Social stigma
I would like to take the opportunity to applaud the sentiment in Friday’s editorial entitled “Rethinking the role of government” (Editorial, Jan. 7, page 8). The author is quite right to be outraged at the attitude taken by the government toward the poor and the disadvantaged.
Whatever the circumstances of their birth, no child deserves the stigma of being implicitly labeled “trash” by the state. It is no different to stigmatizing a child according to race; in neither case does any child deserve such stigma. All children are born innocent and undeserving of the disadvantages inflicted upon them by state-supported prejudice.
Likewise, the continuing plight of farmers in Houlong Township (後龍鎮), Miaoli County, is a disgrace. The dismissal of the right to private property for farmers such as the late Chu Feng Min (朱馮敏), of Dapu Borough, amounts to nothing less than the legalization of theft on condition that it is sanctioned by the seal of the government. Is the inclusion of the right to property in Article 15, Chapter II of the Republic of China’s Constitution meaningful in any way? Surely it is a sad indictment of the legal system that members of the Miaoli County Commission have yet to serve time in jail for what they did to Chu and other farmers.
Yet the two cases highlighted in the editorial merely scratch the surface of a problem that must be understood dialectically.
Childhood disadvantage and later social inequality is entrenched psychologically and culturally, as well as by structural features of the political economy, for example the recurring bouts of unemployment brought about by the credit cycle. Demanding that the central government dole out money to single mothers is not an acceptable answer, for it will do little to erase either the social stigma attached to the children of single mothers or erase the injustice of state-supported privileges for certain professions and classes of people from whence such stigma derives.
Similarly, protests against the construction of an industrial park in Miaoli are misguided while they remain principally tied to the problem of pollution. The “expropriation” of farmland in Miaoli was immoral, not chiefly because of environmental concerns, but because it was theft, i.e. the violation of one of the most basic principles upon which any free society must be predicated. To protest what is happening on environmental grounds amounts to conceding the most vital principle — the integrity of private property — by which we may yet hope to redress the injustices of state-entrenched inequality and, indeed, the problems of pollution.
We must remember that such problems are likely to become worse the longer they are left unchallenged. Any serious reform effort to secure conditions of freedom and prosperity for all in Taiwan must aim to bring about systemic rather than itty-bitty changes to the political economy. We must start with an honest appraisal of the myriad of ways in which the state entrenches privilege and advantage to some at the expense of others and ask ourselves which particular institutions and policies bring about the most harmful systemic effects and consider rational criticism of them.
MICHAEL FAGAN
Tainan
Not so happy birthday
The new year has just begun and I’ve already had it with all this “100 years of the Republic of China (ROC)” hype. I saw Taipei 101’s light show and the “100 ROC” display where the O was a big pink heart. Why are so many organizations and events, such as the recently announced Yilan County Betel Nut Chewing Contest, trying to glom onto this centennial? And what are we celebrating anyway?
A hundred years ago, Sun Yat-sen (孫逸仙) and his anti-Qing cadre were a disorganized mess with nothing more than a slogan to rally around in the pre-World War I atmosphere of political executions, revolutions, warlords and natural disasters, including the Yangtze River flood which killed 100,000 people. Even after the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) was formed, it was so unpopular in its own country that Sun and his cohorts had to flee to Japan. Later, when Sun returned to Guangzhou, he trashed his own constitution and installed himself as generalissimo. Is this man an example of what we want to deify?
Then, when Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) took over the KMT, even he couldn’t prevent ideological splits from rending the party. Following the anti-communist Shanghai massacre of 1927, he was even called a traitor to Sun’s legacy by his own central committee. Later, he flip-flopped under duress and joined the Communists to fight the Japanese, a strategy which was a colossal failure as all three groups went after each other’s throats, contributing to the escalation of misery and suffering as the US and Russian joined the conflict in the run-up to the Chinese Civil War.
Sixty-three years ago, when the KMT’s corrupt economic mismanagement incurred the wrath of the citizens and its huge, well-armed, but inept US-funded army couldn’t put down the Communists, they fled the country to Taiwan, after having almost 3,000 crates of treasures and artifacts shipped the year earlier following the still shell-shocked Japanese government’s agreement to sell out Formosa.
Meanwhile, the people of Taiwan, who had just gotten used to decades of Japanese rule, now had to deal with another colonizing power and learn yet another language, all while facing about 40 years of harsh, corrupt and often brutal martial law. So now, we’re supposed to be celebrating this war-mongering kleptocratic KMT government-in-exile and a carpet-bagger president, who wasn’t even born in Taiwan, trying to whitewash history? Woo-hoo! Happy birthday, ROC!
TORCH PRATT
Yonghe, New Taipei City
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