Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) is currently in the US, trying to convince officials and academics in Washington that the KMT is pro-US, pro-peace and pro-democracy. Former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) is in Taiwan, making waves that muddy Chu’s message.
On Saturday last week, the 33rd anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre — which he euphemistically refers to as the “June 4 Incident” in deference to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) — Ma posted an article that has been interpreted as praise for Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) and his “democracy with Chinese characteristics,” and the idea that this form of democracy is better than the one practiced in Taiwan.
In defense of Ma, his article is not that: His remarks on democracy in China are tempered with an acknowledgement that Beijing needs to move forward with it, and that this process begins with sincerely facing up to the trauma of the “incident,” and that democracy is interpreted differently on both sides of the Taiwan Strait.
However, the criticism is valid in that Ma refuses to address the elephant in the room — Xi’s human rights abuses and interpretation of democracy that no adherent to the traditional understanding of that form of government would understand. His refusal to address these two points is so egregious there is little point discussing the details here.
More ridiculous was how he turned the discussion to Taiwan and portrayed democracy here as being on the decline, as it drifts into an “illiberal democracy” under the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) government of President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文).
Ma has repeatedly espoused this theme over the past three years. However, his ideas are baseless: Again, there is no need to discuss them here.
What we can usefully take from his article is what it reveals about his idea of government. Ma prefers a form of governance that is closer to Xi’s and further from a recognizable democracy, and relies on a self-appointed “benevolent” regime that presumes to know what the people want better than the people do themselves, such as the one he was formerly part of under the pre-democratization government of the KMT on Taiwan.
Ma has yet to come to terms with the “ignominy” of the KMT’s loss of power to the DPP, and has convinced himself that the fabricated “sins” of the pro-localization party somehow vindicate his sense of the KMT’s entitlement to govern Taiwan. He sees the DPP administrations of former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) from 2000 to 2008 and of Tsai from 2016 as historical anomalies.
His comments blaming the destabilization of the international situation not on the CCP’s provocations and bellicosity, but on the “‘anti-China” trend led by the US may have frustrated Chu, who is trying to convince Washington that the KMT is pro-US and pro-democracy. However, Chu himself let slip evidence of the same sense of entitlement for the party that Ma’s article exudes.
On Monday, Chu gave a presentation on the future of Taiwan, which was cohosted by the Brookings Institution and the Center for Strategic and International Studies. During the address, he mentioned that the KMT would be reopening its liaison office in Washington so that the party could once more have a voice in the US.
When “we returned to power in 2008, we closed the office. Maybe we miscalculated the moment. We thought [the] KMT would be always as a ruling party forever [sic],” he said.
It was not a throwaway remark; it was not said in jest.
If he had thought Ma was off message about the KMT as a “pro-democracy party,” he showed his own true colors with this remark.
The sense of entitlement to govern Taiwan is not Ma’s or Chu’s alone; it permeates their generation of the KMT. It is so ingrained they probably have no idea how bad their words sound.
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