To coincide with the 33rd anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre, former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) on Saturday published an article on Facebook that astonishingly praised Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習進平) remarks about democracy, made during a speech delivered to a working meeting of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) National People’s Congress in October last year.
Ma complimented Xi’s remarks as “helpful toward establishing a society based upon the rule of law.”
Ma also launched a broadside against the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) government, writing that under the DPP, the nation is “slowly degenerating into an illiberal democracy.”
Although ostensibly about the Tiananmen Square Massacre, the article was really meant to flatter Xi and denigrate Taiwan.
Ma based his assertion that Taiwan is drifting toward an “illiberal democracy” upon a theory advanced by Indian-American journalist and writer Fareed Zakaria in his 2003 book The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad.
In the book, Zakaria writes that there are many cases in democratic nations where, having been elected by popular vote, the leader implements a number of anti-democratic and regressive policies, such as amending the constitution to extend their term of office, placing illegal restrictions on the liberties of citizens, and attacking opposition parties and opponents by illegal means.
Zakaria called such countries “illiberal democracies” or “elected autocracies.”
It is not the first time that Ma has used this phrase to attack the government. He first used it to criticize the DPP in the Chinese-language United Daily News on Dec. 9 last year.
Kharis Templeman, a research fellow at Stanford University and program manager of the Hoover Institution’s Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific, published a lengthy rebuttal of Ma’s assertion on his blog, headlined: “Ma Ying-jeou claims Taiwan is an ‘illiberal democracy.’ Here’s why he’s wrong.”
Templeman used academic findings to counter Ma’s claim, including research conducted by Freedom House, which rated Taiwan as 94 out of 100 in its democracy rating; the second-highest score in Asia behind only Japan.
Templeman also quoted the Economist Intelligence Unit’s latest democracy rankings, in which Taiwan achieved an overall score of 8.94 out of 10 — taking the top spot in Asia for the first time.
Taiwan’s steady rise through the rankings demonstrates that the DPP administration has done the opposite of what Ma asserts.
“Ma has been hammering away at this theme for at least three years now ... but his evidence of a DPP turn toward illiberalism in Taiwan has always been exceptionally weak,” Templeman said, adding that Ma’s intervention is “partisan political rhetoric” and “not worth taking seriously.”
Furthermore, although Ma praised Xi for talking about democracy and said it would be beneficial in establishing the rule of law, it is important to recognize that the CCP’s definition of democracy is conceptually completely different from how Taiwanese and those living in actual democracies understand the term.
The CCP’s idea of “democracy” is a “people’s democratic dictatorship,” as advocated by Mao Zedong (毛澤東) in his 1949 speech: “On the People’s Democratic Dictatorship.”
Mao said that the goal of the CCP is to unite the working class, the peasantry, the urban petty bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie to form a domestic united front and establish a “people’s democratic dictatorship.”
Not only did Mao use the word “dictatorship,” he also said that “the people” should engage in a class struggle against all other groups, involving the “suppression” of the “landlord class,” “bureaucrat-bourgeoisie” and “Chinese Nationalist Party [KMT] reactionaries and their accomplices.”
Mao further said: “Democracy is practiced within the ranks of the people who enjoy the rights of freedom of speech, assembly, association and so on. The right to vote belongs only to the people, not to the reactionaries. The combination of these two aspects — democracy for the people and dictatorship over the reactionaries — is the people’s democratic dictatorship.”
In the speech, Mao repeatedly singled out the KMT for “suppression.”
As Ma used the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre to disparage Taiwan’s democratic achievements and heap praise on the CCP’s “democracy,” he is presumably advocating for the adoption of a CCP-style “people’s democratic dictatorship” here in Taiwan — which would necessarily entail the eradication of his party, the KMT.
Little wonder that The Economist in 2012 dubbed the then-president “Ma the bumbler.”
Liou Je-wei is a graduate student of political science at National Taiwan University.
Translated by Edward Jones
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