Defending Taiwan
Taiwan's vice minister of National Defense said yesterday that Taiwan's military will fight to defend Taiwan regardless of what the cause of an invasion might be.
But it's not as strange as it may sound. Just a few years ago, it would even have been an essential clarification.
It is only five years since the KMT was voted out of government, putting an end to 50 years of KMT rule, 35 of which the party ran a bloody dictatorship supported by the military under Chiang Kai-shek and then his son Chiang Ching-kuo. Not as bloody as some others, but dissidents still fell off buidlings to their deaths, in the middle of the night and without any witnesses, as late as in the mid-80s, when it also sent people to kill Taiwanese citizens in the US (the guy was imprisoned in Taiwan, and after he was released last year, or maybe the year before that, he hit the talk-show circuit for a while), and martial law was only lifted in 1987. In the party-state of the KMT, the army was of course ruled directly by the KMT, which was the state, and still is the world's richest political party because of it.
Now, after China's passage of the Anti-Secession Law, one of the KMT's vice chairmen has led a delegation to China and signed an agreement with the Chinese government, unauthorized by either Taiwan's president, government or legislature, and the KMT chairman is planning another visit, during which he hopes to meet with China's president, once again without authorization from any elected body. The agreement may even be illegal, but that will be decided by the courts: After all, the Taiwanese and Chinese governments never signed a peace agreement after the civil war, and so are technically still at war, which means that the KMT is signing unauthorized agreements dealing with national issues with a rival enemy government.
The KMT is pro-unificationist, and in fact built its whole dictatorship on the claim that they were going to retake the mainland from the communists. They are still pro-unificationist, but no longer believe in some fairy-tale retake of the mainland, which seems to mean that they now have become friends of the Chinese communists, their erstwhile mortal enemy, and see the solution as some kind of undefined, unmentioned union with the CCP (since China is very much a party-state).
This history -- the KMT party-state and the party's close ties with the military, the relative proximity in time to the military-supported party-state dictatorship, the KMT's prounificationism, its perceived and never-denied friendliness with the Chinese communists, and China's continued threats to attack Taiwan (including the deployment of about 700 missiles along its coast towards Taiwan) -- has made the national defense ministry feel that it is necessary to clarify what in other stable democracies is a fact: the national military will defend the nation in case of an attack.