Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) devoted a considerable portion of her Double Ten National Day address on Tuesday last week to Taiwan’s military. She gave her comments pride of place in the section of the address on “Safeguarding Taiwan’s Democracy and Freedom.”

In doing so, she seemed to be defining the goal of Taiwan’s defense policy as defending democracy. She praised “our brothers and sisters” in the armed forces saying: “All of you are staunch defenders of Taiwan’s democracy, freedom and way of life.”

There was a time when the term “pro-independence” was considered a synonym for radicals, outdatedness and irrelevance, similar to most people’s image of the pro-unification camp nowadays.

When former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) was in power, the “pro-independence” position was hijacked for reasons of political expediency and so heavily propagated that most people became numb to the issue.