In a Facebook post on Wednesday last week, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Taipei City Councilor Hsu Chiao-hsin (徐巧芯) wrote: “The KMT must fall for Taiwan to improve.’ Allow me to ask the question again: Is this really true?”
It matters not how many times Hsu asks the question, my answer will always be the same: “Yes, the KMT must be toppled for Taiwan to improve.”
In the lengthy Facebook post, titled “What were those born in the 1980s guilty of?” Hsu harked back to the idealistic aspirations of the 2014 Sunflower movement before heaping opprobrium on the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) record in office in an attempt to clean up the KMT’s image.
Instead of digging through the past and focusing on events that took place six — or even 10 — years ago, Hsu need look back no further than the beginning of this year to the KMT’s response to the initial outbreak of COVID-19 in China and former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) assertion at a security forum in August that “the nation is not safe.”
How many times have Ma’s public pronouncements either served to hinder the government’s cross-strait policy, or, by singing from Beijing’s hymn sheet, aided China in its propaganda war and ultimate aim to annex Taiwan?
Ma has taken to using the phrase “The first battle will be the last” — meaning that if China were to try to invade Taiwan, it would defeat Taiwan in a single, decisive battle. Ma is inferring that the policies of President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) administration have pushed Taiwan to the brink of war with China.
His intention is to brainwash the public into recognizing the so-called “1992 consensus,” and believing that bowing and bending the knee to Beijing is the path to peace.
Any rational person understands that the only way to achieve peace is through resilient national defense.
Without fail, the KMT always assumes a position diametrically opposed to the interests of Taiwanese. The party’s former leader is now calling into question the quality and capability of the nation’s armed forces. The KMT is the enemy within, which if left to its own devices, would drive the nation into the sea.
Here is another example: During the initial outbreak of COVID-19, the government was engaged in an all-out effort to manufacture masks, to placate an anxious public and to halt the spread of the disease. With an extremely limited stock of masks at the time, the nation had to live within its means. Accordingly, the government moved quickly to ban the export of masks.
However, Ma heavily criticized the measure, saying it was “utterly lacking in compassion.”
When the public needed protection in the form of masks the most, Ma demanded that the government continue to allow the export of masks to China and joined forces with Beijing to pour opprobrium on the Tsai administration for introducing a ban.
This is the same man who has not once criticized China for its appalling human rights atrocities, that by any objective analysis are “utterly lacking in compassion.” Ma and his ilk are lifelong cowards: They bully the meek and cower in front of evil.
When the government realized that the supply of masks could not keep pace with demand, it implemented mask rationing, limiting each person to two masks per week.
The very same KMT politicians who had initially rebuked the government for prohibiting the export of masks, then screamed “mask chaos” and demanded that the government distribute more masks and took the opportunity to badmouth the government at every opportunity. During the initial outbreak the only thing in “chaos” was the KMT.
Faced with a relentless campaign of propaganda and military intimidation from China, Taiwan requires political parties that are capable of protecting and defending the nation. At present, only the DPP and the New Power Party pass the test. The KMT, its offshoot, the New Party, and the other “deep-blue” parties are all pro-unification fifth columns.
The KMT must fall for Taiwan to improve? You bet it does.
Teng Hon-yuan is an associate professor at Chinese Culture University.
Translated by Edward Jones
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