President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) should issue a call for alliances against Chinese expansionism in her Double Ten National Day address, Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU) activists said yesterday, renewing calls for the government to strike back against Chinese diplomatic aggression.
“When we look at the results of Tsai’s moderate line, it is clear that Taiwanese moderation has not resulted in any Chinese moderation, and their international blockading and bullying is harsher than ever,” TSU Publicity Department deputy director Chen Chia-lin (陳嘉霖) said, citing China’s blocking Taiwan from participating in this year’s International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) assembly.
“A moderate line would not be able to maintain the ‘status quo,’ because it would only make China press harder,” he said. “If we do not adjust, the road ahead is likely to keep getting narrower and narrower, and we will be faced with a crisis that is harder to address.”
The party’s call came after Tsai’s interview in the Japanese-language Yomiuri Shimbum last week in which she reiterated that her government respects the “historical fact” that a meeting between Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits and Straits Exchange Foundation officials occurred in 1992, while stopping short of recognizing that any consensus was reached at the meeting.
“Calling this a ‘softening’ might be an over-interpretation, but there is clearly no hardening,” Chen, said, adding that Tsai should move beyond the government’s current economically oriented “new southbound policy” to call for military alliances with other nations to oppose Chinese aggression.
The call for alliances should move beyond the US and Japan to include nations such as Malaysia, Vietnam and Indonesia, which also face Chinese “bullying,” he said.
TSU Youth Department head Ho Tsung-ying (侯宗穎) said Tsai should also call for education reforms to promote Taiwanese identity, including increasing time spent teaching history for ethnic groups other than Han Chinese, replacing “Chinese” history courses with coursework on Aboriginal and East Asian history.
Chen added that measures such as changing the nation’s title on passports would be “too specific.”
TSU activists are to pass out “Taiwan isn’t Chinese Taipei” stickers outside the official Double Ten National Day ceremony to protest continued observation of the day, Chen said.
Double Ten National Day commemorates the beginning of the Hsinhai Revolution, which lead to the establishment of the Republic of China.
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