Former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) is visiting China, where he is addressed in a few ways, but never as a former president.
On Sunday, he attended the Straits Forum in Xiamen, not as a former president of Taiwan, but as a former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) chairman. There, he met with Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference Chairman Wang Huning (王滬寧). Presumably, Wang at least would have been aware that Ma had once been president, and yet he did not mention that fact, referring to him only as “Mr Ma Ying-jeou.”
Perhaps the apparent oversight was not intended to convey a lack of respect. After all, Wang heaped plenty of praise on the former president. He regaled Ma for his efforts on promoting the idea that “people on both sides of the Strait are Chinese,” for his commitment to the so-called “1992 consensus,” for opposing Taiwanese independence and for being a “pro-unification patriot” striving “for the nation’s unification and the rejuvenation of the zhonghua minzu” (中華民族, Chinese ethnic group).
Wang is regarded as being the principal force behind the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) messaging campaigns. In 2023, he was reportedly instructed by Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to take charge of molding the narrative on Taiwan.
From his presentation of Ma’s “credentials,” it seems that Wang is doing an exemplary job.
However, Ma is letting Taiwan down, given the job he used to have.
On Wednesday last week, the Mainland Affairs Council expressed regret at Ma’s planned attendance at the forum, saying that he had become “disoriented” and that he was out of touch with the sentiments of Taiwanese.
Out of touch he certainly is, but it is not true to say that Ma is disoriented: He knows exactly what he is doing and the use Wang is making of him. He is a willing accomplice, not the CCP’s “useful idiot.” He is engaging in a project that coheres absolutely with his own ideology.
Internet personality Holger Chen (陳之漢), just back from his first visit to China, is more easily characterized as a useful idiot for the CCP, one it wants to aim at a demographic in Taiwan. Ma serves a different base and a different purpose, because of his status, and especially his former status. Had he been ideologically opposed to the CCP’s goals and was visiting as part of a naive wish to “maintain dialogue” and “conduct exchanges,” he would have been equally stage-managed and the effect would have been similar. His willingness to play along with Wang’s game turbocharges the “united work” effect.
On this page, Y. Tony Yang, a professor at George Washington University, takes a positive view of Ma’s visit, writing that the government’s “reflexive condemnation” of Ma’s visit is unfortunate, as it is a strategic blind spot that “effectively cede[s] the entire diplomatic space to the opposition.” He believes that the government should instead encourage exchanges like Ma’s.
For Yang, Ma’s presence at the forum “maintains Taiwan’s voice in cross-strait discourse” when official channels remain largely closed and “provides Beijing with a credible Taiwanese interlocutor who can articulate Taiwan’s democratic values and political constraints, which Beijing desperately needs to understand.”
His article suggests that Ma’s visit is a model of the kind of opportunity that Taiwan could leverage to push back against CCP narratives and increase understanding on both sides.
On the surface, this sounds great, but it is blind to the overwhelming way the CCP stage-manages exchanges and its resistance to listening to what Taiwan has to say. It also gives Ma too much credit for being someone who can represent Taiwan or the wishes of Taiwanese.
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