November 6, 2008
By Ashinakhan
(Taipei) Armed police stormed in a record shop nearby the venue of a feast given to Chen Yunlin, the highest-ranking Taiwan affair officer in China and the top negotiator for a new round of cross-strait talks, on Tuesday night and forced it to stop playing the hymn “Ode to Taiwan”, lyrics of which is believed to annoy Chen. The unlawful raid angered protesters outside the feast venue and a conflict soon ensued as police further force the shop to shut down. Several protesters were injured and the shop gate was seriously damaged in the conflict.
The raid was only the latest addition to a series of disputable police action over protesters against cross-strait talks. Dissidents have been questioning that Ma’s pro-China inclination is going unchecked and his unconditional “openness” will result in eventual loss of Taiwan’s sovereignty to China thought talks. The unspoken ban of Taiwan flags within the sight range of Envoy Chen invoked their fears, and several attempts to display national flags in front of Chen were only met by police brutality with very shaky legal ground.
Lien Chan, KMT’s honorary Chairman and the primary promoter of cross-strait talks, hosted an evening feast at Ambassador’s Hotel to Chen after he reached a four-point agreement on direct flights, direct maritime shipping, direct postal service, and cooperation in ensuring food safety with his counterpart, Chiang Ping-kun, chairman of the Strait Exchange Foundation. Several hundreds of protesters, questioning the legality of the agreement and its consequences to damage Taiwan’s sovereignty under its “One China” frame, held a demonstration outside the hotel but were heavily outnumbered and successfully kept away by police guards. Several high profile dissidents were injured as they tried to get into the hotel lobby “for a cup of coffee”.
Sunrise Records, a dealer and distributor specializing in classical music and grassroot music, played “Ode to Taiwan” at its shop gate just in a time when the standoff reached its climax. There were a cheer among the crowd and some protesters danced to the music. The joy lasted less than 20 seconds before a shock troop jumped out of the blockade line and stormed the shop. The troop leader demanded Sunrise Records to turn off the music immediately “because it was so loud that it could even be heard in the hotel.” He also ordered his troop to pull down the shop gate, but did not present any warrant or court order supporting his action.
The raid angered the protesters, and they began to demand the troop to stop illegal actions and retreat. Police troop used baton against the shouting crowd and the shop gate was nearly destroyed in the jostle as protesters attempted to prevent the forced shutdown. Their attempts were futile in face of a outnumbering and much more organized police force.
Li Han-ching, the commander of the shock troop, told local press, “We were just ‘reminding’ them (Sunrise Records) that their neighbors were complaining about their loud music, and they turned it off out of their own judgment.” He also refused to apologize in public as city councilors questioned him about the incident. Ma Ying-jeou, Taiwan’s President, and Wang Cho-chiun, Director-General of National Police Agency, both announced their support for the troop.
Chang Pi, the president of Sunrise Records, decried that the police was not telling the truth. However, she also said that she did not plan to file a suit. Her stock of “Ode to Taiwan” CD was soon depleted the next morning as passionate sympathizers kept coming for it.
A group of lawyers representing the Judicial Reform Foundation, a local NGO promoting judicial human rights, filed a lawsuit against the police department of Taipei on behalf of the victims. Lawmakers from the Democratic Progress Party also held press conference to denounce police brutality.
Cross-strait talks have been in a hiatus for ten years as Lee Teng-hui, Taiwan President at that time, took tougher stance against Beijing. The Ma Ying-jeou regime places the talks on the top of its agenda in hope that tighter links would give local economy a much-needed boost. However, some economists warned about the danger of putting all eggs in one basket. Local political observers also are worried about the “trap effects” if Taiwan does not insist on its sovereignty when engaging China for economic benefits.
China has always seen Taiwan as its “renegade province” and vows for an ultimate reunification, either through peaceful or military means. One the other hand, most residents in Taiwan tends to favor the status quo, i.e. de facto independence, and some of them even call for “nation normalization”, or a de jure independence. However, there are also people calling for unification with China.
Related news can be found at : http://funp.com/push/?tag=%E4%B8%8A%E6%8F%9A%E5%94%B1%E7%89%87&hot&stars=1
(BIG5 Chinese)
Thursday, November 6, 2008
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Viva la Generalissimo!
So they have returned to power, and they are banishing memoirs of Taiwan’s democratization from this hall to revert it to a shrine worshiping the Generalissimo.
