Taiwan is a sovereign nation that belongs to the world, President William Lai (賴清德), who had originally been scheduled to visit the Kingdom of Eswatini last week, said in a prerecorded video address broadcast on Sunday at a gala dinner that celebrated the 40th anniversary of King Mswati III’s accession to the throne. His planned trip to Taiwan’s sole democratic ally in Africa was suspended due to what Minister of Foreign Affairs Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍), who visited the country as Lai’s special envoy, described as Beijing’s politicization of flight information regions.
“Our 23 million people have the right to engage with the international community. The greater the external pressure we face, the more courage and resolve we have,” Lai said.
“No matter how China attempts to interfere politically and obstruct Taiwan’s normal engagement with the international community, Taiwan will not bow or stop,” Lin added on Facebook.
China’s suppression of Taiwan’s diplomatic engagement with international allies is nothing new. The legal ground it claims for its interference is the “one China” principle it has imposed on cross-strait relations that frames Taiwan as an internal affair. Ironically, as Taiwanese law professor Lo Cheng-chung (羅承宗) said recently, Taiwan has all the requirements of a sovereign state, but the Republic of China (ROC), in legal terms, calls itself a part “of China.”
Putting “Taiwan” in parentheses does not resolve the problem, he said, as Taiwan degrades itself to a region in its own Constitution.
Taiwanese academics have called for normalizing Taiwan’s status, as it meets all the criteria of a sovereign state. It could start with small yet meaningful changes, such as renaming streets that still carry China-related names and adopting the Gregorian calendar, which is used by most countries in the world, instead of the ROC calendar. Taiwanese are no longer living in a borrowed place on borrowed time. Such small changes could serve as a reminder that Taiwanese are world citizens who are no longer ruled by an authoritarian party-state. The changes are also important as some people engage in daily self-denial of Taiwan’s status, as Lo pointed out. Obviously, those people include members of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT).
The KMT is shameless. The party in the past few years has repeatedly blocked motions to condemn China after it harassed Taiwan. The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) on Friday proposed a motion to condemn China for its obstruction of Lai’s trip to Eswatini. The motion was sent to its second reading for cross-party negotiations in the legislature, where the KMT holds a majority with the Taiwan People’s Party. It is widely believed that the motion would be shelved just like the previous ones, including those responding to Beijing’s distortion of UN Resolution 2758, Vice President Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) being surveilled by Chinese agents during her visit to Prague in 2024, DPP Legislator Puma Shen (沈伯洋) being listed as “wanted” by Chinese authorities for “criminal activities of secession” in Taiwan and China’s military drills circling Taiwan last year.
Citizen Congress Watch director Chang Hung-lin (張宏林) said the current legislature has never passed a motion to condemn China and that sending the motion to cross-party negotiations, which could take a month, would mean putting the ball in Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu’s (韓國瑜) court, which is equivalent to inaction. Han, a KMT leader, has long given up on defending the nation’s sovereignty, he said.
The KMT was also spineless enough to apply for subsidies from the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy to cover party Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun’s (鄭麗文) trip to China, where she met with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), shook hands with him for 14 seconds and indulged in voluble statements about their shared political foundation based on the so-called “1992 consensus” and opposition to Taiwanese independence.
The foundation, funded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, was established to “advocate Taiwan’s values of democracy, freedom and human rights,” while helping break through Beijing’s diplomatic blockade. It was subject to sanctions by China, as it was in 2022 listed by China’s Taiwan Affairs Office as “an organization associated with Taiwanese separatists.”
“There is no issue of unification or reunification between Taiwan and China — only one of invasion and aggression,” Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Francois Wu (吳志中) said in his speech at the 14th Global Taiwan National Affairs Symposium in Taipei on Sunday.
It is high time for Taiwan to walk the talk — to move toward statehood normalization and transitional justice, and ultimately to name rectification and constitutional amendment. Eventually it has to discard the “one China” pretense to ascertain state sovereignty.
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