Category: Relations -Sino-Taiwanese

Taiwanese KMT Despot: “Let’s Throw Free Speech Under The Bus”

. . . in order to please Communist China.  From Taiwan's China Post:

. . . ruling Kuomintang (KMT) Deputy Secretary-General Chang Jung-kung, who handles the party's ties with China, warned [the mayor of the southern Taiwanese city of Kaohsiung] of the risks of screening [a film about Chinese Uigher leader, Rebiya Kadeer].

He said the mayor should give top priority to the public interest of her city, and should “think carefully” if the move affects Kaohsiung's [influx of Chinese tourists].

Mr. Deputy Secretary-General, free speech IS the public interest of Kaohsiung.  And Taiwan too, you miserable butt-wipe.

Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better

By Ma-llah, the Compassionate!  No wonder the KMT begrudged the Dalai Lama's granting succor to typhoon survivors — why, that Tibetan outlander was stealing the limelight from their Sultan of Sympathy, their beloved Ayatollah Ying-jeou.  (Holy Keeper of the Sixteen Percent Approval Rating.)

Step aside, Dalai.  Taiwan's Second-Handsomest-Man is out to spread the love.  Sixteen Percenters everywhere can rest assured that the mere appearance of the Ma-ssiah's golden visage will turn those typhoon showers into September flowers.

Ayatollah Ma Ying-jeou prays after Typhoon Morakot

(President Ma Ying-jeou image from the China Post)

(Inquiring minds would like to know, though:  Did the departed here lose their lives because of the storm, or because of SUPREME LEADER Ma Ying-jeou's criminally-inept response to it? * )

*  A relative of mine called me one week after the typoon hit, and asked me why Taiwanese were still trapped up in the mountains.  "Doesn't Taiwan have loads of helicopters to transport troops to the beaches in the event of a Chinese invasion?  It's been a week already — why aren't they USING those?" he asked.

No answer from me.  I was outside the country and internet-less.  Imagine my surprise though, to read last week that Taiwan's Commander-Of-The-Faithful only dispatched ONE rescue chopper the day after the storm . . . and took FOUR DAYS to authorize the use of the big helicopters.

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Taiwan’s Buddhist Clergy Are A Disgrace To Their Religion

No, not all of 'em.  (Duh!)  But the reaction of a number of them to the Dalai Lama's visit last week following Typhoon Morakot left a lot to be desired.  From the Aug 30th edition of the Taipei Times:

  • This is not an appropriate time for the Dalai Lama to come,” said Master Ching Liang (淨良法師), chairman of the Buddhist Association of the Republic of China.

  • Cheng Ming-kun (鄭銘坤), vice chairman of the Jenn Lann Temple (鎮瀾宮) in Taichung County’s Dajia Township (大甲) . . . said that while many local religious groups have been working diligently to help victims, the move “erases local religious groups’ credit.”

  • Fo Guang Shan Monastery (佛光山), a Kaohsiung-based Buddhist monastery that helped many storm victims, declined to comment, while the spokesman for the ­Buddhist Compassionate Relief Tzu Chi Foundation (慈濟), another organization that has been helping victims, could not be reached for comments as of press time.

Granted some of these may be Sino-imperialists in the Chinese Communist Party's pocket, but Taiwan's China Post alluded to another dynamic at work — good old-fashioned religious parochialism:

Buddhists in Taiwan are Mahayanists, not tantric Vajrayana followers. They, along with the Taoist majority, do not think tantric mantras and mudras would bring peace to the dead as well as the living. They are not pleased because they believe their priests can do a much better job than the Dalai, who could have stayed in Dharamsala and said as many masses as he pleased for the people of Taiwan.

Here the Post suggests opposition on the part of the laity where little actually existed, since it turns out that 75% of ordinary Taiwanese supported the Dalai Lama's mission to bring comfort to the survivors of the deceased.  

Still, it stands to reason that the local CLERGY would believe that they could "do a much better job" than an outsider.  Which reminds me of a story:

About a week after returning to the Old Country, an elderly uncle of mine died.  Now, in his will he stipulated that an old fishing buddy of his (who happened to a minister) should be the one to give the service.  These last wishes were complicated however, by the appearance of another minister, the man who apparently took excellent care of my uncle at the hospice.   (I understand that the last few weeks were agonizing, once the cancer began attacking the nerve endings.)  So this minister too, seemed to have good grounds for wanting to say a few words at the funeral.

