Taiwan, China, and other things. Recovered from the defunct TypePad platform.
Heh, heh.
I don’t usually bother discussing polls taken in Taiwan, but this statistic was interesting:
…85 percent of [Taiwanese] 20 to 30 year-olds and 80 percent with a university degree or higher education favor independence. [emphasis added]
Gotta remember that number next time Taiwan’s China Post prints an editorial claiming the "rational and educated" within Taiwan prefer the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and its policies of surrender.
It was in all the papers here on Monday, but here’s a link to the Taipei Times’ story. Um, is anybody here even thinking about how well that’s gonna go down in Europe? Because The View from Taiwan reports that France is STILL pressing to supply weapons to the Chinese Communists, and we know that it’s only prevented from doing so because of opposition from the European public.
Yet now some Taiwanese legislators want to throw away their country’s democratic bona fides and all the goodwill that goes along with it by CANING people?
Sounds like some Taiwanese nationalists need another one of Vice-President Annette Lu’s lectures on the value of "soft power".
UPDATE (Mar 21/07): Michael Turton sees this as going nowhere – typical nonsense one should expect from political primary season.
Yeah, I know. Surprise, surprise.
Headline in the China Post: 50,000 people vie for tour guide license to host mainland visitors
Sounds like China Fever. All those folks wanna get in on all those tourist dollars. Nothing wrong with that.
But wait, the China Post forgot to inform us there’s something else explaining the increased number of people taking the tour guide tests. A Taipei Times story discusses expectations of future Chinese tourists, but mentions something else, too:
Relaxed qualification requirements for tour guide licenses led to a record 50,000-plus applicants sitting this year’s tour guide exam, held nationwide at 13 venues on Saturday and yesterday.
[…]
Unlike previous years, where applicants needed a college diploma or to have graduated from high-school with at least one year of experience in the travel industry, this year the candidates could apply for the test so long as they had a high school diploma.
Ah-ha. Econ 201 time. If the price of a commodity goes down, the quantity demanded goes up if all other things are equal. In this case, the price of a tour guide license went down (in the sense that it became easier to apply for the license). So yes, one would expect the number of applicants to increase.
We see now that there are really two factors here driving the increased number of applicants: relaxed license requirements AND expectations of job growth in the tourist industry. The Taipei Times simply gave the reader a more balanced picture of the facts here.
Tough to defend the existence of Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall on moral grounds, so the latest argument is a naked appeal to economic self-interest. From Sunday’s editorial in the China Post:
Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall has become a tourist attraction that’s extremely popular with tourists, especially visitors from mainland China. It contributes immensely to the development of Taiwan’s tourist industry.
The abolition of this historic site would deprive the island of a major tourist attraction and do tremendous harm to the lives of countless businesspeople who rely on this tourist center to make a living.
Making pilgrimages to monuments to authoritarianism is about the LAST thing that subjects of a communist state ought to be doing. If Chinese tourists come to Taiwan, let them visit monuments showing Taiwan’s commitment to democracy instead.
Lenin’s Tomb is a pretty big tourist attraction too, but that’s entirely beside the point. Bury the sonofabitch already.
Kinda cool, and kinda creepy at the same time. But really, people want to take this to court, saying it’s discriminatory? Yeah, well, so’s rap music, but I don’t see old codgers suing over it.
For some time now, I’ve been reflecting on the similar situation that Hungary, Estonia and Taiwan face in removing statues dedicated to communism / authoritarianism, but it took Dr. Keating to actually write about it. Finding myself in such agreement, I had to search pretty hard to find ANYTHING to disagree with:
A side issue of the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial [relative to renaming it] is whether to tear down the walls. A few extra gates could be built to ease access, but taking down the walls will serve no great purpose.
The rationale behind the proposal to tear down the walls was to reflect "democratic openness" in keeping with its new name (the Taiwan Democracy Memorial Hall). This initially seemed to me an exercise in overly esoteric symbolism, but a few days later, I changed my mind. Instead of being a serious suggestion, the proposal should be viewed as a diversion (or perhaps an opening bid in a negotiation). I mean, for days afterward, the big story wasn’t "Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall to be renamed", but "KMT vows to defend memorial walls".
Masterful. And if the memorial IS renamed, President Chen ends up looking magnanimous when he says, "OK, you win. The walls can stay."
Aside from that, there’s something Dr. Keating brought up that I wanted to elaborate a bit more upon:
…above Budapest, the Liberty Statue monument prominently stands on Gellert Hill overlooking the city and the Danube River.
This monument too has received its own rectification — a rectification of inscription.
Originally erected in 1947 by the conquering Russians, it used to bear the hypocritical inscription: "Erected by the Hungarian Nation in memory of the liberating Russian heroes." Some liberation!
The Hungarians quickly realized the destructive and oppressive nature of these heroes. In 1956 they rebelled and were severely put down.
(Liberty Statue in Budapest, Hungary. Image from Academic Programs International.)
