What would it be like to live in a Taiwan that had been annexed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and subsumed into the People’s Republic of China? A minority of Taiwanese appear to believe it would mean nothing more than a changing of the guard: that there would be a few minor interruptions, but it would essentially be a seamless shift from one administration to another, “returning” Taiwan to the warm embrace of their ancestral “motherland.”
Of course, such people are utterly deluded. The perpetrator-in-chief of this muddleheaded view of the world is former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) chairwoman Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱), who in May notoriously visited the CCP’s concentration camps in Xinjiang and, while there, accused Western nations of fabricating stories about Chinese repression of Uighurs in Xinjiang.
Hung is the epitome of what Vladimir Lenin called a “useful idiot.” In communist dictatorships, it is always the “useful idiots” who are the first to suffer after the revolution has swept away the old guard. In Taiwan’s case, Hung and other members of Taiwan’s deep-blue faction, including rabble-rousers such as China Unification Promotion Party founder Chang An-le (張安樂), would likely be stripped of all power and put under close surveillance for the rest of their lives. There would be no place at the table for Taiwan’s pro-Beijing sycophants.
The fate of Uighurs and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang, formerly East Turkestan, as well as Tibetans and people living in Inner Mongolia, provide a valuable insight into what Taiwanese could expect should the CCP conquer Taiwan.
Chinese Ambassador to France Lu Shaye (盧沙野) spelled it out during an interview on France’s BFM TV on Aug. 3: “After the re-unification [of Taiwan with China], we’ll do re-education” to “ensure that Taiwanese people recover their sense of patriotism,” Lu said.
Although it should have been obvious to anyone paying attention, it has now come from the horse’s mouth: Beijing would establish Xinjiang-style “re-education camps” in Taiwan to ensure that “troublemakers” and “unruly elements” are molded into patriotic Chinese citizens. It is important that all Taiwanese recognize the destructive and inhuman nature of the CCP’s “re-education” regime in Xinjiang. Under an invasion scenario, China would employ brutal methods similar to those used in Xinjiang and Tibet to subdue a restive Taiwanese population.
In Xinjiang, arbitrary quotas mean that as many as 40 percent of residents in a village are being rounded up. In some households, both parents are taken away, leaving their children behind. Leaked documents show that staff are armed with a plethora of weapons and restraining devices, including electric cattle prods, tear gas and spiked clubs known as “wolf’s teeth,” and also employ “tiger chair” torture devices. In addition to attending mandatory indoctrination classes, many Xinjiang inmates are used as forced labor.
If Beijing were to annex Taiwan by means of a political coup orchestrated by the party’s United Front Work Department, whose job it is to infiltrate and subvert Taiwan’s democracy, then the death-by-a-thousand-cuts fate of Hong Kong is a more likely modus operandi. China’s “long march” through Hong Kong’s institutions — the civil service, the police, the media and the territory’s business community — began in earnest after the handover from Britain in 1997 and achieved a near-bloodless coup. For this reason, despite all its military posturing, Beijing probably still favors infiltration over invasion.
However, Taiwanese who might feel a sense of ambivalence toward their nation, or even identify as Chinese, should be under no illusions: If Hung and her ilk get their way and help to subvert Taiwan’s democracy in a bloodless coup, the gate to their past lives would be slammed shut once and for all, and they would be the inmates of a prison that extends from the Taklamakan Desert in the west to Taiwan in the east.
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