By Chris Wang / Staff reporter
Outspoken writer and political analyst Li Ao (李敖) yesterday said he supported the proposal of “one country, two areas (一國兩區),” but was concerned about the “pro-US” President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), who he said had committed “traitorous acts.”
The pro-unification writer told a press conference that Ma is “the most pro-US president in Taiwan’s history” for his lifting of a ban on US beef and his efforts to procure US arms.
Li said he would not call Ma a traitor, but Ma “did commit traitorous acts, by doing everything the US asked him to do.”
“Not even president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) was that obedient to the Americans,” he said.
In terms of the “one country, two areas” proposal, Li said that the “two areas” framework has been written in the Constitution of the Republic of China (ROC) for decades and the initiative was constitutional.
However, Ma and Taiwan independence advocates are “not that much different,” Li said, because “Ma advocates maintaining the so-called status quo, not unification; and independence advocates can only pay lip service to the idea.”
“For those who would claim Taiwan and China are different countries, I would say that they have to revise the Constitution before making those claims,” he said.
For the same reason, the 77-year-old added, he opposed granting a presidential pardon to former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), who is serving a 17-and-a-half-year sentence for corruption, because “any form of amnesty shows disrespect of the law and the victims.”
The former legislator addressed a wide range of issues in the press conference, including his views on Taiwan’s education and Hoklo (commonly called Taiwanese.)
“From a linguistic point of view, there is no such thing as Taiwanese. There is the Minnan language spoken by 56 million people, including the 23 million people on Taiwan,” he said.
Li criticized Taiwan’s history textbooks for containing too much Taiwanese history, saying that Taiwan does not have much history because “there was no written language in ancient Taiwan.”