KMT
apologizes for Lee controversy
REGRET: Despite calls that
Diane Lee be forced to return the salary she drew from 1991 until 2005, the
Taipei City Council said only a Cabinet order could make that happen
By Mo Yan-chih
STAFF REPORTER
Sunday, Feb 08, 2009, Page 1
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Wu Poh-hsiung (吳伯雄) yesterday offered
an apology after former KMT legislator Diane Lee’s (李慶安) elected status was
revoked over her US citizenship.
The Central Election Commission (CEC) revoked Lee’s elected status as both
Taipei City councilor and legislator on Friday night after the US Department of
State on Thursday confirmed that Lee’s US citizenship was still valid.
Wu yesterday expressed his party’s regret over the matter, but added that the
KMT had made no attempt to cover it up or delay the investigation.
“The KMT did not try to cover up her mistakes or delay the process on her behalf
… Lee was a party member and we are sorry about what happened,” Wu said after
attending a lunch party hosted by the party’s Taipei branch.
The KMT had persuaded Lee to resign as a legislator if she could not provide
solid evidence disproving accusations that she had dual citizenship and made
inquiries with the US about her status, Wu said.
The party was also scheduled to hold an evaluation and discipline committee to
discuss Lee’s case before she announced she was leaving the party in December,
he said, adding that the KMT had already asked the Legislative Yuan to handle
the case according to the Nationality Act (國籍法).
Lee resigned as a legislator on Jan. 8, but failed to show any document
supporting her claim that she had lost her US citizenship automatically when she
was elected Taipei City councilor in 1994.
In response to a request by the Democratic Progressive Party that the
legislature and the Taipei City Council recover the salary Lee earned between
1991 and 2005, Wu Bi-chu (吳碧珠), chairwoman of the council, said yesterday that
it would not take the initiative to do so.
Lee served as a Taipei City councilor for one term from 1994 to 1998, after
which she was elected as a legislator.
Wu said the council would follow administrative procedures and recover Lee’s
salary if the Executive Yuan gave the order.
Council secretary-general Wang King-de (王金德) said the council had only handled a
similar matter once before, when New Party councilor Tim Chang (常中天) was found
to have charged research fees when serving in the military.
Wang said that as Lee was no longer a councilor, the decision to recover her
salary would be made by the CEC or the Executive Yuan.
Cabinet spokesman Su Jun-pin (蘇俊賓) yesterday declined to comment on whether the
Cabinet would take such action.
The Cabinet’s Appeal Review Committee will handle Lee’s appeal according to the
law, he said, referring to comments by Lee’s lawyer, Lee Yung-ran (李永然), who
protested the CEC’s decision and said Diane Lee would appeal to the Cabinet.
China
defiant ahead of key UN panel on human rights
AP, BEIJING
Sunday, Feb 08, 2009, Page 1
Days before China’s human rights record comes under scrutiny before a UN panel,
the government’s grip on dissent seems as firm as ever.
Government critics have been rounded up and some imprisoned on vaguely defined
state security charges. Corruption whistleblowers have been bundled away, while
discussion of sensitive political and social topics on the Internet remains
tightly policed.
On Friday, officers stationed outside a government building in Beijing took away
at least eight people — members of a loosely organized group of 30 who had
traveled to the capital from around the country seeking redress for various
problems, almost all of them involving local corruption.
One member of the group, Li Fengxian, from Henan Province, held up a sign with
the character for “injustice” painted on it.
Li, 65, said she spent years fighting officials in her village who she said gave
away a poverty allowance allotted to her family to other officials.
Police response underscored the government’s determination to keep control —
even in the face of a UN meeting to examine China’s human rights record.
The review by the UN Human Rights Council, which begins tomorrow, is part of a
new process that evaluates member countries in an effort to prompt improvements
and address violations. The council, which replaced the discredited UN Human
Rights Commission, has no enforcement powers, but is supposed to act as the
world’s moral conscience on human rights.
Following the review, the three-nation working group composed of Canada, India
and Nigeria will submit a report of their findings.
The stakes are high for China, which wants to be seen as a responsible player.
At the same time, the leadership in Beijing is worried about its grip on power
slipping as the economic downturn and rising unemployment threaten to aggravate
social unrest.
The government is especially sensitive this year, the 20th anniversary of the
Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests and the subsequent military crackdown.
On Thursday, four months before the anniversary, two events commemorating a
milestone modern Chinese art exhibition whose iconoclastic spirit fed into the
rebellious mood of the times were shut down.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Jiang Yu (姜瑜) said last week that China was looking
forward to “constructive dialogue” at the UN panel.
“It is normal that countries would have differences of opinion on human rights
issues and we hope, on the basis of dialogue, to narrow our differences and
expand our consensus,” Jiang said.
