In her inaugural address in May, President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) announced three major areas of reform for the military: asymmetric warfare capabilities, the reservist mobilization system and the management structures.
However, the most pressing area of reform is to engender a sense of Taiwanese consciousness in soldiers, sailors and pilots. The concept of “ethnically Chinese Taiwanese” needs to be gradually built up during recruits’ education and training.
The Chinese Communist Party constantly pushes the idea that “Chinese do not fight Chinese,” while retired officers largely identify themselves as “Chinese on Taiwan.”
Tsai has been in office for almost five years, and during this time she has frequently advocated, and herself put into practice, “the Taiwanese point of view.”
However, the question remains: Given the decades of Sinicization under Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), is the military capable of loyally serving its commander-in-chief in the event of a war with China?
The People’s Republic of China is a permanent member of the UN Security Council and the legal representative of China. This means that the Republic of China can only represent Taiwan, but calling the nation Republic of China (Taiwan) will not cut the mustard.
What is needed is to change the way military personnel think about their identity and make them “upright and dignified Taiwanese” rather than the “upright and dignified Chinese” that Taiwanese were taught they needed to be during the Chiang era.
Whether our ancestors came from China, Japan, the Netherlands or Spain or were Austronesian, we are all Taiwanese. Fostering a Taiwanese consciousness must start with military training and education.
The Tsai administration continues to plot a course for the nation as a sovereign and independent state under the banner of Republic of China (Taiwan), which has converged with a growing anti-China force in the US and pro-independence forces in Taiwan.
These elements are moving closer and closer toward what China calls its red line for military action.
As foreign forces are increasingly becoming involved and Taiwanese sovereignty increasingly becomes de facto separated from China, the military’s Taiwanese consciousness must be fortified, and they must declare that they are upright and dignified Taiwanese.
Given the still prevalent mindset in the military of being “Chinese in Taiwan,” in a conflict with China, the nation could lose both the psychological and the physical battle.
Tsai Sen-jan is a political writer.
Translated by Edward Jones
On May 7, 1971, Henry Kissinger planned his first, ultra-secret mission to China and pondered whether it would be better to meet his Chinese interlocutors “in Pakistan where the Pakistanis would tape the meeting — or in China where the Chinese would do the taping.” After a flicker of thought, he decided to have the Chinese do all the tape recording, translating and transcribing. Fortuitously, historians have several thousand pages of verbatim texts of Dr. Kissinger’s negotiations with his Chinese counterparts. Paradoxically, behind the scenes, Chinese stenographers prepared verbatim English language typescripts faster than they could translate and type them
More than 30 years ago when I immigrated to the US, applied for citizenship and took the 100-question civics test, the one part of the naturalization process that left the deepest impression on me was one question on the N-400 form, which asked: “Have you ever been a member of, involved in or in any way associated with any communist or totalitarian party anywhere in the world?” Answering “yes” could lead to the rejection of your application. Some people might try their luck and lie, but if exposed, the consequences could be much worse — a person could be fined,
Taiwan aims to elevate its strategic position in supply chains by becoming an artificial intelligence (AI) hub for Nvidia Corp, providing everything from advanced chips and components to servers, in an attempt to edge out its closest rival in the region, South Korea. Taiwan’s importance in the AI ecosystem was clearly reflected in three major announcements Nvidia made during this year’s Computex trade show in Taipei. First, the US company’s number of partners in Taiwan would surge to 122 this year, from 34 last year, according to a slide shown during CEO Jensen Huang’s (黃仁勳) keynote speech on Monday last week.
On May 13, the Legislative Yuan passed an amendment to Article 6 of the Nuclear Reactor Facilities Regulation Act (核子反應器設施管制法) that would extend the life of nuclear reactors from 40 to 60 years, thereby providing a legal basis for the extension or reactivation of nuclear power plants. On May 20, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) legislators used their numerical advantage to pass the TPP caucus’ proposal for a public referendum that would determine whether the Ma-anshan Nuclear Power Plant should resume operations, provided it is deemed safe by the authorities. The Central Election Commission (CEC) has
RSS