Dr. Keating didn’t have space in a single newspaper column to flesh out the expression "severely put down". I’ll retell but a single story that readers might not be familiar with:
When the Red Army rolled into Hungary in 1956, their tanks initially took relatively heavy losses against Molotov cocktails. To prevent this, the Soviets did what anyone pupilled in the ethical school of Marx and Lenin would have done: they simply tied Hungarians to their tanks and used them as human shields against the flaming glass projectiles.
Some liberation, indeed. Reckon I wouldn’t judge too harshly Hungarians if they busted a Red Army statue into a couple hundred pieces after hearing that some petty local magistrate wanted to present it as a token of eternal friendship to the Russians.
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OK, I knew that the name of the Chiang Kai-Shek Airport was initially supposed to be the Taoyuan International Airport, and was only given that name because the dictator died. So in a way, renaming it back to the "Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport" is only restoring it to what it should have been called in the first place.
But I didn’t know that the building of Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall also usurped a previous plan:
In July 1973, ‘Taipei reading’ (volume 67) had an article about the project, ‘Ying-Pien New Community.’ The government originally planned to raise 1500 billion NTD to build a ‘modern business center’ across 62 acre area in Hsin-Yi Road. There would be five 18- to 50-level business buildings, three 24- to 30-level international hotels for tourists and apartments, four department stores, conference hall, world trade center, culture centers, and entertainment facilities. There would be transportation systems between buildings, and moving tracks for pedestrians. In the cover and content of this journal, we can see the scenographs, and all of them are towering glass-covering buildings. This project is full of the imagination of ‘modern and technology advance,’ and it was set to start the development in June, 1974. However, Chiang Kai-Shek died in 1975, and the plan was suddenly changed to use the land for Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall.
(from Chih-Hung Wang, via Global Voices Online)
Mischievous thought: If the name of Taiwan’s main international airport can be restored, then why can’t the original vision for the memorial’s parcel of land be as well? The Chinese Nationalist Party never ceases to claim that Chiang was the sole cause of Taiwan’s economic miracle, so what better monument could there be to such a man than a few 50-story skyscrapers?
…by offering to accept China’s "1992 Consensus", which would surrender Taiwan’s sovereignty to the Communist leviathan in perpetuity.
Thursday’s Taipei Times displayed a front-page photo of the Presidential Office, with a potted plant set in a place formerly reserved for a portrait of Sun Yat-sen, the founder of the Republic of China.
(Photo from the March 15th edition of the Taipei Times)
A day later, an editorial in the China Post read, "DPP’s attempt to cut ties with China will backfire."
Much as I’d like to say they’re all wrong, I can’t. Yes, I know why President Chen, a TAIWANESE nationalist, would wish to remove a symbol of CHINESE nationalism. But replacing a picture of Sun with a PLANT?
That’s a slap in the face. It needlessly mobilizes his political enemies, while antagonizing voters who straddle the fence. When you’re engaged in a struggle with the Chinese Nationalists over the name of the Post Office and Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall, why open another front? Removing the "China" from the titles of the Taiwan’s Post Office and other state institutions is a worthy cause necessary for distinguishing this "China" from the REAL one. And dismantling the cult of Chiang isn’t de-sinification; it’s democratization.
But near as I can tell, Sun Yat-sen, unlike Chiang, never hurt Taiwan. In politics, you have to pick your battles, and I’m sorry to say, I have agree with the China Post when it says that Chen is over-reaching here.
Hope I’m wrong.
UPDATE (MAR 19/07): A few townships controlled by the Taiwan’s Chinese Nationalist Party removed portraits of SITTING President Chen Shui-bian during the height of the anti-Chen protests in September / October 2006.
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I had to read this story twice to fit it all together. In the Taiwanese port city of Kaohsiung, a statue of Chiang Kai-shek was taken down recently. The mayor of the Taiwanese city of Tahsi requested the statue, but he didn’t want it for HIS town. Instead, he hoped to send it as a gift to the village in China where Chiang was born.
So the trucks rumble into Tahsi sometime before 5 in the morning. I’d like to think that the lead driver was a broad-faced teamster smoking a cheap stogie. Driver steps from the cab and says, "We got your Chiang statue for ya. Just sign right here, mac."
One little problem though. The 8.17 meter statue had been broken up.* Into 200 pieces.
Butterfingers.
Meanwhile, the mayor of Tahsi is in Xikou, China. He’s trying to persuade the Chi-coms of Chiang’s village to accept the statue of their former enemy. And apparently, he’s been making progress. So he gets a phone call, telling him that, y’know that statue you were kinda hopin’ to give away as a gift?
Well, there’s been a little complication.
The China Post reports the mayor was "heartbroken". Having lost a set of dinner plates on my last move**, I know exactly how he feels.
* The statue was 8 meters tall? Just how much did the damn thing weigh, anyway? In defense of the teamsters, it must have been one heck of a job even to load up the broken pieces.
** I didn’t, really. I just made that part up.
UPDATE (Mar 20/07): Looks like the statue was only segmented into 79 pieces instead of 200, and my footnoted questions were appropriate:
[The sculptor of the statue said that] the way the bureau removed the statue was correct given the statue’s size and weight.
