On Saturday, President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) met with his “old friends” John and Doris Naisbitt in his office. Being a so-called “futurist,” John Naisbitt was expected to predict Taiwan’s trends for the president and Taiwanese people.
Naisbitt likes predicting trends, especially when invited by powerful people to do so. He once wrote that for many years he was plagued by regrets, afraid of missing the most precious opportunities in life, until finally in 1996 “one of the most powerful people in the world, the [then-]president of China, Jiang Zemin [江澤民]” asked him to “tell the story of China.”
Having such a strong desire to curry favor with authoritarian power, Naisbitt would never miss the chance to please the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). His book China’s Megatrends: The 8 Pillars of a New Society did not disappoint the party.
In the book, Naisbitt predicts that China has a bright future because its current political and economic systems are unique and superior to those in Western countries. He displays a tendency to believe everything the party’s top leaders say about China’s future in their speeches, government reports and party propaganda, and he quoted these in his book as the sole source of evidence to support his argument.
The book obviously lacks first-hand materials, in-depth analysis and serious thinking. Academics have said that the book is “merely another type of party propaganda material under the name Naisbitt” and that “in terms of quality it was roughly the same standard as that of the lowest-ranking party cadre.”
Even worse, Naisbitt coined the term “horizontal democracy” to describe China’s authoritarian, power-centralized system. In his book, “horizontal democracy” is one of the “eight pillars” that facilitate the sustainability of the virtually authoritarian country.
Naisbitt eagerly embraces the powerful CCP, praising its “achievements” at every turn and supporting the party’s authoritarian rule with his twisted logic.
For Ma to invite such a person to Taiwan as an honored guest is surely an absurdity. Naisbitt took the opportunity to offer advice on the future and to predict Taiwan’s “megatrends.”
“In the next 10 years, the world will be dominated by the US and China” and “Taiwan should really and truly join the world,” Naisbitt said.
However, with Asia rising and Europe and the US in decline, “joining the world means [Taiwan] making mainland [China] your best friend,” Naisbitt said.
Ignoring the universal values of democracy and human rights, Naisbitt said “nations should now adopt the mentality of operating companies if they want to strengthen their international competitiveness.” In his view, China is a good teacher, but “the Western nations, including the US, are reluctant to learn anything from China because they think they know it all already.”
What does Naisbitt expect the Western nations and Taiwan to learn from China? In his speech in Taipei, he implied that “China’s one-party system has enabled the country to push through economic policies effectively, while Western democracies have become bogged down in political point-scoring by rival parties,” which he likened to a company with two competing boards of directors.
Being an educated citizen from a democratic nation, Naisbitt should be clear about the difference between the public and private sectors, and he must understand what “all political authority belongs to the people” actually means. Despite this, he chose to dissemble and obfuscate when it came to these basic concepts, perhaps because he wants to be or was instructed to be a “propaganda cadre” promoting CCP ideology in Taiwan.
Taiwan is democratic, so people are free to hold the same anti-democratic views as Naisbitt (or the CCP). There is also nothing inherently wrong with Ma striving to “take every chance to improve relations with China” in the non-political realm.
However, Taiwanese should be aware of the implications behind Ma’s statement in his official meeting with Naisbitt that “the political barriers between Taiwan and China are diminishing.”
Was Ma trying to convey to Naisbitt and the CCP that he no longer opposes the authoritarian politics of China? Or perhaps that he intends to gradually reform Taiwan’s polity toward “horizontal democracy” after winning next year’s presidential election to be better able to guide Taiwan in the direction of “China’s megatrends”?
If such educated guesses are true, then Taiwan’s democracy, achieved through the blood and tears of generations of Taiwanese, is in jeopardy.
Zaijun Yuan is a political scientist based in Hong Kong.
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