Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

Anyone who has lived in Taiwan very long quickly sees that October is a month of posturing, irony and anomalies. This year’s October not only met that mark, but was rich in overtones and humor.

Oct. 1 is the National Day of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), formally established in 1949, and so the month always begins with PRC posturing. This October, Chinese president Xi Jinping (習近平) reiterated China’s worn out claims on how it must reunite what really had never been united in the first place.

As backstory, Xi’s Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was founded in 1921, a decade after the 1911 Xinhai revolution that split the Manchu Qing empire and the founding of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). That occurrence was also more than two decades after the Manchus had given “in perpetuity” the part of Taiwan that they controlled to Japan in the 1895 Treaty of Shimonoseki.

The public must be confused about the issue of whether it is appropriate to restart construction of the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant in New Taipei City’s Gongliao District (貢寮).

The site has been sealed up for a long time, and the fuel rods have been shipped overseas. So why is a referendum needed on whether to restart construction of the mothballed plant?

The truth is that the plant has become something of a political ATM. If a political party wants to make it an issue for its own political benefit, it resurrects the debate.