The national solidarity that President William Lai (賴清德) is calling for is to purge people who are not pro-Taiwanese independence, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) said yesterday at the KMT’s Central Standing Committee.
Lai on Tuesday delivered a talk at the Taoyuan Hakka Youth Association, the second of a series of 10, and said that Taiwanese supported democracy, and their votes, through elections and recalls, express “steel-willed determination” to protect Taiwan’s democracy.
That force that is not only expressed in the government, but also within the legislature, he said.
Photo: CNA
“Hammer after hammer, tempered into steel and removed of all impurities, until all that’s left is steel-willed determination to defend our sovereignty and safeguard our democracy,” he said.
Chu said that Lai, like totalitarian governments, is in favor of purging members of the opposition and likens the process to forging steel, in which one must purge the impurities from iron.
The majority of Taiwanese have already been deemed to be “the others” and impure, Chu said, referring to the removal of “Han Chinese” as an ethnic group from the Executive Yuan’s Web site on March 24 and defining the ethnic group as “the rest of the population.”
Lai is purging his and his party’s opponents under the guise of democracy, he said.
Lai’s use of Hoklo, commonly called Taiwanese, in front of Hakka people, and asking whether they understood, is an attempt to create a Hoklo-only society, Chu said.
Hakka people are also Taiwanese, and the Hakka language is also a Taiwanese language, he said.
New Taipei City Mayor Hou You-yi (侯友宜) of the KMT said unity should be about tolerance and moving forward, rather than treating lawmakers as “impurities” that needed to be “hammered out.”
Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) Chairman Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) said that all Taiwanese should be the masters of the nation, not “impurities,” adding that Lai’s comments were chilling and did not sound like the head of a democratic country.
Lai should clarify what impurities he wished to eliminate, and why he sees Taiwanese this way, Huang said.
The TPP cannot accept the president’s attempt to divide the country under the guise of promoting national unity, TPP spokeswoman Celina Wu (吳怡萱) said.
Presidential Office spokeswoman Karen Kuo (郭雅慧) said this was not the first time Lai used the analogy, citing a 2019 speech.
Politicians should not overinterpret the president’s speech and not distort his intended message of solidarity, she said.
The president in his speech said that the desire to protect democracy is the most significant consensus among supporters of the Republic of China and those who back independence, she said.
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