Shoes and power
In Chinese politics, there is no space for humorous expression; there is only
power space between the dictator and the people ruled.
When a reporter threw a shoe at former US president George W. Bush, he commented
that the shoe was size 10. But when someone threw a shoe at Chinese Premier Wen
Jiabao (溫家寶), Wen’s response was that it was a “dirty trick,” because he has the
power to crush such dissent immediately if the incident had happened in China.
A big government like that of the Chinese Communist Party tortures its people,
such as rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng (高智晟), who did not even throw a shoe at the
country’s leader, but only spoke his mind. And what happened to him? Severe
beatings, electric shocks to his genitals and cigarettes held to his eyes. Now
he is missing.
Just think what would happen if someone threw a shoe at a Chinese leader. They
would disappear from the face of the Earth within seconds.
NI KUO-RONG
Hsingchu City
Where’s Lee’s US passport?
Former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislator Diane Lee’s (李慶安) attorney Lee
Yung-ran (李永然) has reportedly said that Lee’s taking an oath of allegiance to
the Republic of China (ROC) and use of an ROC passport to enter and exit the US
since 1994 are concrete acts that prove her intent to relinquish her US
citizenship (“AIT’s letters back Diane Lee: lawyer,” Feb. 6, page 4).
But what of her maintaining property in the US? What about her having family
members in the US? And what about her being on record as paying what is
evidently federal income tax in the US?
According to the Web site of the US Department of State, these are three crucial
questions in determining — on a case-by-case basis — if it is a person’s intent
to relinquish his or her citizenship. Moreover, there is no documentation that
attests to Lee’s renouncing her US nationality. Such documentation is a
requisite step in surrendering one’s US citizenship.
It seems to me that another crucial question in this matter is: What is the
current official status of Lee’s US passport? Is her passport still valid? Has
it lapsed? If so, has she made any effort to renew it? Has she officially
relinquished it by turning it in to the relevant US authorities? Has any
official US authority divested Lee of her passport — has it been revoked in any
way?
Exactly what is the status of her passport?
I pose these questions because holding a valid US passport means that a person
is a US citizen. They are equivalent. If a person has a US passport, then he or
she is a US citizen or national.
MICHAEL SCANLON
East Hartford, Connecticut
Some
Tibetan lessons for Taiwan
By J. Michael Cole
寇謐將
Sunday, Feb 08, 2009, Page 8
NEXT MONTH WILL mark the 50th anniversary of the “liberation” of Tibet by the
People’s Liberation Army (PLA). As Beijing — and purportedly all Tibetans —
ready themselves to rejoice in the festivities surrounding “Serf Emancipation
Day” on March 28, people in Taiwan would be well advised to turn to the history
books.
For starters, the so-called liberation of Tibet did not occur in 1959, but
rather nine years earlier, when the PLA made its first incursion into Tibet.
Along with thousands of soldiers, the liberators brought the Seventeen-Point
Agreement, a document that was purportedly intended as a blueprint for the
“modernization” of “backward” and “barbaric” Tibet by a benevolent China and
which called for the ouster of “reactionary governments” and “imperialist”
forces that had thrown Tibet “into the depths of enslavement and suffering.”
It is less well known that, although the Seventeen-Point Agreement was a
creature of Beijing in which Tibetans had had no say, Tibetan leader the Dalai
Lama sought to make the best of the situation by agreeing to give China’s
“offer” a chance and to facilitate the implementation of the agreement. This was
a decision that, as it turns out, essentially spelled the death of Tibet as a
sovereign country. Seeing no incompatibility between Buddhism and communism, the
young Dalai Lama accepted an invitation to visit Beijing, where he held talks
with the upper echelons of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), including personal
meetings with Mao Zedong (毛澤東). During a succession of banquets, the Dalai Lama
also had exchanges with “chew and lie” — the Tibetan delegations’ telling
sobriquet for then-Chinese premier Zhou Enlai (周恩來) — and other CCP cadres.
Soon enough and in spite of the many attempts by the Tibetan leadership to make
the best of a difficult situation, Beijing began reneging on its own agreements
and cracked down on the growing number of Tibetans who felt betrayed by the turn
of events. Aside from a few improvements in certain technical sectors, it was
becoming increasingly evident that the benefits of modernization were mostly
being enjoyed by the Chinese settlers, while the environment and cultural
heritage of Tibet were being dismantled one piece at a time. The Tibetan
leadership appealed to Beijing, which cajoled and threatened while painting an
optimistic portrait of the situation in Tibet. All was well and in time Tibetans
would prosper, Beijing officials said, a lie that failed to deceive the Dalai
Lama and his entourage.
