An image has been circulating online showing an election campaign leaflet from 1996, when then-president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) and then-premier Lien Chan (連戰) ran as the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) candidates for president and vice president in Taiwan’s first-ever direct presidential election.
The leaflet asks voters if they want to go on living their lives and going their own way without being threatened by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and with the two sides of the Taiwan Strait treating each other as equals in a mutually beneficial way. It urges voters to “Support Lee and Lien, who will not submit to the CCP’s verbal and military threats.”
If the slogans were to appear in the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) campaign materials for the Jan. 11 presidential election, probably nobody would have any doubts about them.
Two decades ago, the KMT and the DPP vied to be seen as the party that could better resist the CCP, but these days they compete over whether there are more people willing to bow before the CCP or who refuse to submit to it.
In the lead-up to the 1996 presidential election, China conducted missile tests over the Taiwan Strait, leading to a crisis. Interestingly, it was the KMT that gained from it, not the DPP.
The KMT has led its followers from the era of former presidents Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) and his son, Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國) — when it said that negotiating with the CCP would be suicide — to 2014, when it tried to please China by forcing the Cross-Strait Trade in Services Agreement through the legislature.
This year, it went a step further by nominating a presidential candidate who is strongly favored by the Chinese State Council’s Taiwan Affairs Office.
The DPP caucus has proposed a draft anti-infiltration act. The stated purpose of the bill is to guard against “external hostile forces,” meaning “states or bodies that are at war with this country or in armed confrontation with it.”
It also covers “states or bodies that advocate using non-peaceful methods to threaten or harm this country’s sovereignty.” Let us bear in mind that the KMT used to regard the CCP as the greatest hostile force.
Over time, the KMT’s ideology has been transformed from extreme anti-communism to a strong affinity with the CCP. One wonders what deep-blue voters who have supported the KMT all their lives must have thought when they saw KMT Legislator Chiang Wan-an (蔣萬安) opposing the bill.
These deep-blue supporters remember the presidencies of the Chiangs in a positive light. Back then, Chiang Kai-shek and Chiang Ching-kuo, who were Chiang Wan-an’s great-grandfather and grandfather respectively, staunchly opposed communism and firmly rejected the CCP’s proposed “one China, two systems.”
Many KMT members and supporters have been enticed by the lure of the Chinese yuan. Many of them worship China as a rising power and want to be part of a “greater China.”
Does the same hold true of Chiang Wan-an? Has he forgotten his forebears’ resolve, or is he afraid to remember it?
Kao Ruo-ru is a master’s entrance examination candidate.
Translated by Julian Clegg
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