At the suggestion of DPP Chairwoman Tsai Ing-wen, the opposition party's Central Executive Committee adopted a resolution banning present and past party and public officials who are DPP members from attending the Changsha forum.

The reasons for the decision include the demonstrated reality that the KMT-CCP party to party platform supercedes Taiwan's democratically elected government in setting down the guiding principles for the development of cross-strait relations and is beyond the monitoring by opposition lawmakers, the news media or Taiwan citizens.

Indeed, the decision by the KMT government to continue the party-to-party channel effectively accepted the authoritarian "game rules" of the CCP dictatorship, which subordinated the government to the party's political guidance and thus marked a tacit agreement to make the "party-to-party" platform "track one" in the cross-strait relationship.

The fact that the KMT-CCP forums are not "purely for the exchange of views" is confirmed by the presence of senior government officials, including three Taiwan deputy ministers for the Government Information Office, the Ministry of Education and the Council of Cultural Affairs supposedly acting "in their personal capacities."

Thanks to the privileged position given to the KMT-CCP forums, the channel between Taiwan's legally authorized Strait Exchange Foundation and its negotiations with Beijing's Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait for the negotiation of concrete agreements is subordinated to the "political guidance" of the party-to-party track, a channel which is naturally dominated by the CCP itself.

The bewilderment expressed by former DPP Hsu Jung-hsu over the DPP's stance shows that she has failed to grasp the genuine nature of the KMT-CCP forum and the decorative role allotted to her and other invited?"green" guests, such as former DPP Hsinchu County mayor Fan Chen-tsung whose "green" credentials are dubious given his support for KMT presidential candidates in the March 2004 and March 2008 elections.

That role is naturally to be both window dressing and a propaganda tool to manifest the magnanimity of the Dec. 31 call by PRC State Chairman and CCP General Secretary Hu Jintao to engage in dialogue with politicians connected, however distant in time and space, with the DPP so long as they abandon advocation of "Taiwan independence."

Indeed, attendance at the KMT-CCP has nothing to do with "dialogue" between the DPP and PRC political parties (including the CCP) or broader civil society on the basis of dignity, parity or substantive meaning or with any refusal by the DPP to communicate directly with Chinese society but is merely a publicity stunt.

Top-down imposition

President Ma, who will take up the KMT chairmanship for the second time in September, began already began to exploit Fan's presence Thursday by claiming "DPP participation" in the KMT-CCP forum and telling his party's delegation to the Changsha forum that he hoped all Taiwan parties can participate in the making of cross-strait policy.

If such an invitation was sincere, it should have been issued at the very beginning of the new president's term in May 2008, just as former president Chen Shui-bian invited all parties to participate in a "bottom-up" formation of a consensus cross-strait policy after he took office in May 2000, an invitation which was rejected out of hand by the KMT and its allied rightist People First Party.

Ma and the restored KMT government never seriously or sincerely entertained the possibility of a "bottom -up" consensus-based policy, but, beginning with his inaugural declaration that the Taiwan people "belong to the Chinese race," have imposed a joint KMT-CCP "one China" framework from the top-down and have left scant room for any genuine input from opposition or Taiwan-centric forces except through votes against KMT candidates in the ballot box or in possible ratifying referendums on Taiwan-PRC agreements.

The last reason why the DPP is correct in banning its party and public officials from attending this weekend's KMT-CCP forum is to avoid being painted as having endorsed the predetermined conclusions of the Changsha meeting that will undoubtedly set in place a monist "one China" framework on cultural and educational policies that will reimpose the myth of an monistic "Chinese culture" over the reality of Taiwan's pluralistic multilingual, multiethnic and multilingual society.

Instead, the forum will certainty ratify proposals, such as the joint drafting of a "standardized" cross-strait Chinese dictionary, designed to reinforce the position shared by both the "Chinese Nationalist Party" and the "Chinese Communist Party" that Taiwan culture "belongs to Chinese culture" just as the Taiwan people "belong to the Chinese race."

No member of the DPP or any Taiwan citizen with a trace of honor or dignity should lend his or her name to such a reactionary and chauvinist project.