Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

On Monday last week, Taiwan Democracy Watch released the results of a poll on the top 10 democracy-related events, which showed that the primary concern among those polled was the continued threat to freedom of expression. The results also contained a list of five influential factors on democracy and third on this list was the “China factor.”

This deserves further exploration.

Recently, the perennial question of whether Chunghwa Telecom will renew New Tang Dynasty Asia Pacific Television’s (NTDTV) broadcasting contract has once more hit the headlines, suggesting that the decision to renew is more than a simply commercial one.

In 1871, 142 years ago, 54 sailors from the Ryukyu Kingdom were shipwrecked on the southern tip of Taiwan and beheaded by Aborigines. Japan took the matter up with the Qing court in China, on the pretext of wanting to protect the civilians of the Ryukyu Kingdom. The Manchu government in Beijing had little experience with international affairs and agreed to allow the Japanese to launch a punitive expedition to Taiwan to “discipline the unsubjugated foreigners” in retaliation for the killings.