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Taiwan’s president Lai Ching-te has implored the country’s armed forces to shake off its legacy as the army of the Chinese Nationalist party and urgently focus on its mission of defending against an unprecedented threat from China.
Lai addressed instructors, cadets and veterans of the country’s top military school at a celebration of its founding as Whampoa Military Academy in China 100 years ago.
“All instructors and cadets should understand the challenges and mission of the new era,” Lai said. “The biggest challenge is to face the strong rise of China, which is destroying the status quo across the Taiwan Strait and viewing the annexation of Taiwan and the elimination of the Republic of China as its national cause.”
“The highest mission is to bravely shoulder the important responsibility of protecting Taiwan and maintaining peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait,” he added.
Lai’s remarks underscored the new government’s determination to push through reforms of a force widely criticised for its outdated command structure.
But the Taiwanese military’s problems also stem from its ambiguous identity. The force was founded as the National Revolutionary Army in 1924 with support from the Soviet Union, as Sun Yat-sen sought to wrest control of the 13-year-old Republic of China for his Kuomintang, or Nationalist party, from various warlords.
It fled to Taiwan in 1949 after its defeat in the Chinese civil war, having been renamed Republic of China Armed Forces, as it is known today.
The People’s Republic of China has since then claimed Taiwan as part of its territory and has threatened to attack if Taipei refuses to submit to its control indefinitely. Beijing has escalated its intimidation campaign since Lai’s Democratic Progressive party gained power eight years ago, most recently with “punishment” exercises last month after his inauguration, when he pledged to protect Taiwan’s sovereignty.
Although Lai’s predecessor Tsai Ing-wen undertook overhauls including increasing budgets, reforming the reserve force, extending conscription and improving training, the military’s ingrained culture has prevented a more thorough transformation to meet a modern force suited to the country’s acute defence needs.
Many in the military brass continue to reject an identity exclusively focused on Taiwan rather than a greater China, raising doubts over their loyalty in the event of war. Many bases retain memorials to the late Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, and to battles fought defending China against Japan in the 1930s.
The Whampoa Military Academy itself demonstrates that fractured identity. In Guangzhou, at the academy’s founding site, the Communist party held rival celebrations this weekend claiming Whampoa as the common heritage of a China that includes Taiwan. Dozens of nonagenarian ROC Army veterans educated at the academy when it was in China attended the ceremony.
The Global Times, a Communist party tabloid, on Sunday published an interview with Chiu Chih-hsien, head of an association in Taiwan of descendants of Whampoa graduates, who had travelled to China for the event. It quoted Chiu as saying that the DPP was “repulsive” to Whampoa veterans because of its attempts to “de-Sinicise” Taiwan and deny the contributions of graduates in the war against Japan.
Lai, in his address, attempted to balance respect for heritage with a message about the need to move on. After a brief nod to Whampoa veterans’ sacrifices in China, he said: “The nature of the armed forces is continuously transforming with the development of the nation — from a party army to a national army, from a revolutionary force to a professional force, from fighting for the premier to fighting for the country and the people.”
“Without Taiwan, there is no Republic of China,” he added, warning that Taiwan’s military “must not fail to distinguish friend from foe”.
Successive Taiwanese governments have struggled to replace the military’s rigid top-down culture with more flexible command structures that empower operational-level small units, changes that experts have said will be crucial in the event of a conflict with China.
In one demonstration of the changes to come, the Taiwan celebration included a final performance of goose-stepping, a practice most common in authoritarian regimes, and that has come to symbolise the ROC Armed Forces’ outdated culture. Wellington Koo, the new defence minister, has said that goose-stepping will be abolished in favour of training focused on war-fighting skills.
“Tsai did a lot to improve living conditions for soldiers and raise the image of the armed forces, but her efforts failed to reach our military education system,” said Enoch Wu, a former special forces officer and National Security Council official who now runs Forward Alliance, a non-governmental group specialising in civil defence.
“To this very day, our cadets are taught about the ‘Whampoa Spirit’, but what spirit is that? It is the spirit of a Leninist party army. This army was an army that suffered defeat,” Wu added. “What they should be learning about is . . . who and what to fight for — for the nation, for our freedom and democracy.”