Watching news footage of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) officials shaking hands and exchanging pleasantries with their counterparts across the Taiwan Strait, I could not help but feel a profound sense of temporal displacement. As a member of the generation born after the lifting of martial law and raised under modern civic education, I truly want to ask the KMT: “Do you not see who the true villain is?”
In 1949, the Chinese Communist Party used a bloody civil war to drive the KMT into exile in Taiwan. In the decades that followed, it has sought to completely erase the existence of the Republic of China (ROC) from the international stage. From a constitutional perspective, this was an “independence movement” launched within the ROC that successfully split the national territory. It was Mao Zedong (毛澤東) who changed the national title, replaced the flag and orchestrated “secession” outside the original state system — it was “communist independence” in its purest form. For the KMT, it was the agony of a destroyed home and a lost nation.
The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which the KMT now regards as a thorn in its side, has won multiple elections, but has not used military force to drive the KMT away, nor has it destroyed the existing system. On the contrary, the DPP continues to use the national title of the ROC, respects the ROC Constitution, and maintains the five-power separation framework originally designed by a founder of the ROC, Sun Yat-sen (孫逸仙).
Ironically, one party is a historic enemy who tried to exterminate the KMT; the other is a competitor who inherited its brand and systems.
What the younger generation finds most intolerable is the KMT’s distorted logic regarding friends and foes. In Taiwan’s internal political arena, the KMT fights the DPP tooth and nail, treating them as irreconcilable enemies. However, when facing the very party that seized their land and refuses to renounce the use of force against Taiwan, they appear incredibly submissive, rushing to shake hands and seeking validation.
In the KMT’s logic, “anti-Taiwan independence” seems to have become a fig leaf used to cover up a disregard for past humiliations and the betrayal of the modern democratic system.
A political party that cannot see the context of history is destined to be abandoned by time. When KMT members entertain cross-strait forums, do they not wonder how many young people in Taiwan are disappointed by this posture of “weakness toward the outside, but ruthlessness toward the inside”?
If the KMT continues to treat fellow citizens who defend democratic values as enemies, while treating opponents who destroyed national ideals as allies, then the future of the party might remain buried in the archives of history, never again finding a place in the heart of a modern Taiwan.
Huang Yi-sheng is a student in the Department of Bioinformatics and Medical Engineering at Asia University.
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