The two might easily have come to an accomodation had it not been for yet ANOTHER minister.  My uncle lived in a small town, where there was only ONE church of his denomination.  And the head of this church was bound and determined that neither of these two interlopers would be given the opportunity participate in a ceremony on HIS home turf.

This crazy situation was only resolved when the family grew completely disgusted by the local minister's intransigence, and threatened to hold the service in the community center instead of his church.  THAT made the local guy see reason — real fast.

True story, that.  Seems to me that Taiwanese Buddhist clergy (and Christian preacher-men!) bring discredit upon themselves during times of tragedy when the best they can do is act like mutts peeing on fence posts to keep the other dawgs out of their territory.  A quick reminder to clerics of any religion:  When people die and families are grieving, it's not all about YOU.

Grand Ayatollah Ma Ying-jeou Silences Heretic

A while back, Taiwan's China Post took one of its usual swipes at the Dalai Lama, calling him a "one-time theocrat."  True enough, I suppose, but it got me to thinking:  Couldn't the "theocrat" appelation be applied with equal accuracy to Taiwan's current Chinese nationalist president, Ma Ying-jeou?

After all, in November of last year, Ma refused to permit the Dalai Lama into the country for the simple reason that the Tibetan religious figure doesn't kneel at the sacred high altar of Sino-imperialism.  Then last week, when Ma was forced by political reasons to allow the Dalai Lama to visit on a religious mercy mission, Taiwan's Supreme Leader again assumed the role of religious tyrant by issuing a government gag order on the Buddhist pontiff.

Politics and economics should be separate, Ma tirelessly preaches from his pulpit.  But politics and religion?  Not a word from hizzoner on that score . . .

Taiwanese Falun Gong followers — I'd be afraid if I were you right now.  There's no telling how many of your rights Taiwan's self-declared high priest of religious orthodoxy is prepared to sacrifice in the name of enjoying "good relations with Beijing".

If Not Now, When?

So the Dalai Lama left Taiwan on Friday, after a religious mission for the five hundred souls lost in the wake of Typhoon Morakot.

Seemed like a pretty innocuous mission.  The man comes to Taiwan, says a few prayers for the dead, comforts the surviving kin.  Who'd object to that?

Beijing, it goes without saying.  But to outsiders it would appear remarkable that the governing Chinese Nationalist Party of Taiwan ALSO objected to a visit by his Holiness.  Taiwan's China Post had this to say:

But the timing [for the Dalai Lama to come to Taiwan] isn't right for Taiwan, this time around. Taiwan is trying what it can to improve relations with China. It is relying ever more heavily on the other side of the Taiwan Strait for getting out of its current economic downturn and the global financial crisis.

Fortunate it is for the China Post that the KMT recently legalized prostitution in Taiwan.  Now the paper's editors can rent themselves out to the Communist Party nightly — without any fear of ever being arrested!

So my question for the Post is this:  If 500 dead Taiwanese aren't ENOUGH reason for a religious mercy mission from a world-renowned religious figure, what would be?

1000?  10,000?  100,000?

Exactly how many MORE bloated corpses buried in the fetid mud would the China Post and the KMT have liked there to have been before they'd have welcomed the Dalai Lama without reservation?



Former Ag Minister May Not Be As Guilty As People Think

On Tuesday it was revealed that Paul Sun, Taiwan's former Minister of Agriculture, had hired himself out as an unpaid adviser to a Chinese Communist Party agricultural organization.  The response to his conflict of interest was swift and bi-partisanly negative, and rightfully so.  The KMT is going to have to crack down hard on people like Sun, or else they fully deserve the charge of, "Sellout!" every time it's leveled at them.

Sun certainly did himself no favors when speaking in his own defense:

“We shouldn’t see agricultural technology as sensitive material; instead, it should be a public asset. China has large stretches of land and a good plant diversity, and can be seen as an extension of Taiwan’s farmlands,” he said.

About 5,900 Taiwanese farmers or businessmen in the farming industry are in China, Sun said.

“If you view it positively, you can see it as helping Taiwanese farmers become more professional. If you view it negatively, then you can make many criticisms. From the positive side, I feel it is something worth promoting,” he said.

Taiwan’s agriculture should not be shut behind closed doors. Instead, people should open their minds to what is out there, he said.

Here he seems to be saying six thousand Taiwanese farmers in China should be helped at the expense of tens of thousands of Taiwanese farmers back in Taiwan.  And for that, he deserves every bit of criticism that he gets.

