On May 20, Lai Ching-te was sworn in as President of the Republic of China (Taiwan), bringing global attention to the situation in the Taiwan Strait. In his inaugural speech, Mr. Lai declared that the two sides of the Taiwan Strait “are not subordinate to each other,” prompting the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to immediately retaliate by conducting military exercises in the Taiwan Strait.
Around the same time, in Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan, Kuomintang (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) lawmakers, taking advantage of their majority seats, pushed for parliamentary reforms.
The reform bills aimed to increase the level of legislative oversight of the executive and were criticized by its opponents as opaque and non-transparent.
On the evening of May 28, some 70,000 demonstrators gathered around the Legislative Yuan as the legislature passed all of the amendments to the Legislative Power Law.
Taiwan Strait a Focal Point of US-China Confrontation
Guo Jun, president of the Hong Kong edition of The Epoch Times, said on the “Pinnacle View” program that Mr. Lai is a hardliner in the DPP and had previously said that he would not declare Taiwan’s independence.
Ms. Guo believes that the current international situation in Taiwan has been the most favorable since 1972.
“The most important reason is, of course, that the United States has shifted from reliance on the CCP to outright confrontation with the CCP. However, as Taiwan is becoming increasingly important to both the United States and China, the military threat from the CCP is likely to grow in the future,” Ms. Guo said.
She cited a U.S. Department of Defense report that said the CCP leader Xi Jinping has asked the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to be ready for a military attack on Taiwan by 2027.
Anti-Xi Faction Anxious to See Xi’s Failure
Shi Shan, a senior writer and contributor to The Epoch Times, shared in the show that the CCP’s current situation in the Taiwan Strait is delicate and difficult.“The CCP is not ready, but the international environment in Taiwan is getting better and better. Therefore, for the CCP, launching an attack now is not the right timing, yet not launching an attack can’t be justified [based on its own propaganda]. This is a little embarrassing for the CCP. So this so-called reform bill in the Taiwan Legislative Yuan is a very big deal in Taiwan, and it was reported that more than 100,000 people took to the streets to oppose it. The bill was passed quickly in a short period of time,” Mr. Shi said, implying that the timing of the reform bill is suspicious.
“In fact, Professor Yuan Hongbing predicted in February that the CCP had already hatched a plan to provoke the chaos in Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan,” he continued. “At that time, many people didn’t believe it, and some said that Professor Yuan was making it up. Now, however, events are unfolding exactly as Professor Yuan described, making many people feel uneasy.”
Mr. Yuan, a former law professor at Peking University and a renowned dissident now living in exile in Australia, joined the panel discussion on the “Pinnacle View” TV show remotely.
“On Feb. 6, I was interviewed by Vision Times, in which I revealed a message from a conscientious member in China who is a CCP princeling,” Mr. Yuan said.
Vision Times is an overseas Chinese media outlet that often reports on the CCP’s rights abuses.
“In short, Xi Jinping has instructed the CCP’s United Front Work Department and the Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council to take advantage of the favorable opportunity of the KMT’s majority in Taiwan’s legislature to pass a series of bills called the ‘Five Parliamentary Bills’ in the name of parliamentary reform. The passage of these bills serves at least three purposes.
“The first purpose is to shackle and handcuff the executive power of President Lai’s administration through the legislative power and to reduce the efficiency of the executive branch in Taiwan. The second purpose is to expand the legislative power to include the judicial power, in order to reduce the control or domination of the judicial power in Taiwan by the ruling party. The third objective is to drive a wedge through the KMT in Taiwan’s national power system and in the Legislative Yuan. These three objectives were disclosed in the CCP document I mentioned earlier, and the recent incident in the Taiwan Legislative Yuan is very much in line with the script revealed in that document,” Mr. Yuan said.
He pointed out that the CCP has been wielding its global influence to isolate Taiwan, a free nation, for many years.
“In the past, the CCP has mainly used political, economic, cultural, and diplomatic efforts to stifle Taiwan’s international space for survival. At present, the CCP is attempting to infiltrate Taiwan, and the goal is to bribe a number of prominent commentators, scholars, and media personnel to widely incite people’s feelings of either fear of the CCP or pandering to the CCP by exploiting the freedom of speech in Taiwan,” Mr. Yuan claimed.
He also alleged a widespread anti-war sentiment within the PLA.
In October last year, the CCP formally removed its defense minister, Li Shangfu, after Mr. Li disappeared from public view for two months. According to Mr. Yuan, many high-ranking officials in the PLA’s Rocket Force and Strategic Support Forces were also taken away for investigation, involving more than 170 officers above the rank of major general.
“This is an important case in China, which is now coming to an end,” Mr. Yuan said. “The main reason for this case is not corruption but that these people are so-called two-faced people in their attitude toward Xi Jinping. On the surface, they pretend to agree with Xi Jinping’s strategy of attacking Taiwan, but in reality, they all believe that as long as Taiwan has a firm will to resist, and as long as there is strong support from the international community, it is a suicidal act for the CCP army to attack Taiwan now.”
He also learned from CCP insiders that some influential CCP figures who dislike Xi are trying to incite Xi to attack Taiwan, because they are eager to see Xi meet his own demise when launching the attack.
Xi’s Personality Is Most Risky Factor
Mr. Yuan shared on the show that the CCP insider told him that the Xi administration currently does not plan to launch a large-scale war against Taiwan before the U.S. election.“Xi Jinping’s think tanks have a judgment that this year’s U.S. election, no matter who is elected, is likely to result in a major split in U.S. society like the last U.S. election—political conflict, social division, and ideological division, a relatively long period of ideological turmoil in U.S. society, which the CCP will use as a window to launch a war in Taiwan. Their reasoning is that once this kind of political chaos and ideological conflict occurs in the United States, it is likely to weaken the will and ability of the United States to intervene in the Taiwan Strait War. Therefore, Xi Jinping sees the period between 2025 and 2027 as a window of opportunity to launch the Taiwan Straits War to conquer Taiwan.”
Mr. Shi believes the CCP has misjudged the international situation, especially the free world and democratic societies.
“They always analyze things from their experience as a totalitarian system. For example, they think that a country will definitely be in chaos if there is no leader in the country. In fact, in the United States or in many free worlds, even if there is no leader, everything in the society will go on as usual and continue to function as a free society because it is essentially a bottom-up society. So, even if there is some kind of political chaos in the United States, I think it will not affect its military strength. So it’s actually a huge gamble for the CCP to attack Taiwan at that time,” he said.
Ms. Guo pointed out that Xi and his generation, the group of people born in the 1950s, spent their teenage years during the Cultural Revolution, and their basic mentality is to firmly and emotionally defend their political stance.
“For this group of people, calm, rational, and objective analysis is part of right-wing capitulationism, and their goal is to liberate Taiwan, make the whole world red, control the whole world, and liberate all mankind,“ Ms. Guo said. ”Adolescence is a crucial period for developing logic and rationality, but this group of people lacks basic education and training in these areas. Therefore, they blindly worship Mao Zedong and consider Mao’s schemes and tricks as so-called farsightedness. They admire his gambling personality and his arrogant audacity. We can see that the top echelons of the CCP are now filled with this kind of thinking with Mao’s characteristics. Almost all policies are formulated in such a way that they bypass logical and objective analysis and go straight to an emotional expression of macro-objectives. This kind of gambling mentality is the greatest danger to the future of China, as well as to the future of the world.”
