The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Reform Committee has announced the party’s latest cross-strait policy, which it is calling: “Affirming the contribution of the 1992 consensus.”
However, several former party chairs are unhappy that the so-called “consensus” looks set to be consigned to the history books by KMT Chairman Johnny Chiang (江啟臣) and have accused the KMT’s Central Committee of aping the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).
Chiang has strongly rejected accusations that he is turning the party into a “DPP lite.”
Disappointingly, despite the months that have passed since the KMT was trounced in January’s presidential and legislative elections, the party is still bogged down in a quagmire of its own making, rehashing old arguments and making little progress toward meaningful reform.
The main reason for the KMT’s poor showing at the elections is clear: foreign policy, or specifically, pursuing a cross-strait policy that has already been publicly rejected.
During the 2016 presidential and legislative elections, which returned the DPP to power with a historic legislative majority, voters rejected then-president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) cross-strait formula, which recognized the “1992 consensus,” while maintaining that each side could interpret what it meant in its own way.
Two years prior, the Sunflower movement captured the public mood and galvanized voters against the cross-strait service trade agreement with China that the Ma administration was attempting to ram through the legislature without proper scrutiny. The then-following elections were a turning point for the nation — a categorical rejection of the pro-China policies of the Ma era.
Today, the public mood is even clearer than it was four years ago.
The “1992 consensus” that the KMT claims to have achieved with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was long ago contorted and compressed by Beijing to mean simply “one China.”
Last year, Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) used a set-piece speech to try to bamboozle Taiwan into accepting a version of Hong Kong’s “one country, two systems” model, and explicitly linked it to acceptance of the “consensus.”
As a protest movement in Hong Kong last year against extradition laws to China gathered pace, Taiwanese looked on as Beijing crushed Hong Kongers’ demands for freedom and democracy. This year, Beijing is imposing national security legislation on the former British colony.
Taiwan has seen how the Beijing regime ran a coach and horses through the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration, an international treaty lodged at the UN. In reality, “one country, two systems” means whatever Beijing wants it to mean, and the CCP’s handling of Hong Kong shows that it has no compunction about ripping up international treaties.
Given this, in what meaningful sense is there any sort of a “consensus” between the CCP and the KMT?
If four years ago, the KMT still harbored illusions about the CCP, after suffering a second major electoral defeat, surely it must now come to its senses. The cross-strait situation is becoming clearer by the day: Beijing has designs on Taiwan, and it is spending colossal sums of money to modernize its military to achieve this aim.
In reality, it does not matter what politicians in Taiwan say, regardless of which camp they belong to. Beijing is pursuing an aggressive strategy of regional expansion that threatens every one of its neighbors.
The threat from China is intensifying: Xi has taken advantage of the global havoc caused by the COVID-19 pandemic to expand Beijing ’s power, and a new political world map is being sketched out.
The US-China trade dispute, which had entered a fragile truce before the pandemic, looks set to become ever more polarized, while critical manufacturing supply chains are being scrutinized as countries scramble to reshape international ties, form new security treaties and reheat old alliances.
There is no possibility of a rapprochement between Washington and Beijing. Caught in the middle, Taiwan has limited room to maneuver.
However, within a global family of democratic nations led by the US, Taiwan might gradually gain more influence.
A once-in-100-year pandemic has hastened the restructuring of the global order and is testing the leaders of political parties around the world. US President Donald Trump of the Republican Party has elevated containment of China as a key political priority. The Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee, former US vice president Joe Biden, is competing with Trump to sound tough on China.
Despite being former US president Barack Obama’s deputy for eight years, Biden appears willing to jettison the former administration’s China policy, which is generally viewed as having been too soft on Beijing. The circumstances have changed, which requires a new policy to meet the challenges of the day.
Out of office for more than four years, the KMT continues to cling to the wishful thinking of the Ma era. Despite two significant electoral defeats, the party continues to rely on the “1992 consensus” as the answer to every challenge, showing that it is ignorant of the new international political situation and unaware that Taiwan’s mature democracy now affords the nation the ability to carve out a sizeable space within the international community.
The KMT Reform Committee’s proposed cross-strait policy has met with stiff opposition from former party chairs, who resent that the “consensus” is now referred to in the past tense. They have called on the committee to refrain from carrying out a rash and impetuous act that would obliterate the achievements of the “consensus.”
China’s Taiwan Affairs Office has also intervened, warning the KMT to “separate truth from falsehood” or face consequences for the CCP-KMT relationship and for cross-strait exchanges.
This purely “coincidental” meeting of minds by former KMT chairs, which happens to echo the mood music from Beijing, throws into stark relief the deep damage that the “1992 consensus” has inflicted on the party. If the KMT were serious about reform, it would unequivocally disavow the “consensus.”
Some of those critical of reform within the party appear not to be in full possession of their critical faculties, while others have become enmeshed in a complex web of ties and interests with Beijing.
If Chiang takes the advice from either of these camps or treats members of the party’s pro-unification faction with undue deference — perhaps offering them plum positions within the KMT to buy their support, while loudly calling for the party to “unite” around his leadership — he is likely to end up being hoisted by his own petard, and the momentum for reform would be squandered.
While delivering a speech to the reform committee, Chiang signaled his willingness to reform the party by pledging to reduce its ill-gotten assets to zero and promised to restart discussions with the Executive Yuan’s Ill-gotten Party Assets Settlement Committee on handing over misappropriated assets to the state.
Compared with the tactics of his predecessors, who brought litigation against the assets committee to delay and obstruct the process, the KMT under Chiang might be serious about reform. If so, it can only be a good thing for Taiwan to have a benign opposition party that can provide a viable alternative for voters.
A KMT-aligned think tank recently published the results of an opinion poll, which found that the party lags behind the DPP by more than 50 percent. For the KMT to start over would require that it once again focus on fair competition, and take an open and transparent attitude to voter criticism.
On the other hand, if Chiang allows himself to be tripped up by the “1992 consensus,” badly misjudges the situation and squanders the opportunity for reform, the KMT would drift even further away from mainstream public opinion. Under such a scenario, becoming a “DPP lite” would be out of its reach, and the party would be reduced to nothing more than a bit player within Taiwan’s pan-blue camp.
Translated by Edward Jones
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