However, there is one part of the story that seems to have been overlooked.  After serving as Agriculture Minister, Sun went to work as chairman of Taiwan's Asian Vegetable Research and Development Center (AVRDC), which is a non-profit INTERNATIONAL institution.  Yes, it receives money from Taiwan's national government.  But it also receives money from the Bill Gates foundation and numerous other countries as well.

Now, if the AVRDC was a national institute, this would be an open-and-shut case.  Taiwanese taxpayers contribute to fund the center, and they expect Taiwan's agricultural sector to bear the fruits of whatever research goes on there.

But since it's an international research center, the benefits of its research are supposed to be shared globally.  Its mission statement isn't, "To help Taiwanese farmers," — its mission statement is, "To alleviate poverty and malnutrition in the developing world through the increased production and consumption of safe vegetables."  And in fact, AVRDC has field offices in countries such as Thailand, Tanzania, India, Mali, Uzbekistan, South Korea, Camaroon, Madagasgar, Indonesia, Laos and the Solomon Islands.

There's another conflict-of-interest going on here, that I've just alluded to.  As Agriculture Minister, Sun's job was to strengthen Taiwan's agricultural industry.  But as chairman of AVRDC, his job is to help strengthen OTHER COUNTRIES' farm industries.  Those are two very different sets of hats.  The CEO of Monsanto has every right to quit and pursue his life-long dream of becoming the next Johnny Appleseed.  Monsanto however, has every right to be concerned that its former Chief Executive Officer may be giving away proprietary information.

Same deal applies here.  An investigation should be conducted into Mr. Sun, because during his stint as Ag Minister, he had access to techniques and cultivars developed by national institutions, which were intended to benefit Taiwanese farmers only.  If that's what he gave to China, then he's harmed Taiwan greatly.  But, if he only gave them techniques and cultivars developed by the AVRDC, then he was only doing his job of diseminating the Center's research to the world.

(And, just to reiterate, whatever the outcome of that investigation, he should still be punished for taking a job in the PRC, creating an obvious conflict of interest.)

Tales Of The Gold Monkey

No, not the old TV show.  Turns out the Los Angeles zoo built an enclosure for some golden snub-nosed monkeys from China, only to have the deal go sour.  Now the zoo is left with a 7.4 million dollar boondoggle.

I'm tempted to say that the reason is that American officials blanched when Beijing tried to designate their country, "Chinese L.A."  But the real reason is more prosaic than that:

"[The Chinese] were resentful that federal policy on importing any endangered species required that any money exchanged for that animal had to be used to conserve the habitat and wild population of that species," said David Towne, a Seattle-based consultant who helped broker the original deal.  [emphasis added]

The Chinese certainly have point here.  The zoo was supposed to pay $100,000 a year for the simians, and none of it was supposed to grease the palms of Chinese Communist Party apparatchiks?

Hey, those guys gotta eat too, y'know!

One-China Policy: Simplified vs. Traditional Chinese Characters

Since I don't read Chinese, I don't really have any personal stake in the debate Taiwanese president Ma Ying-jeou started a few days ago about whether Taiwanese should learn the Simplified Chinese characters that are used in China, or whether Chinese should learn the Traditional characters used in Taiwan.

Nonetheless, the fact that the topic is being broached now gives the lie to Ma's claim that his "One-China Trade Market" is an economic issue only.  Because if China truly is Taiwan's economic savior and an agreement is reached, then some sort of linguistic harmonization is going to take place.  Business between the two countries will need to communicate intelligibly with each other.  As foreigners we're all aware of the efforts Taiwanese make to learn English — similar efforts to learn Simplified script may someday also be undertaken.

Without making any value judgments about this, it's clear that the Chinese Nationalist Party's "One-China Trade Market" is not just an economic issue, but a cultural issue as well.  Will the Taiwanese be permitted to have anything to say about a policy which affects these two areas?

Not if the KMT has anything to do with it.  The unwashed proles mustn't be allowed to vote on issues already decided upon by their political betters.

The Simplified vs. Traditional character proposal also finds its origins in the Chinese Nationalist Party's "One-China Educational Market" as well.  Once Taiwanese students begin studying in China, they'll need to be able to write using Simplified characters, while Chinese students in Taiwan will need to be able to read Traditional characters.  And it's dishonest for anyone to claim that this isn't going to have a cultural impact.

Postscript:  An even more dishonest argument that's being made is that opening Taiwan's educational system to Chinese will increase the number of students in Taiwanese universities.

Well, of course the number of CHINESE students in Taiwan will increase, but since Taiwanese students will also leave the country to study in China, the number of TAIWANESE students here will necessarily decrease.