If you believe the tides of democratization are irreversible, just look at Taiwan. On March 22, 2008, Ma Ying-jeou, a Harvard-educated politician with the ability of charming the crowd out of their souls with one single smile, won the presidential election with more than 7 million votes from people angry and frustrated with endless scandals marring Chen Shui-bian’s reign. People brought Kuomintang(“KMT”), once notorious with its corruption and one-part rule over China and then Taiwan, back in power in their own will. Technically it was a flawless democratic process, without mass vote-rigging, voter intimidation or other frauds observed. However, it is the same thing as what we saw in the Eastern Europe in late 1990’s to early 2000’s: ex-communist swept through all elections, and the king is back.
One thing is different: ex-communist winners embraced things they had once detested, at least as a disguise to cheer the crowd, but Kuomintang is enshrining things their voters once overthrew.
On August 17, the executive branch of Ma’s Government announced a plan to revert “Taiwan Democracy Memorial Hall” back to “Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall”, calling the renaming by the previous government illegal and should be voided. This monument, sometimes ridiculed as “Shrine of the Hairless One” (Chiang is hairless) and once a favored venue for demonstrations against KMT’s one-party rule, has become a hot spot for partisan conflicts after being remodeled and renamed in 2007 to honor the memory of agelong struggle for democracy by the Taiwanese people. Bloody violence by pro-China protesters during the removal of the old plaque shadowed that historical moment, and debates over the renaming decision continue to widen the rift between supporters of KMT and the pro-independence Democratic Progress Party (“DPP”) in Taiwan.
Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek led KMT from 1928 to 1975 and ruled China from 1928 to1949. After being defeated in the Communist Revolution, he fled to Taiwan and ruled it for another 26 years as the president of “Republic of China” in exile. Chiang imposed in Taiwan the longest period of martial law in modern history and ripped Taiwanese of political rights. More than 140,000 dissidents were either killed or imprisoned under his rule in Taiwan, and KMT enjoyed an unchallenged grip of political and economic powers. After taking into accounts of his deeds in China, Professor R.J. Rummel put him in the sixth place of the “Bloodiest Dictators in the Millenium” list. You may also want to know President Truman’s well-known quote about the Chiangs: “They’re all thieves, every damn one of them.”
Despite his bloody suppression of human rights, Taiwanese seem to have mixed feelings about this dictator. Before the late 1980’s, the KMT-controlled education system kept instilling students with “love for the leader”, and telling them “you are not ready for democracy yet, and dictatorship make this place safer.” Amazingly, such rhetorics have a profound impact till now. Some Taiwanese still believe the Generalissimo did protect Taiwan from Communist China and his policies did make this place stable and prosperous, even though decades ago some of their fathers and uncles never came back after Chiang’s gendarmes knocked on their door at midnight.
As Taiwan’s democratization process was gaining momentum since the 1990’s, ugly facts were being revealed and voices began to pop up everywhere calling for “liberation” of Taiwan from the memory of this dictator. Finally steps were taken as DPP won the presidential election in 2000. Chiang’s 27 secret retreats, featuring prime sceneries but inaccessible by ordinary people, were opened up to all visitors as parks and commercial hotels. Taoyuan International Airport, the largest airport of this country, is no longer named after the Generalissimo, and thousands of Chiang’s statues, once filling up every corner of Taiwan, were tore down and melt. The Memorial Hall seems to be the last battle to get rid of Generalissimo’s shadow.
Hard-core KMT supporters, mainly consisting of refugees from the 1949 Chinese Revolution and their descendents who enjoyed preferential treatments in the “good old days”, were infuriated by a series of “de-Chiang-ization” and gathered together to defend their last stand. Local media, mostly controlled by KMT allies even after DPP came into power, initiated propaganda campaigns denouncing such efforts as “dirty politics maneuvers” to profit from widening partisan rift that destabilize the society. Taipei city mayor, whose father is one of Chiang’s generals, preempted the central government by designating this 27-year-old hall a “historical site”, a status that makes unauthorized alternations unlawful. The KMT-controlled Legislative Yuan (parliament) also boycotted related budgets and legislations to stop the proposed renaming.
War did not end after DPP government devised a way to circumvent parliament’s boycott and renamed this monument in honor of Taiwan’s democratization. Local media kept heating up this event by attaching things like gossips and conspiracy theories to it. As the renaming was successfully tagged as a “DPP’s dirty maneuver” instead of a “public issue”, people soon got tired of it and reasons gave way to partisan emotions in related discussions.
