People debating the pros and cons of absentee voting must consider the issue carefully. If China were a democracy that recognized Taiwan as an independent country, and allowed Taipei an embassy and official agencies there, absentee voting could be implemented without a problem.
However, as well as being far from reality, most absentee voting would be done from China.
China’s Taiwan Affairs Office spokesperson said that “making money in China while supporting Taiwanese independence is not allowed.”
In January’s presidential election, the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) vice presidential candidate, Jaw Shaw-kong (趙少康), asked why absentee voting cannot be implemented in Taiwan given that it works in the US. He said that the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) should not be afraid of trivial issues in sacrificing the voting rights of 1.6 million people.
Voters would not be easily tricked or threatened, Jaw said, adding that they are capable of making their own decision and they have the right to do so. He then mocked the DPP, saying that it sought to emulate the US, but has failed to implement its voting systems.
Jaw’s implication was that the DPP wants to imitate every aspect of the US political system, but it is the KMT that lacks autonomy.
Sun Yat-sen (孫逸仙) and Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) followed the Russians first and Chiang learned from Adolf Hitler before the KMT decided to follow the US.
The KMT lost the Chinese Civil War in 1949, just as the Cold War was beginning, during which the Chiang family relied even more heavily on Washington. KMT elites were sent to the US to be educated and the Republic of China on Taiwan became a protectorate of the US.
When Jaw was in college, he was trained by the KMT and joined a student group at National Taiwan University (NTU) called the Juemin Society. He was also president of NTU’s Graduate Student Association. After his military service, he received a scholarship to study at the University of California, Berkeley, with a major in engineering. While he was in the US, he was a member of the Republic of China Anti-Communist Patriotic Alliance. The “ambitious young people” of that time did not want to learn from democracy in the US; they only studied there to boost their career prospects in Taiwan.
The KMT members who studied in the US did not favor democracy, freedom, human rights or a system that would allow changes to the political party in government, because such things would get in their way.
Nothing much has changed — there is about the same credibility in Jaw’s rhetoric about adopting a US system as Chiang would have had talking about rights and democracy.
Today’s KMT members consider the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to be their guide, so Jaw’s belief that Taiwan should implement absentee voting because of the example of the US shows that he is nothing but an opportunist.
His suggestion ignores the history of the US. In the Revolutionary War, the Continental Army defeated the British Army, making the US of today utterly distinct from the UK. Other countries that have absentee voting are democracies whose citizens are unlikely to be manipulated by foreign countries.
Moreover, the proportion of absentee votes they count are not likely to have a great say in the outcomes.
However, Taiwan’s population of potential absentee voters — 1.6 million people — are mostly in China, which sees Taiwan as an enemy state and there has been no definitive end to the Chinese Civil War as there was to the Revolutionary War. China most certainly has an axe to grind regarding Taiwan, while no such scenario affects the US.
Could Taiwanese in totalitarian China cast their ballots from across the Taiwan Strait freely? Of course not. Additionally, China does not have universal suffrage. Its elections are carried out according to orders.
Moreover, Beijing has intervened in Taiwan’s elections several times. There is no reason to believe that it would allow voting in Taiwanese elections from within its borders to be done freely.
Such issues should not even be suggested until China, itself, institutes universal suffrage.
Jaw said that people are capable of making their decisions and the public would not be coerced easily, but they must have a free space to do so.
A prime example of how Beijing would wield the axe over absentee voters can be found in the plight of Hon Hai Precision Industry Co founder Terry Gou (郭台銘).
A golden boy of the KMT in the 1980s, Jaw is in his 70s now and his memory seems to be failing. If it were not, he would remember that Gou last year participated in the KMT’s presidential primary, but lost, so ran as an independent.
Gou was so determined that he announced: “If the CCP wanted to confiscate my Hon Hai property, I’d reply: ‘Yes, please.’”
Gou indicated that he was not willing to bow to pressure from Chinese officials, but once Beijing began a probe of Foxconn Technology Group, he withdrew from the election — and even from public view.
If Beijing’s guillotine terrifies Gou, as rich as he is, even when he is not in China, how much more sway would it have over ordinary Taiwanese and medium-size enterprises in China? They are not as powerful as Gou. Would they be unaffected by China’s threats?
The pan-blue and white camps might think that by implementing absentee voting, Chinese spouses would help them gain more power, but as the saying goes: “Put yourself in someone else’s shoes.”
The blue and white camps should definitely do so.
Even if the DPP loses on the issue of absentee voting, the blue and white camps would still be in trouble for a simple reason: the absentee voters would be controlled by China.
The Taiwan Affairs Office would never be satisfied. The voters under China’s control could be replaced according to Beijing’s plan. In the CCP’s script, all political parties in Taiwan are puppets to be manipulated. In Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) mindset, a country’s minister of foreign affairs and minister of national defense can be “disappeared” at any time. It would be no different if it had puppet officials in Taiwan.
The appointed leader would be someone like Hong Kong Chief Executive John Lee (李家超), a loyal patriot to China.
Election systems should keep up with the times to protect voters’ rights, but that does not mean that democracy, fairness and justice should be abandoned.
Jaw’s proposal is akin to demanding that prisoners be allowed to vote because some law-abiding citizens do not have time to cast their ballots.
The distance between Taiwan and China has increased because the latter is autocratic while the former is a democracy, which does not help China’s plan for unification, so Beijing has been employing every means to destroy Taiwan’s democracy.
Absentee voting should not be implemented. The public should must see through Jaw’s scheme. Is he stupid or vicious? Taiwanese should know the answer.
Translated by Emma Liu
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