The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) on Sunday last week held its annual national congress. The event failed to attract too much attention, possibly because observers anticipated that — as the old saying goes — you cannot teach an old dog new tricks.
What attracted the most attention at the congress was KMT Chairman Johnny Chiang’s (江啟臣) proposal for the party’s new discourse on cross-strait relations.
Since Chiang did not dare to cross China’s “red line” by abolishing the so-called “1992 consensus,” supported by former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and certain other party heavyweights, his push for reform on the party’s cross-strait policy was in vain.
Keeping the “consensus” also shows that Chiang is in the embarrassing position of being as “outdated and inflexible” as he had once described the “consensus.”
Take a look at the remarks of Chen Li-hsu (陳麗旭), a Tainan delegate to the congress, who suggested that, since the KMT had brought the treasures of the National Palace Museum from China to Taiwan, the museum’s holdings and ticket revenues should go to the party, serving as a new income source.
Chen made the wild claim as if Taiwan were still under Martial Law, had never been through a democratization process and the nation’s public assets belonged to the KMT, while all party delegates were powerful players in a party-state system as they had once been.
The refusal of the KMT’s heavyweights and hawkish factions to face the changing times is understandable.
However, if the party still wants someday to regain power, it urgently needs to get with the plot. It cannot allow itself to be frozen in time due to the stubborn insistence of a small number of its members.
If the KMT continues to embrace the “1992 consensus,” while arguing that the “one China” part of it actually refers to the Republic of China (ROC), it will fade away.
In particular, the Constitution has become a source of contradiction in the past few years, and the calls for amending it, or even writing a new constitution and changing the nation’s name, are heard increasingly more often.
Under such circumstances, as the nation’s largest opposition party, the KMT has kept changing its political stance on a series of issues, such as lowering the legal age of adulthood from 20 to 18, and abolishing the Examination Yuan and the Control Yuan.
Yet it does not seem to know where it is going.
Moreover, since the majority of the public is opposed to being seen as Chinese, the KMT’s discourse on “one China” as referring to the ROC runs counter to popular opinion in Taiwan.
By taking such a position, the party might be suspected of echoing the People’s Republic of China’s “united front” propaganda, and this pro-China image could hurt the KMT badly.
At the opening of the congress, the KMT played a video reviewing what it has changed and not changed over the years, but it revealed the party’s historical tragedy: The KMT has always been driven by a need to move forward, but it is reluctant to take the initiative to transform itself.
Once it encounters a major defeat, it simply flees to the next location with the troops it has under its direct control.
This can be proven by its relocation to Taiwan, as well as its embrace of die-hard supporters of outdated policies.
Chen Kuan-fu is a graduate student at National Taipei University’s Department of Law.
Translated by Eddy Chang
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