President William Lai (賴清德) on Tuesday gave the second of a series of 10 talks that he plans to deliver across Taiwan. The talk came with few surprises, and not just because of the use of the usual platitudes of national unity.
Lai’s approach to both the opposition in Taiwan — the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) — and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in China has been to hold out olive branches tinged with an implicit critique: a call for consensus, but also a caution that he will compromise only so far.
It was no coincidence that he mentioned the 1949 Battle of Guningtou (古寧頭) and the 1958 Taiwan Strait Crisis as exemplars of the idea that “united, we are stronger,” the shared effort of the armed forces and civilians, irrespective of ethnicity, to safeguard Taiwan proper and the outlying islands.
Guningtou was fought in Kinmen between the retreating forces of the KMT following its defeat in China by the CCP. The KMT forces successfully defended Kinmen, which had always been part of China, and held it while the main KMT forces retreated to Taiwan proper, which the Japanese had relinquished in 1945.
The Second Taiwan Strait Crisis was the successful defense of Kinmen and Matsu in 1958 following a sustained bombardment by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army.
Lai’s evocation of these events was a reminder to the KMT of the origin story of the Republic of China (ROC) on Taiwan, and of who the real enemy is.
Neither was it a coincidence that he referenced Taiwanese democracy pioneer Chiang Wei-shui (蔣渭水). Chiang was born in Yilan in 1890 during Qing Dynasty rule; he was only four years old when the Qing Dynasty ceded Taiwan to Japan, never again to come under Chinese rule under international law.
In 1927, Chiang cofounded a pro-Taiwan political party during Japanese colonial rule: a courageous stand for Taiwanese sovereignty and for unity in the face of rule by an external, colonial power.
The party’s name is often rendered, in English, as the Taiwanese People’s Party (臺灣民眾黨). In Chinese, it is identical to the name that then-Taipei mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) chose when he established the TPP in 2019.
It was no coincidence, either, that Ko chose that name. He was very aware of the history, and had expressed admiration for Chiang and the hope that he could “inherit” Chiang’s unfinished work. Lai was reminding TPP Chairman Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) of the political DNA buried in Ko’s concept of the party that he founded.
For anyone in the audience who had not picked up on these references, Lai went on to mention Taiwan’s 38 years under martial law, the 228 Incident of 1947 and the 1979 Formosa Incident, also known as the Kaohsiung Incident, all of which were visited upon Taiwanese by the KMT. He continued by referring to all the people who had fought against authoritarian rule and had sacrificed their lives fighting for democracy, implicitly referencing Chiang and the original TPP in their struggle against colonial Japan, and the Taiwanese in their struggle against the KMT party-state.
To achieve a true whole-of-society effort to deter CCP aggression, Lai would need not just the public, but the KMT and the TPP on board. He knows that is unlikely to happen, and this is why he has embarked on this series of talks. He cannot get the opposition on his side to help foster unity among its followers, so he is trying to recruit the opposition’s followers to help him rein in the opposition parties’ destructive behavior.
If he succeeds, that is where the real surprise will come.
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