The government must warn the public about China attempting to increase its influence by citing a shared culture and ethnicity as part of its “united front” rhetoric, a Taiwanese academic said on Monday.
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) claims that Taiwan and China are “culturally one” are embodied by how Fuzhou City has reached out to Lienchiang County (Matsu) and Xiamen City has wooed Kinmen County, said Hung Chin-fu (洪敬富), a professor of political science at National Cheng Kung University.
Taipei must be alert to China’s use of culture and ethnicity to get more Taiwanese to sign up for a Chinese ID card, Hung said.
Photo: Screen grab from Lienchiang County Commissioner Wang Chung-ming’s Facebook page
A government official speaking on condition of anonymity said separately that they hoped the Republic of China still had a place in the hearts of Taiwanese officials attending Chinese-hosted Lunar New Year events.
The remarks came on the heels of Lienchiang County Commissioner Wang Chung-ming (王忠銘) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) leading a delegation to a lantern festival in Fuzhou’s Mawei District in China’s Fujian Province over the weekend.
The unnamed official said that Wang attends the event every Lunar New Year and last year even helped promote a Fujian-Matsu card for travel between the Chinese city and the Taiwanese county, citing their proximity as a reason for the promotion.
The Fuzhou Daily reported that the festival’s central theme extolled unification and celebrated UNESCO in December last year adding China’s Spring Festival customs to its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
The Mawei festival is held in communities among those represented in the UNESCO listing, giving the event more significance, the newspaper reported.
Wang on Sunday wrote on Facebook that he, Lienchiang County Council Speaker Chang Yung-chiang (張永江), county councilors Tsao Er-chang (曹爾章) and Chen Yu-fa (陳玉發), and four other local officials attended the event.
“Today, Mawei and Matsu jointly marked the lantern festival,” with the joy stemming from both sides “being of one people,” Wang wrote.
Wang thanked CCP officials and urged both sides “not to cast aside our five millennia of history for five decades of politics.”
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