The Democratic Progressive Party yesterday slammed former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) chairwoman Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱) for attending China’s military parade commemorating the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, saying that she supported authoritarianism.
In China Central Television’s live broadcast, Hung could be seen standing near former Chinese vice president Wang Qishan (王岐山).
Hung’s attendance at the event featuring authoritarian leaders brought “shame” to her and the KMT, the DPP wrote on Facebook.
Photo: screen grab from the China Central Television Web site
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) was flanked by Russian President Vladmir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un as they watched the parade, it said, adding that the leaders of Belarus and Myanmar were also in attendance.
“Hung not only failed to distance herself from the event, but ran toward it absurdly to stand beside dictators in acceptance of China’s ‘united front’ work,” it said.
Hung’s behavior contradicts herself, as she in 2015 criticized a Chinese military parade for claiming that Chinese communists had done most of the fighting during the Second Sino-Japanese War, the DPP said.
New Power Party Chairwoman Claire Wang (王婉諭) said that the Chinese military parade was a “dictators’ party” serving as the launch of an “axis of evil alliance.”
Beijing utilized the parade to remove the KMT from the historical narrative, legitimize its plans to annex Taiwan and put up a show of force against democracies around the world, she said.
Taiwanese should reject China’s false narrative, which is a pretext for potential aggression, Wang said.
Reaction within the KMT was mixed, with senior party figures either defending or avoiding the issue.
KMT Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) said that former president Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) Nationalist forces did most of the fighting during the war.
Chinese communists made contributions, but they should not obscure the fact that the KMT was the main force fighting Japan, he said.
President William Lai’s (賴清德) address, which referred to yesterday as the anniversary of the end of World War II instead of a “victory day,” had “brought shame to the nation,” Chu said, adding that Lai was “aping Japanese.”
Separately, former KMT Taipei mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) wrote on Facebook that his late father, Hau Pei-tsun (郝柏村), a former premier and chief of the general staff, had repeatedly turned down Beijing’s invitations to its parades.
Hau Pei-tsun viewed the Chinese Communist Party’s claim of being the main contributor to victory in the war in China as a usurpation of the KMT forces’ achievement, he said.
“History’s lesson to us is to stay on the one true path of insisting on peace,” Hau Lung-bin wrote.
Former KMT legislator Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) said the DPP had smeared Hung’s motives, and sowed division and hate across the Taiwan Strait when the two sides wanted nothing more than peace.
Hung understood that Beijing’s military parade was a gesture of China’s “commitment to peace, not an intent to trigger an arms race or provoke war in the region,” Cheng said.
The former KMT chairwoman “does not want to turn Taiwan into a second Ukraine,” she said.
Additional reporting by Huang Cheng-chia
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