“Men battle to move up, water flows down” is a Chinese maxim that is used to encourage people to improve themselves. But while water flows downwards because of gravity, men have to overcome the forces that hold them back, resist temptation and possess determination to get ahead.
A society can only improve if its members strive for continuous improvement and excellence. The advancement of moral standards, quality of life, personal ability, academic research and scientific breakthroughs — all of these depend on improvement and excellence. If people do not strive for these goals, a society will start to decay.
Taiwan is a small but densely populated nation where people have a tendency to get carried away with the latest ideas put forward by the government. The country therefore needs a government that can oversee and guide the people to ensure that society continues moving forward, instead of backsliding, because of shortsighted ideas. People that keep falling back will only expedite the decay of a society which, unfortunately, is what is happening in Taiwan now.
There used to be a popular saying that pokes fun at the public ideal of education, which loosely translates as: “Study at National Taiwan University and then head off to the US (來來來, 來台大, 去去去, 去美國).”
While it is a somewhat warped view of things, the saying encouraged Taiwanese youth to gain a solid education, make full use of their abilities and seek a better life. However, somewhere along the way, Taiwanese have fallen into the mindset of making money here in Taiwan and spending it in China.
There is a huge difference in the way Taiwanese are regressing while Chinese are moving up in the world. The number of Chinese students studying in the US has increased dramatically, while the number of Taiwanese students has plummeted. More Chinese students are going to the West, while Taiwanese students are heading to China.
Chinese officials and tourists are traveling to developed Western nations, while officials and tourists from Western countries and Taiwan are visiting the backward state of China.
During the colonial period, Taiwan emulated Japan and developed at a much slower pace than Japan, which was learning things directly from Western nations. It was not until the mid-1960s that Taiwan had the chance to learn directly from the West and take on a more vibrant form of development.
When Taiwan’s economy was starting to take off, it had funds and technology from the West and Japan which it was able to utilize to turn the country around. However, Taiwan has failed to expand on these collaborations to continue improving. Taiwanese businesspeople became satisfied with what they had and only developed an interest in using China’s cheap labor and taking advantage of its shoddy legal system and corrupt government to make money.
China spent a long time emulating the Soviet Union, gained nothing positive from doing so and did not wake up until after the Cold War. When China woke up, it started to learn from the West and moved to attract large amounts of investment funds and technology from these countries to modernize itself.
In stark contrast, President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) ideology has bought about a new trend in Taiwan of learning from a backward China. The government is not trying to improve itself, the public is unaware of what is happening and the nation is blindly moving backwards. For Taiwan, this is a tragic state of affairs.
James Wang is a media commentator.
TRANSLATED BY DREW CAMERON
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan. In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new
If you had a vision of the future where China did not dominate the global car industry, you can kiss those dreams goodbye. That is because US President Donald Trump’s promised 25 percent tariff on auto imports takes an ax to the only bits of the emerging electric vehicle (EV) supply chain that are not already dominated by Beijing. The biggest losers when the levies take effect this week would be Japan and South Korea. They account for one-third of the cars imported into the US, and as much as two-thirds of those imported from outside North America. (Mexico and Canada, while
The military is conducting its annual Han Kuang exercises in phases. The minister of national defense recently said that this year’s scenarios would simulate defending the nation against possible actions the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) might take in an invasion of Taiwan, making the threat of a speculated Chinese invasion in 2027 a heated agenda item again. That year, also referred to as the “Davidson window,” is named after then-US Indo-Pacific Command Admiral Philip Davidson, who in 2021 warned that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) had instructed the PLA to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. Xi in 2017