Memorial services for former president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝), who died on July 30, were held on Saturday at Aletheia University and nearby Tamkang Senior High School in New Taipei City’s Tamsui District (淡水). As a participant, I found myself back at the school where I taught 23 years ago and where Lee studied long before me. The school was the first in Taiwan to teach mandatory courses on the school’s own history and the history of Taiwan.
Within the school grounds is a cemetery where 19th-century Presbyterian missionary George Leslie Mackay, his family and other foreign missionaries were laid to rest.
Having devoted his life to Taiwan, Mackay expressed his final wishes in a poem: “My heart’s ties to Taiwan cannot be severed! To that island I devote my life … I should like to find a final resting place within sound of its surf and under the shade of its waving bamboo.”
Mackay was Canadian, but he loved Taiwan, so he chose to be laid to rest at Tamkang Senior High School. Lee, for his part, took to heart Mackay’s motto: “It is better to burn out than rust out,” and followed it throughout his life.
Lee inherited and kept alive the spirit of Mackay. During his 12 years as president, he laid the foundations of today’s Taiwan. Among them are: the National Health Insurance system; the National Affairs Conference, which convened six times to decide on constitutional amendments; a broad program to train an army of farmers; humanistic education that has set down the roots of Taiwanese consciousness; the “two-states theory”; legislative elections; shelving the Taiwan Provincial Government; amending Article 100 of the Criminal Code concerning sedition; and direct election of the nation’s president.
After leaving office, Lee applied his abundant knowledge in many fields to finding ways for Taiwan to escape from its predicaments. Let us be thankful that, among the great changes of recent history, God chose Lee to lead Taiwanese into the dawn of a new era. Even after striving for these goals throughout his life, in his later years he turned his mind to a second wave of democratic reforms and Taiwan’s path to normal nationhood.
Lee led the nation with great clarity of foresight. A good example is his “no haste, be patient” policy with regard to investment in China. Behind his political language lay his philosophical ideas. As a “philosopher president,” he believed that there were two essential tasks for building a Taiwanese ideology and forming a Taiwanese spirit.
One of these tasks was to consolidate consciousness of a living community, and the second was to awaken the consciousness of new-generation Taiwanese.
Lee grew up in the years before World War II, when Taiwan was much more civilized in the spiritual sense than it was materially. This background endowed him with great wisdom and a selfless sense of purpose.
In a rigorous environment over many years, he sought to make the concept of “Taiwan first, homeland foremost” gradually become the mainstream ideology of Taiwanese society.
As of today, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) that Lee once led has abandoned the path that he set. The KMT has become a rootless, empty shell that will sooner or later follow the New Party into oblivion.
As well as leading Taiwan to become a democracy, Lee also developed the nation into an economic power. His clarity of thought pointed in the forward direction, and he persuaded more people to identify with Taiwan as a nation.
I could not help crying as I watched a film on his lifelong efforts. It is for good reason that Lee is known as the father of Taiwan’s democracy and the father of Taiwan.
One complaint concerns the flag presentation ceremony that took place at the end of the memorial service. Military police held a Republic of China (ROC) national flag and folded it until only the KMT’s party emblem was visible.
This scene was broadcast nationwide, with a view of the folded flag for at least five seconds before the flag was placed in a box. This was absurd.
The issue is the same as with the new design for the ROC passport. Is the KMT emblem also our national emblem? Lee’s greatest dream was for Taiwan to join the community of nations, so the flag he pictured must surely have been a flag representing Taiwan.
The nation now has a Taiwan-centric government, so let us hope that it will carry forward Lee’s unfinished legacy, namely his clear objective of normalization for Taiwan as a nation and a second wave of democratic reforms that would make Taiwanese confident to forge ahead.
Chu Meng-hsiang is a counselor at the Lee Teng-hui Association for Democracy.
Translated by Julian Clegg
George Santayana wrote: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” This article will help readers avoid repeating mistakes by examining four examples from the civil war between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) forces and the Republic of China (ROC) forces that involved two city sieges and two island invasions. The city sieges compared are Changchun (May to October 1948) and Beiping (November 1948 to January 1949, renamed Beijing after its capture), and attempts to invade Kinmen (October 1949) and Hainan (April 1950). Comparing and contrasting these examples, we can learn how Taiwan may prevent a war with
A recent trio of opinion articles in this newspaper reflects the growing anxiety surrounding Washington’s reported request for Taiwan to shift up to 50 percent of its semiconductor production abroad — a process likely to take 10 years, even under the most serious and coordinated effort. Simon H. Tang (湯先鈍) issued a sharp warning (“US trade threatens silicon shield,” Oct. 4, page 8), calling the move a threat to Taiwan’s “silicon shield,” which he argues deters aggression by making Taiwan indispensable. On the same day, Hsiao Hsi-huei (蕭錫惠) (“Responding to US semiconductor policy shift,” Oct. 4, page 8) focused on
Taiwan is rapidly accelerating toward becoming a “super-aged society” — moving at one of the fastest rates globally — with the proportion of elderly people in the population sharply rising. While the demographic shift of “fewer births than deaths” is no longer an anomaly, the nation’s legal framework and social customs appear stuck in the last century. Without adjustments, incidents like last month’s viral kicking incident on the Taipei MRT involving a 73-year-old woman would continue to proliferate, sowing seeds of generational distrust and conflict. The Senior Citizens Welfare Act (老人福利法), originally enacted in 1980 and revised multiple times, positions older
Taiwan’s business-friendly environment and science parks designed to foster technology industries are the key elements of the nation’s winning chip formula, inspiring the US and other countries to try to replicate it. Representatives from US business groups — such as the Greater Phoenix Economic Council, and the Arizona-Taiwan Trade and Investment Office — in July visited the Hsinchu Science Park (新竹科學園區), home to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC) headquarters and its first fab. They showed great interest in creating similar science parks, with aims to build an extensive semiconductor chain suitable for the US, with chip designing, packaging and manufacturing. The
RSS