President Chen Shui-bian’s Taiwan is looking more like the mouse that roars in a postwar popular satiric novel that bears that title.The fictitious mouse is a tiny, nondescript realm that has been plagued by all economic ills and is on the verge of total bankruptcy.The ruler wants to get out of the financial strait, and one of his ministers comes up with a splendid idea.The great genius recommends that the country declare war on the United States.His reasoning is superb.The country would be defeated, of course.But American financial assistance will follow and the small country will be afloat again, with almost all the woes gone forever.
Chen seems on the verge of declaring war on China to save his neck.It’s a well calculated risk.He doesn’t have to officially declare war.All he has to do is to corner Beijing into going on the record by saying it would invade Taiwan to enforce its anti-session law, which codifies an automatic invasion if and when Taipei declares independence.He knows full well China can’t make good that threat now – it may a few more years later. A belligerent China is all he needs to get his ruling Democratic Progressive Party presidential candidate Frank Hsieh elected in next March.If Ma Ying-jeou of the opposition Kuomintang should win the race, Chen would face indictment for corruption and a certain conviction.First lady Wu Shu-chen is standing trial for embezzlement, charged with borrowing invoices and receipts from friends and relatives to claim a NT$14.8 million reimbursement from a public fund under her husband’s control for the conduct of “affairs of state.”The president was not indicted, for he enjoys immunity against prosecution, but was regarded as an unindicted co-defendant who will be formally charged on leaving office.He might wind up in jail like Ro Tae Woo or Chun Do Hwan of South Korea.
The latest attempt to provoke China is the “normal nation resolution” the ruling party has adopted.It’s going to be a centerpiece of campaign themes for the legislative elections in next January and has paved the way for writing a new constitution for Taiwan, which President Chen has promised again and again to put into force by the time he steps down on May 20 next year.One finishing touch will be to call a referendum on Taiwan’s accession to the United Nations under that name, which China considers a move towards de jure independence.
In fact, the resolution is a futile exercise in verbose malapropism.It identifies five great “threats” Taiwan is facing and offers as many remedial steps.The spin doctors of the ruling party, supposedly all great scholars with a caliber equal to that of the ingenious minister who wants his country to go to war with the United States, have purposely misused the word “threats.”Admittedly, China is a threat, but that threat is there only when Taiwan “secedes” from China.Beijing calls Taiwan a province of China and professes to take it back to its fold by force if necessary, but the fact is that it doesn’t want to fight an absolutely counterproductive war and is actually trying to find every possible excuse not to be compelled to attack the island, albeit it is always talking tough.That doesn’t mean that Taiwan should let down its guard.We have to beef up our defense to discourage Beijing.
The other four threats are no threats at all.Is Taiwan’s official title of the Republic of China a threat to its existence?Has the hated Kuomintang which ruled Taiwan as an alien regime defamed our native education and culture to obstruct our gaining the rightful national identification?Is what is known as ill-gotten assets of the Kuomintang a threat to Taiwan’s democratic development?Is it the Kuomintang or the ruling party that has been giving “the favorable treatment” to “specific organizations” over the past seven years that has harmed social harmony and solidarity to qualify as a threat?
The Republic of China certainly is a misnomer for present-day Taiwan.But that’s the name Beijing and the United States, Taiwan’s only possible protector against China, want us to have for now.Even President Chen had to vow not to change that title in two inaugural speeches in 2000 and 2004.
One thing the Kuomintang regime has never done is to defame our native education and culture.The Japanese colonial authorities did so selectively, and the sole remedial step the Kuomintang government took after Taiwan was restored to the Republic of China after the Second World War in 1945 is to change the medium of teaching in all schools, making Mandarin a lingua franca in place of Japanese.As a matter of fact, it is Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek who, by moving his government from Nanjing to Taipei, raised Taiwan’s status to that of a nation-state, giving the people on the island their new national identity and fostering Taiwanese nationalism to cope with Communist China.
The Kuomintang has been all but liquidated, though the ruling party continues to call for the return of the property it had acquired not entirely lawfully in Taiwan.The vote-buying culture it was charged with starting in Taiwan to threaten its democracy is fully espoused by the ruling party as well.Everybody knows politicians around the world buy votes.There was no vote buying in Taiwan while Chiang Kai-shek was calling the shots, however.It has become a general practice as democratization deepened after Lee Teng-hui took over from President Chiang Ching-kuo in 1988.
“Specific organizations” had received “the favorable treatment” from the Kuomintang regime before there was the change of government in 2000.The ruling party is giving them that treatment now.The Kuomintang is out of power and can’t do so, even if it wishes.Ask a man in the street who is “harming social harmony and solidarity” in Taiwan.Most likely, he will tell you politicians of the Democratic Progressive Party are in order just to get more votes by stoking the feud between the islanders and the mainlanders begotten after the bloody February 28 Incident of 1947.
As a matter of fact, this new gimmick of President Chen’s won’t work.It insults the intelligence of the electorate.In the end, he has to appeal emotionally to the Hoklo islander majority not to elect Ma Ying-jeou, the Hong Kong-born son of a mainlander apparatchik of the Kuomintang, to help Taipeiite Frank Hsieh win.
（本文刊載於96.09.10 China Post第4版，本文代表作者個人意見）