Ma’s decision to restore the Generalissimo’s memorial hall is just a new move by one side, but not a real end to this war. While some Taiwanese may accept Ma’s rhethoric of “Look ahead, but don’t look back”, others still insist that harms done by Chiang have not been justly undone yet. Besides, many Taiwanese also cherish memories of agelong struggle for democratization, and to them the monument is where so many important things happened. Both sides honor conflicting memories in this special monument, and no unilateral move can successfully resolve this deadlock.
While the whole enshrining thing may look ridiculous to outsiders (just imagine if now there would be any German still worshipping Hitler, or any Italian worshipping Mussolini publicly), KMT might have a reason for that. For more than 50 years KMT has successfully established a saga linking Chiang’s image with the “social stability in the good old days”, which, as a prerequisite for economic prosperity, has been one of KMT’s major appeals in every election. Revaluation of Chiang’s era would be a direct challenge to this winning formula. However, as archives are being declassified and academic works are shedding more light on the other side of the past, Chiang’s revaluation is almost a certainty now, making KMT’s insistence look stupid.
So emotional attachment may be one last explanation for that. Those 1949 refugees once placed their hope on the Generalissimo, who gave them so much and kept promising to bring them home in triumph. Even though the false hope for return to glory is gone, their psychological reliance has not. Such reliance, strengthened by fears that dominance by native Taiwanese would mean disaster for 1949 refugees (which did not happen in Chen’s regime, but fear still remains), holds them together against any move to challenge Chiang’s “historical position”.
On the other hands, native Taiwanese, long taught to stay away from politics since the period of White Terror, care more about economic growth for next year than about such “partisan maneuvers”.
Taiwan’s example surely tells a story about how a notorious dictator can come back to posthumous glory after his kingdom is democratized. You can still hear them hail “Viva la Generalissimo!” Yes, the Generalissimo’s ghost is back in Taiwan, smiling at the extravagant banquet his disciples prepared for him.
Thursday, August 14, 2008
One World, One Dream, but No Truth
Soon after China had its best time at the Opening, which it expected billions to watch in awe, stories behind are rendering this proud presentation into a magnificent joke. The Giant Footprints over Beijing surely deserves a place in the Guinness World Records, and the mimed solo by the cute starlet Miaoke Lin is bringing this comedy to another height. What else? Deserted “Olympic Protest Parks” where Beijing shows its hospitality for human right activists, or the “Volunteer Cheerleaders” that fill the seats? Not to mention those empty Olympic promises. Beijing is surely full of wonders, but no truth.
Welcome to China, where everything is possible! Possibility is always the main ingredient of dreams, but what is the “One Dream” mantra they have been chanting? The spectacular Opening, where numerous individual performers are used to mimic display pixels (at fine resolutions!), is nothing more than a reprise of ancient imperial ceremonies where all barbarian tribes come to pay homage to the Heavenly Dynasty (in Chinese: “萬國來朝，四夷賓服”). So exactly whose dream is it? This great country may have many hands, but still only one collective mind that can think and dream. That is why they have only one dream: the dream of nationalism fevers. Dreams of a free Tibet, a free Eastern Turkestan, and an undisturbed Taiwan are simply not cherished here. Dreams of speech freedom, a viable civil society and open elections are not cherished here. Dreams of displaced Darfur refugees are certainly not cherished here either. Only the “One Dream” can be dreamt of, and now all the imperial subjects, and all the envoys from “barbarian tribes” are also chanting about that “One Dream” in Beijing.
And “One World”? Try traveling to rural areas in Hunan, Henan or even Tibet yourself to see if you really find people living in the same world as Beijingers do. “Equality” is a foul language in this country. If you are not impressed with the alerting Gini Coefficient of 46.9, you might want to take a look at the this picture of a little Tibetan girl who kept begging for candies for her friends:
I got this from a forwarded email (please kindly let me know if you are the original owner) with many beautiful pictures of Tibetan children. I am astonished by their poverty, especially when the PRC Government keeps telling us how quick Tibet’s economy has been expanding, and how China conquistadors have improved Tibetans’ life.
Tibetans are too far away and thus is not a good example? OK, try googling for “petitioners’ village” and see what you will find (better google for pictures, so that you can see what it actually looks like). Many Chinese still cherish fictional belief of imperial intervention in local injustice as a final relief (Yes, I really think such belief comes directly from classic novels and theater plays), so wronged people have a natural tendency to flock to Beijing for help. They lived in terrible condition in urban slums, not very far away from the masterpiece Birds’ Nest Stadium and Water Cubic Swimming Gym, spent years on their fruitless petitions and were consistently harassed by policemen and gangsters. Of course, Beijing got rid of such nasties just in time to greet the World in her prime. Now Beijing is one world, while those displaced petitioners live in another.
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