Things came to a boil in 1955 after Beijing imposed collectivization on Tibet,
sparking an uprising in the eastern part of the country. With that began a long
succession of demonstrations and uprisings, to which the PLA responded with
increasing force. Monks were arrested, humiliated, tortured and murdered, as was
anyone who opposed Chinese benevolence. Surrounded by the PLA, facing certain
arrest (or death) and amid preparations for a major uprising in Lhasa, in March
1959 the Dalai Lama and his followers fled Tibet and were granted asylum in
India, ending, in Beijing’s view, years of “theocratic slavery” in Tibet, hence
the “Serf Emancipation Day” holiday. For those who still care about history,
March 28, 1959, is the day China dissolved the Tibetan government after 18 days
of uprising.
During the ensuing half-century, China continued to dismantle and disfigure the
Tibetan state, poisoning parts of its territory with uranium and nuclear weapons
tests, while crushing anyone who stood in its way. As of the early 1990s, when
the Dalai Lama published his autobiography Freedom in Exile, more than 1 million
Tibetans had died as a result of PLA violence, starvation or suicide, while
hundreds of thousands were forced to flee to refugee camps abroad. Symbols of
Tibetan spirituality — temples, practices and so on — were for all intents and
purposes extinguished, and the country was virtually isolated from the outside
world. Through population transfers, meanwhile, China turned Tibetans into a
minority group within their own country, adding yet one more violation of
international law to an already towering list.
From his exile, the Dalai Lama was accused by Beijing of being a “splittist” for
refusing to go along with China’s destruction of his native land — an irony that
was not lost on the Tibetan leader, as prior to liberation China had inked
official documents, such as the “perpetual treaty” of 821AD, which clearly
referred to Tibet as an independent country. A report by the International
Commission of Jurists issued after Tibet’s “return to the motherland” also
attested to Tibet’s existence as a sovereign legal entity. But in China’s world,
international law was a very malleable concept indeed.
The lessons for Taiwan at this juncture in its history could not be any starker,
nor the need for a close reading of historical precedents any greater. Under
President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), Taiwan has embarked on efforts to improve ties
with Beijing, in the process inking its own series of agreements, first in
November during the visit to Taipei by Association for Relations Across the
Taiwan Strait (ARATS) Chairman Chen Yunlin (陳雲林), with more agreements expected
for April, probably in Nanjing or Beijing.
So far, the agreements have covered economic matters, with both sides leaving
the more contentious political discussions for future consideration. What we
should bear in mind as Taipei welcomes Beijing’s goodwill and signs official
pacts with China, however, is that even when the other side participates in good
faith and willingly — as Tibet did in the early 1950s — Beijing has a propensity
to break agreements and to bully the other party when the latter raises
objections.
In his memoirs, the Dalai Lama makes the observation that behind the reveling,
toasts and smiles at the many banquets he attended, Chinese diplomats had a
tendency to intertwine handshakes with threats and laughter with bullying,
especially when they regard their counterpart as an inferior (including
Taiwanese, as demonstrated by the long history of discrimination by Chinese
against Taiwanese). There is no reason to believe that Chinese diplomats have
grown any less perfidious, or that the meetings between ARATS and Straits
Exchange Foundation officials were a departure from that age-old practice.
The Dalai Lama came close to making the mistake of believing that change within
the CCP was possible when Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平) — as moderate and pragmatic a CCP
leader as there ever was — seemingly extended a friendly hand in the late 1970s,
only to realize that the offer was nothing more than a trap. To this day,
nothing the Chinese government has done, what with the Tiananmen Square Massacre
almost 20 years ago to its more recent crackdowns in Xinjiang and Tibet, would
indicate that the CCP has abandoned the duplicitous mindset that marked the Mao
era, when Tibet was taken over.
The implications for the future of Taiwan are therefore of the utmost
seriousness. Even if Taipei negotiates in good faith and sticks to its side of
the agreements it reaches with Beijing, we can expect that in time China will
alter, reinterpret or moot those pacts and make short shrift of anyone who
stands in its way.
Regardless of whether the agreements are perceived by Taipei as means to “reduce
tensions in the Taiwan Strait,” “reunify” the two sides, “modernize” or simply
rescue the economy, Ma and his negotiators had better tread cautiously, for
through CCP eyes and the historical revisionism the party has refined into an
art form, Taiwan is just like Tibet half a century ago, “lost” property that
needs to be “liberated.”
Taiwan is blessed with a substantial Tibetan refugee population. As China
prepares to celebrate the “liberation” of Tibet, Taiwanese would benefit
tremendously from listening to what Tibetans have to say about what “liberation”
meant for them, or just how trustworthy a negotiator Beijing can be.
J. Michael Cole is a writer based in
Taipei.