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Defeatist
KMT bosses kowtow to Chen Yunlin
By James Wang 王景弘
Friday, Jan 01, 2010, Page 8
Just as President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) rose to prominence because he managed to
hide his true self, his fortunes are now plummeting because he has revealed his
true colors. This outcome should be obvious, but he still doesn’t seem to have
reflected on his behavior. Instead, he worries about the Chinese Nationalist
Party’s (KMT) image over fears that honorary chairmen throwing a feast for and
toasting Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait (ARATS) Chairman
Chen Yunlin (陳雲林) gave the public a negative image of the party.
When Ma blocked former KMT chairmen Lien Chan (連戰) and Wu Poh-hsiung (吳伯雄), as
well as People First Party (PFP) Chairman James Soong (宋楚瑜) — all players in the
old Chiang family camp — from hosting a dinner for their “old pal” Chen, he not
only failed to cover up the KMT’s image as treasonous, but drew criticism for
his arrogance and defeatist cross-strait policies.
As the trio criticized Ma while doting on the Chinese envoy, it became plain
that Ma is not only incapable of suppressing corruption among the party’s lower
echelons, but also of suppressing privileges among the politically powerful and
influential KMT “nobility” in resisting manipulation by the Chinese Communist
Party (CCP). It is only natural that the public saw through his charade.
Lien, Wu and Soong overstepped their bounds by doting on Chen. It looked bad,
and their criticism of Ma was not very tactful. Lien said Taichung Mayor Jason
Hu’s (胡志強) years at Oxford had not been a waste of time, thus implying that Ma
had wasted his years at Harvard.
While that was a clever jab, Lien’s doctoral thesis, Chinese Communism Versus
Pragmatism: The Criticism of Hu Shi’s Philosophy, detailed how the CCP purged
the intellectual thought of Hu Shih (胡適), a philosopher and essayist who fled to
Taiwan with Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) KMT forces. Lien has also served as the vice
president of the Republic of China (ROC) and is now an honorary chairman of the
KMT.
Despite this, he is unable to differentiate between what is important and what
isn’t, so when he went to offer tribute to the “C-list” politician Chen, he only
showed that he had wasted his years studying at the University of Chicago.
Soong was not happy about being brushed off, so he used his direct connection to
Chen, going to Sun Moon Lake, where he walked right through the lines of police
officers protecting the Chinese envoy to have a private meeting in his capacity
as a “normal citizen.” This highlights both Soong’s extraordinary privileges and
the fact that Chen does not require approval from Ma to see whomever he wishes
to see.
Although the semi-official meeting between Chen and Straits Exchange Foundation
(SEF) Chairman Chiang Pin-kung (江丙坤) had already given Ma a headache, Soong said
that if it weren’t for him and Lien, “Mr Chen probably would never have been
able to come to Taiwan.”
This makes it sound as if Soong made considerable contributions to cross-strait
negotiations, but listening more carefully, it reminds me of when the Manchu
army was allowed to walk through the Great Wall of China to bring down the Ming
Dynasty.
Ma managed to stop Lien, Wu and Soong from doting on Chen, but at the banquet
given by host Jason Hu, Lien and Wu cheerfully toasted Chen as if there were no
problem. From anti-communism to pro-communist defeatism, the KMT nobility enjoy
themselves while trampling all over Taiwan. Their treachery is unacceptable.
James Wang is a media commentator.
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