A group called Ethnic Equality Action Alliance has suddenly appeared on Taiwan's political landscape. It was allegedly established on Monday by almost 100 people from cultural and academic circles and from social movements.
Representative figures from this group immediately launched an attack on the pan-green camp, accusing it of fomenting ethnic hostility more frequently than the pan-blue camp does. They said with a straight face that stronger ethnic groups are more inclined to bully weaker groups and to manipulate ethnic issues.
Such shallow discourse might deceive those who do not know Taiwan's history into believing that the ethnic Taiwanese and Hakka peoples, which together account for 85 percent of Taiwan's population, are strong ethnic groups that exercise control over government resources and state power, and that these groups have a tendency to manipulate ethnic sentiments. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Let's begin with Taipei City. Without the support of the majority ethnic Taiwanese and Hakka peoples, how could Mayor Ma Ying-jeou (
If politicians from the Democratic Progressive Party and Taiwan Solidarity Union were manipulators of ethnic sentiment, neither Lien Chan (
The fact that the ethnic Taiwanese and Hakka peoples have no strong ethnic consciousness couldn't be more obvious. To the contrary, the majority ethnic Taiwanese people suffered ruthless political suppression in the past. Soon after arriving in Taiwan, Chiang Kai-shek's (
For example, the KMT government deliberately favored the Hakka people, Taiwan's second-largest ethnic group, by recruiting large numbers of Hakkas to work in the rail and postal services, thereby crowding out the ethnic Taiwanese people who had worked in those services since the Japanese era.
This KMT action is also one of the primary reasons that Taoyuan, Hsinchu and Miaoli counties, which have large concentrations of Hakka people, remain pro-blue to this day.
The KMT's manipulation of ethnicity also extended to the civil service exams. Until the mid-1980s, quota guarantees were given to mainlanders taking the exams. The majority Taiwanese had to put up with such discrimination. This is also why a majority of government employees are pro-blue today.
It is obvious which political party has a history of manipulating ethnic issues to gain political benefit. The examples mentioned above are only the tip of the iceberg.
With election time upon us, the pan-blue camp is gathering pro-unification people, along with some liberals who do not understand the pan-blues' political motives, to put on hypocritical moral masks and help block the Taiwanese pesople from settling accounts -- so that the misdeeds committed by the pan-blue camp in the past do not come back to harm the pan-blues in today's democratic Taiwan.
This is why we hear thieves accusing others of theft at election time. This is far from being a real call to conscience.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁) has caused havoc with his attempts to overturn the democratic and constitutional order in the legislature. If we look at this devolution from the context of a transition to democracy from authoritarianism in a culturally Chinese sense — that of zhonghua (中華) — then we are playing witness to a servile spirit from a millennia-old form of totalitarianism that is intent on damaging the nation’s hard-won democracy. This servile spirit is ingrained in Chinese culture. About a century ago, Chinese satirist and author Lu Xun (魯迅) saw through the servile nature of
In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.” Moreover, the two authors observe that those who denounce such legal threats to democracy are often “dismissed as exaggerating or
Monday was the 37th anniversary of former president Chiang Ching-kuo’s (蔣經國) death. Chiang — a son of former president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), who had implemented party-state rule and martial law in Taiwan — has a complicated legacy. Whether one looks at his time in power in a positive or negative light depends very much on who they are, and what their relationship with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is. Although toward the end of his life Chiang Ching-kuo lifted martial law and steered Taiwan onto the path of democratization, these changes were forced upon him by internal and external pressures,
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus in the Legislative Yuan has made an internal decision to freeze NT$1.8 billion (US$54.7 million) of the indigenous submarine project’s NT$2 billion budget. This means that up to 90 percent of the budget cannot be utilized. It would only be accessible if the legislature agrees to lift the freeze sometime in the future. However, for Taiwan to construct its own submarines, it must rely on foreign support for several key pieces of equipment and technology. These foreign supporters would also be forced to endure significant pressure, infiltration and influence from Beijing. In other words,
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