For those who have long complained about the seemingly apathetic Taiwanese youth on matters of politics, the past two weeks must have had elements of both surprise and relief, with two large student mobilizations taking place in two cities on two different continents: London and Taipei.
The catalyst in both instances was injustice — the removal, following official complaints by China, of the Republic of China (ROC) national flag at a non-Olympic venue in London, and the creation of a pro-China media monster through the acquisition by the Want Want China Times Group of China Network Systems’ (CNS) cable TV services, and the subsequent threat of lawsuits by a Want Want employee against a student.
Hundreds gathered on Regent Street in London, proudly showing the ROC flag, while about 700 protested in front of the CtiTV building in Taipei, calling for freedom of speech to be respected. In stark contrast to the protests organized by the pan-green camp, where the majority of participants are usually above the age of 50, those two events involved students and young professionals who were educated, connected and angry. They were, in essence, the same type of people who took to the streets earlier this year when two houses were flattened in a suburb of Taipei to make way for an urban renewal project; or those who turned up in large numbers to confront police and contractors when farmland was seized to accommodate large-scale industrial projects.
Issues of justice, rather than abstracts of ethnicity or nationality, are what lights the fire in the belly of Taiwanese youth today. For them, the past is in the past and the issue of who they are has already been settled; what they look to is the future and the uncertainties created by injustice. That is why one can hardly find anyone below the age of 30 at protests against, say, the so-called “1992 consensus,” but thousands will roll up their sleeves when someone’s property is threatened by state rapacity.
All of this occurs at a time when policymaking within the Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) administration appears to have been taken over by an old, conservative wing of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), while moderates in the pan-blue camp have grown largely silent.
Under Ma, the rich and powerful are becoming richer and more powerful, and more often than not, that wealth derives directly from backroom deals with China. Want Want China Times chairman Tsai Eng-meng (蔡衍明), Taiwan’s richest man and a Tiananmen Massacre denier (there are audio tapes to prove it), has amassed great wealth through his dealings with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). He has used his media to target — no, slander — opponents of the CNS takeover, ordinary people who apprehend the excesses of unchecked power and who are concerned about the future of freedom of speech in their country.
Furthermore, those behind-closed-doors deals are struck by former KMT secretaries-general and other elderly figures like Wu Poh-hsiung (吳伯雄) who not only are unaccountable to the public, but also seem to agree with their CCP counterparts that the public has no say in the direction their country should take.
While a few continue to enrich themselves, salaries remain stagnant, jobs are not created and the economy is contracting. On the political side, the Ma government failed to stand up to Chinese suppression of Taiwan in London and once again this week transparently used its influence on the judiciary, this time in Chiayi County, to distract the public from an embarrassing corruption scandal involving a former Executive Yuan secretary-general.
Taiwan’s youth are increasingly paying attention to what is going on around them and they do not like what they see. The point where they say enough is enough, when they realize that cynical old figures are compromising their future, could be at hand. What happens next remains to be seen, but the elderly ones could be in for a surprise.
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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