Ang Lee (
Lee's relationship with the US has been as lengthy as that with Taiwan. He worked on Spike Lee's student short feature Joe's Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads in the early 1980s, before eventually finding financing for features back in Taiwan, including Eat Drink Man Woman, which remains one of modern Taiwanese film's most elegant and delightful entries.
Unlike master director Hou Hsiao-hsien (
But the subtexts of his films are no less challenging, if more subtle, than the politics of his country of birth. Lee has said that in Taiwan he felt like an outsider while growing up, a feeling that followed him to the US. Instead, film is his reality.
In his films, this subtle ache of isolation -- the tenuousness of filial piety, social estrangement and distress and the tensions that arise from competing objects of devotion -- is surely informed by his upbringing and the ethnic disjunctures that seem to have left Lee, a Mainlander, non-plussed about the role of politics in life.
Lee's significant contribution to film culture is his ability to get inside the cultures and characters he depicts and inject them with insight and maturity in a way that transcends stereotypes of Asian or Western film. It is an achievement that few who cross this "boundary" can claim; not even Hong Kong director John Woo (吳宇森), despite all of his intelligence and ferocious energy, has been able to look into the eyes of his characters and draw out such complexity.
All in all, Taiwan cannot claim credit for Lee's success, despite the memorable films he made here. Yet Lee's career is a model for all Taiwanese to follow: Embrace the world and all that it offers.
So there is a lesson in Lee's journey for those who care to consider it: Let Taiwanese shed their provincialism and self-doubt and cultivate individuality, talent and passion rather than meekly subject themselves to the agendas of government and political miscreants.
And let them also find comfort among their limitations and scars: Hulk, Lee's remarkable allegory of child abuse and healing, teaches us that there are times when people with dignity who have been horribly mistreated are allowed to become very, very angry before finding some kind of peace with themselves.
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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