Former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) this week came under fire over his speech at a Rotary Club meeting in Taipei on Monday, when he said that Beijing’s military strategy toward Taiwan was “to let the first battle be the last.” If China started a cross-strait war, it would end quickly, without time for other nations to react, he said in his “Cross-Strait Relations and Taiwan Security” address, criticizing President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) for saying that she hoped other nations would come to Taiwan’s aid in Beijing’s first wave of attacks.
A president should prevent war from happening, not talk about how many days a nation could last, Ma said.
Taiwan Republic Office members and other independence advocates on Wednesday protested in front of the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) headquarters in Taipei, accusing Ma of contravening national security laws, undermining the military’s confidence and selling out Taiwan. They also called on the KMT to expel him. The protest was a nice piece of political theater, but was there anything new in what Ma said — or the remote possibility that the KMT would consider giving him the boot?
Ma and the KMT have long been out of touch with mainstream Taiwanese opinion. He says a president should prevent war from happening, but Taiwanese repudiated his — and his party’s — willingness to sell this nation out without a fight, in his eagerness to wrap the nation’s economy so tightly in China’s tentacles that it would have eventually been smothered.
The spectacular backfiring of the KMT’s efforts to ram Ma’s Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement with Beijing through the legislature in 2014 triggered the Sunflower movement and paved the way for the party’s massive losses in the 2016 elections.
The problem is twofold: One, Ma and the KMT are unable to accept reality or that time and history have passed them by, and two, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) cannot accept a disparity of viewpoints, not to mention its allergy to democracy in even a limited form.
Ma, the KMT and the CCP have been trying to brainwash Taiwanese and the world about the meetings and talks they held in the 1990s and ever since, from the spurious so-called “1992 consensus” to all those cross-strait negotiations under Ma’s administration, as well as his meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) in Singapore on Nov. 7, 2015.
The KMT and the CCP continue to blindly parrot the myths of unification and of a great “one China,” despite the rising numbers of people killed or imprisoned by Beijing for seeking to uphold the rights to freedom of religion, language and culture guaranteed under the Chinese constitution, and Beijing running roughshod over Hong Kong.
Ma hoped that his Singapore meeting with Xi, the first between the heads of the KMT and the CCP since the end of the Chinese Civil War, would be enough to win him a place in history, but he is doomed to remain a footnote, unlike former president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) or Tsai.
On Oct. 5 last year, Ma was scathing in his critique of Tsai’s first term in office, accusing her of relying too much on the US, pointing to the lack of high-level US official visits and the loss of seven diplomatic allies. He alluded to his oft-heard complaint that she is turning Taiwan into a bargaining chip between the US and China.
The truth — however unpalatable it might be to Ma and the KMT — is that Taiwan has been a bargaining chip since 1949, if not the end of World War II. The loss of diplomatic allies is part of Beijing’s long-running campaign to destroy Taiwan, regardless of who is president. Washington’s willingness to send Cabinet officials for a visit, or sell arms and equipment, has more to do with US domestic politics and foreign policy considerations than Taiwanese politics.
Ma should have his eyesight and hearing checked.
China’s supreme objective in a war across the Taiwan Strait is to incorporate Taiwan as a province of the People’s Republic. It follows, therefore, that international recognition of Taiwan’s de jure independence is a consummation that China’s leaders devoutly wish to avoid. By the same token, an American strategy to deny China that objective would complicate Beijing’s calculus and deter large-scale hostilities. For decades, China has cautioned “independence means war.” The opposite is also true: “war means independence.” A comprehensive strategy of denial would guarantee an outcome of de jure independence for Taiwan in the event of Chinese invasion or
A recent Taipei Times editorial (“A targeted bilingual policy,” March 12, page 8) questioned how the Ministry of Education can justify spending NT$151 million (US$4.74 million) when the spotlighted achievements are English speech competitions and campus tours. It is a fair question, but it focuses on the wrong issue. The problem is not last year’s outcomes failing to meet the bilingual education vision; the issue is that the ministry has abandoned the program that originally justified such a large expenditure. In the early years of Bilingual 2030, the ministry’s K-12 Administration promoted the Bilingual Instruction in Select Domains Program (部分領域課程雙語教學實施計畫).
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) earlier this month said it is necessary for her to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) and it would be a “huge boost” to the party’s local election results in November, but many KMT members have expressed different opinions, indicating a struggle between different groups in the party. Since Cheng was elected as party chairwoman in October last year, she has repeatedly expressed support for increased exchanges with China, saying that it would bring peace and prosperity to Taiwan, and that a meeting with Xi in Beijing takes priority over meeting
Philippine Department of Foreign Affairs spokesman for maritime affairs Rogelio Villanueva on Monday said that Manila’s claims in the South China Sea are backed by international law. Villanueva was responding to a social media post by the Chinese embassy alleging that a former Philippine ambassador in 1990 had written a letter to a German radio operator stating that the Scarborough Shoal (Huangyan Island, 黃岩島) did not fall within Manila’s territory. “Sovereignty is not merely claimed, it is exercised,” Villanueva said. The Philippines won a landmark case at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in 2016 that found China’s sweeping claim of sovereignty in
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