It has been more than a week since President William Lai (賴清德) gave his address to the nation to mark Double Ten National Day on Oct. 10. It seems that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) did not regard his address as sufficiently provocative to warrant a demonstration of its ire: There was no multiservice military drill around Taiwan, unlike Joint Sword-2024B, held four days after last year’s address.
Whatever this muted response from the CCP means, Lai’s speech was interesting because of how it compared with his National Day address last year. His speech on Friday last week either represented a change in tack in his approach to cross-strait tensions or an extension of an evolving strategy.
Last year’s address was not particularly provocative, but Lai got his shots in at a previous event, the Double Ten National Day gala at the Taipei Dome on Oct. 5 last year. During the gala, Lai had mused that, as the Republic of China (ROC) had been founded several decades prior to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the ROC was technically the “motherland” of the PRC, not the other way around. This was an obvious jibe at the CCP and a conciliatory wink at the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). The observation’s inherent absurdity sharpened the jibe and blunted the overture.
There were no jibes this year, just as there were no conciliatory winks to the opposition. Conspicuous by its absence was any acknowledgement of the divisions and enmity of the recall movement, nor were there any attempts to address tensions at home. The overtures in this year’s speech were instead aimed at Beijing.
This year, after the opening remarks, Lai spent about 20 percent of his time speaking about the government’s plans to improve trade and invest in business and industry, while about 15 percent of his speech outlined policies aimed at improving the lives of ordinary Taiwanese. Finally, he turned to remarks on national defense and societal resilience.
The logic of a speech’s organization can go many ways: It can follow the principle of placing the most important aspects first, or leading up to the most important aspect, which is left to last, as that is what remains more clearly in the mind of the listener. As to which logic lay behind this speech, look at the opening paragraphs.
Lai said: “Sept. 10 was the historic date when the number of days Taiwan had spent free from martial law officially surpassed the number of days endured under its stifling rule. This signifies that we have parted entirely from an authoritarian regime and its shadow.”
He thus set the context for the arc of his argument: Taiwan as a free, democratic nation, liberated from the authoritarian KMT post-Chinese Civil War regime and resistant to the CCP’s desire to return the nation to governance under authoritarian masters.
The sections on Taiwan’s economic prosperity and the investment in its future, and the promise of translating them into improvements that ordinary people would feel in their daily lives, were Lai’s way of impressing on his audience the importance of defense, deterrence and resilience in the face of threats of invasion and annexation.
In the absence of the possibility of direct communication with the CCP under the preconditions of so-called “1992 consensus” or a return to the early dichotomy of the ROC’s and PRC’s interpretations of “one China” that traditional elements within the KMT would like to see, Lai was offering a vision of a more rational regional cohabitation: adherence to the “status quo,” no mention of a declaration of independence, the avoidance of war, the protection of life and property, a shared commitment to mutual prosperity, and learning the lessons of the past regarding the destruction of war.
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