Whether there'll be a net gain or loss is anybody's guess. *  But what's truly maddening is that the same people who loudly trumpet the GAINS from an influx of Chinese students are noticibly quiet when it comes to mentioning the LOSSES from the expected China-bound exit of Taiwanese students.

Which suggests that those in favor of the "One-China Educational Market" aren't really interested in the net result at all, and that they're actually arguing in bad faith . . .

*  Did I say anybody's guess?  Leaving aside the issue of the difference in tuition rates, there was an interesting story recently that the Taiwanese government would like to raise the educational requirements for university entrance.

Of course, no one wants to climb up on a soap box and speak in favor of low educational standards.  But raising entrance requirements will inevitably lock some Taiwanese students out of the Taiwanese university system.

Leaving them with nowhere to go, but less picky universities in the People's Republic of China.  Or as the KMT calls it, "Mother China".

Fetal Position Diplomacy

Passivity is fatal to us. Our
goal is to make the enemy passive.
– Mao Tse-Tung


Looks like Taiwan's Chinese Nationalist Party president Ma Ying-jeou's year-old diplomatic "truce" with China is breaking down.  It was always an unstable affair, based as it was upon narrow Sinocentrism.  The two "interpretations" or "regions" of China will be better off if they both agree not to poach each others' diplomatic allies away from each other, Ma argued.  Both "sides of the Strait" will save heaps of money by not engaging in dollar diplomacy.  It'll be Win-Win.

Perhaps he should have instead asked himself, "But is it Win-Win-WIN?"  Let's grant that Taiwan wins.  And that China wins.  But do Taiwan's diplomatic allies ALSO benefit from an arrangement which (quite frankly) brings them less dough while perpetually denying them the freedom to choose which "China" they can maintain diplomatic relations with?

Pretty damn arrogant, really.  We, Chinese, WE will decide amongst ourselves which incarnation of China you foreign governments will be permitted to deal with.  Whether you like it, or not.

Turns out, some of them don't:

Like Nicaragua, Panama is chomping at the bit to switch diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing.


Fortunately, Joe Hung (Taiwan's very own Fifth Columnist . . . columnist) has a splendid solution:  Curl up and die.

Taipei and Beijing are tacitly agreed that they won't vie against each other to win diplomatic allies.

Any diplomatic sally President Ma makes will have adverse effect[s] on relations between Taipei and Beijing.  China certainly does not want Ma to show the flag around in a very quick succession.

Ma has to remember Beijing's patience will wear thin if he continues to make state visits to several of the 23 states with which Taiwan still maintains diplomatic ties.


And thus did Mao Tse-Tung achieve his goal.

Postscript:  Hung sneers at the "irrationality" of supporters of Taiwanese independence AND run-of-the-mill Republic of China sovereigntists:

. . . it's simply an expression of Taiwan's collective thymos [spiritedness, or desire for recognition] to cheer for President Ma's foreign ventures like those of his predecessor Chen Shui-bian.

Thymos drives people to anger when their worth is not recognized by others.  President Chen made most of the people thymotic.  They wanted their country recognized throughout the world either as the Republic of China or Taiwan.


Spiritedness?  Who needs THAT?

Apathy, spiritlessness, numbness . . . passivity.  That's the rotgut of choice for the purveyors of sell-out and surrender !

Ironically though, we find that Hung drinks from the same thymos bottle as the rest of 'em.  Because the old boy sure got a mite tetchy after Mr. Ma's worth was snubbed by Nicaragua:

Of course, Ma was right in refusing to meet with Ortega.  He couldn't and shouldn't demean himself by begging for a meeting.

[…]

Even if Ortega . . . apologized, Ma shouldn't change his mind and meet him in Managua.

Such a snub as Ortega handed to Ma cannot be tolerated.


Just to put this in perspective:  Daniel Ortega postpones a meeting with Ma for 4 or 5 hours, and Hung calls that intolerable.  Absolutely unforgivable. 

Meanwhile, China aims 1,500 missiles at Taiwan, and where's Hung?  Down on all fours, licking Hu Jintao's boots.

UPDATE (Jul 3/09):  One writer believes Taiwan's diplomacy is on the verge of collapse.

The [two visits Taiwan's president has made to Central America in the past month] have nothing to do with long-term friendship, they are salvage missions to try and fix the damage Ma's attitude has done to Taiwan's relations with its diplomatic partners.


We'll certainly see.