Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

Taiwan’s retired military officers once again made absurd spectacles of themselves by demonstrating their deficient senses of national identity.

Retired lieutenant-general Wu Sz-huai (吳斯懷), along with several other Taiwanese retired military officers, was spotted in the audience at an event in Beijing on Friday last week listening attentively as Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) claimed that Taiwan and China are parts of a single Chinese nation and warned against “separatism.”

Back in the days of Formosa Magazine (美麗島雜誌) and the Kaohsiung Incident, we members of the dangwai (黨外, “outside the party”) opposition movement put ourselves and our families at risk to oppose martial law and the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) one-party rule. We were often in a state of fear and exhaustion. I often jokingly say that it was a good thing that the KMT was anti-communist, because it allowed us to devote our energy to confronting the KMT while it handled the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).