Hardly a week goes by nowadays without farmers, environmentalists, unions and rights activists petitioning the central government over issues of corporate predation upon the land and the individual. While every instance could be looked upon as isolated and unrelated, their frequency in the past two years means that one cannot help but see a trend.
It would be easy to blame President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) administration for all the ills that have befallen the workers in this country or the inhabitants of areas that are to be destroyed to make room for industrial projects. However, the problem is a more fundamental one, one that has deeper roots than the policies of a single administration. The answers and solutions, if ever we find them, will only emerge when people and organizations that purport to fight for freedom and justice in Taiwan themselves stop exploiting those who work for them.
Sometimes this hits so close to home that we don’t even see it.
One need not turn to forced evictions to see what’s going on. In recent years, too many young educated Taiwanese have struggled to find employment with a wage that enables them to raise a family, let alone buy a home. At the same time, entire neighborhoods, with municipal sanction, are facing the prospect of being razed to make room for new residential buildings that, once they are built, will be well beyond the financial reach not only of new workplace entrants, but to the previous residents as well. Far too often, those new buildings remain empty, totems of financial speculation that only the rich can afford.
The growing injustice in Taiwan isn’t simply an abstract idea: There are signs of it all around us, and no matter who it affects — from the young graduates who despair at the pitiful salary offered by their first employer to the farmers whose land is stolen through expropriation — each case is a form of violence against the individual. Although one cannot solely fault the government for this situation, it nevertheless creates the conditions that make it possible for the powerful to exploit the weak.
Those are issues that need to be raised and debated as we head into the legislative and presidential elections in January. Neither party has done this yet.
Whether Ma’s Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is too beholden to autocrats that it can’t reverse course on exploitation remains to be seen. As for the Democratic Progressive Party, it will have to go beyond the usual vapid slogans and clearly articulate an alternative policy for national development that is just and avoids government-sanctioned theft of private property. Call this development with a heart, or a road to modernity minus the bulldozers and police contingents.
The role of China in all this is also something politicians will have to look into. While it is still too early to fully comprehend the impact of the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA), there already is every indication that the so-called “benefits” of the pact have been largely felt by the corporate elite.
As the ECFA is a work in progress, the possibility that this imbalance will be exacerbated cannot be ignored. For one, the benefits could be exploited as “sticks” and “carrots” to reward those who favor it, while punishing those who, for various reasons, don’t.
What is happening in Taiwan isn’t as dramatic as the forced eviction of 1.4 million Chinese for the construction of the Three Gorges Dam. That said, in the aggregate, all the greed-driven injustices perpetrated against Taiwan’s disenfranchised farmers and landowners, workers and young graduates, is no less serious. Injustice isn’t mere statistics. It is a cold, hard reality and it must be stopped lest it continues to spread.
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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