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
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has long been expansionist and contemptuous of international law. Under Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), the CCP regime has become more despotic, coercive and punitive. As part of its strategy to annex Taiwan, Beijing has sought to erase the island democracy’s international identity by bribing countries to sever diplomatic ties with Taipei. One by one, China has peeled away Taiwan’s remaining diplomatic partners, leaving just 12 countries (mostly small developing states) and the Vatican recognizing Taiwan as a sovereign nation. Taiwan’s formal international space has shrunk dramatically. Yet even as Beijing has scored diplomatic successes, its overreach
After more than a year of review, the National Security Bureau on Monday said it has completed a sweeping declassification of political archives from the Martial Law period, transferring the full collection to the National Archives Administration under the National Development Council. The move marks another significant step in Taiwan’s long journey toward transitional justice. The newly opened files span the architecture of authoritarian control: internal security and loyalty investigations, intelligence and counterintelligence operations, exit and entry controls, overseas surveillance of Taiwan independence activists, and case materials related to sedition and rebellion charges. For academics of Taiwan’s White Terror era —
After 37 US lawmakers wrote to express concern over legislators’ stalling of critical budgets, Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) pledged to make the Executive Yuan’s proposed NT$1.25 trillion (US$39.7 billion) special defense budget a top priority for legislative review. On Tuesday, it was finally listed on the legislator’s plenary agenda for Friday next week. The special defense budget was proposed by President William Lai’s (賴清德) administration in November last year to enhance the nation’s defense capabilities against external threats from China. However, the legislature, dominated by the opposition Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), repeatedly blocked its review. The
In her article in Foreign Affairs, “A Perfect Storm for Taiwan in 2026?,” Yun Sun (孫韻), director of the China program at the Stimson Center in Washington, said that the US has grown indifferent to Taiwan, contending that, since it has long been the fear of US intervention — and the Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) inability to prevail against US forces — that has deterred China from using force against Taiwan, this perceived indifference from the US could lead China to conclude that a window of opportunity for a Taiwan invasion has opened this year. Most notably, she observes that
RSS