Tomb-Sweeping Day

The story of Keith Richards snorting his dad’s ashes with coke made the papers here, and just in time for Tomb-Sweeping Day.  Lordy-be.  I can only imagine what Taiwanese make of us Westerners after THAT little show of filial piety.

For those who don’t live in Taiwan, Tomb-Sweeping Day is a holiday set aside to pay obeisance at the tombs of one’s ancestors.  People typically trim away vegetation that has grown over family graves over the course of the year; in subtropical Taiwan this can entail quite a bit of work, particularly for children from urban centers who may’ve never handled a pruner or hedge-trimmer in their entire lives.  A good piece on Tomb-Sweeping Day holiday can be found here.

Joe Hung also wrote an interesting column on modern observances of this holiday.  I was unaware that the holiday used to be unfixed (the 15th Day of the Spring Equinox, so it fell on either Apr 5th or 6th).  It was fixed on Apr 5th by late Taiwanese dictator Chiang Ching-guo in order to honor his father, Chiang Kai-shek, who died on that day.  As part of a recent de-Chiangification campaign, it has been suggested that the holiday become unfixed again.

I don’t know if Tomb-Sweeping Day will be returned to its TRUE Chinese roots and become unfixed again, but I beg to differ with Dr. Hung on one point.  De-Chiangification is NOT de-Sinicization – unless one starts with the proposition that dictatorship is an inherent and essential part of Chinese-ness.


UPDATE:  The Taiwan News reports that Richards was joking about his dad’s ashes.

UPDATE (Apr 7/07):  Good pic of the day’s observances from Friday’s Taipei Times:

Taiwanese at a cemetery burning incense and paying obeisance to their ancestors.

Frankly, I’m a little surprised to see this picture at all.  Last time I showed some Taiwanese friends a couple pictures I’d taken of local tombs (mixed in with other photos – I’m not THAT morbid), they were horrified.  Said the ghosts were going to follow me now.


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The Problem With Lists

Last week a Taiwanese nationalist found Chiang Kai-shek in a book listing the 100 most evil dictators of all time, and said something a bit foolish:

"[Since Chiang is on this list,] from the perspective of foreign academics, Chiang, Mussolini and Hitler were equally cruel."

Um, no.  I could come up with a list of my 100 most favorite foods, and would probably like numbers 79 and 84 equally well.  But I’m reasonably certain that I’d prefer #1 to #84.

Sorry, Chiang may have been bad, but he wasn’t Hitler.  It’s not even close.

Sprucing-Up The Place

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.

Small potted tree in alcove reserved for Sun Yat-sen's portrait at top of stairs in Taiwan's Presidential Office.

(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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Was Chiang Kai-shek Really So Bad?

That was the question the China Post‘s Joe Hung posed in his column on Monday.  Let me begin by stating that it’s entirely fair for Hung to enumerate the beneficial things Chiang did for Taiwan (though at the same time, some of the things he lists are debatable, even refutable).*  And I certainly take his point that historians should endeavor to tell all the facts, not just cherry-pick the ones they happen to like.

But when he says that history isn’t judgment, I confess to being a bit baffled.**  Can we now expect the China Post will stop slamming President Chen Shui-bian’s record?  Because by definition, Chen’s record IS history, isn’t it?  And didn’t Dr. Huang just finish telling us that that’s something we’re not ALLOWED to judge?

By strange coincidence, I ran into a quote during my vacation arguing rather the opposite, by Yale Classics professor Donald Kagan:

Finally, I must explain and defend my use of what has been called "counterfactual history".  Some readers may be troubled by my practice of comparing what happened with what might have happened had individuals or groups of people made different decisions or taken different actions.  I believe that anyone who tries to write history rather than merely chronicle events must consider what might have happened; the only question is how explicitly he reveals what he is doing.  Historians interpret what they recount, which is to say they judge it.  They cannot say that an action was wise or foolish without also saying or implying that it was better or worse than some other action that might have been taken – that, after all, is "counter-factual history".  [emphasis added]  All true historians engage in the practice, with greater or less self-consciousness.  Thucydides, perhaps the greatest of historians, does this on many occasions, as when he makes a judgment of Pericles’ strategy in the Peloponnesian War:  "such abundant grounds had Pericles at the time for his forecast that Athens might quite easily have triumphed in this war over the Peloponnesians alone." (2.65.13; emphasis added [by Kagan])

I think there are important advantages in being so explicit.  A clear statement puts the reader on notice that the assertion in question is a judgment, an interpretation rather than a fact.  It also helps to avoid the excessive power of the fait accompli, making clear that what really occurred was not the inevitable outcome of superhuman forces or of equally determined and equally mysterious forces within the historical actors.  Instead, what happened was the result of decisions made by human beings acting in a world they [did] not fully control.  It suggests that both the decisions and their outcomes could well have been different.  I continue this practice in examining the life of Pericles.

– p xiii-xiv of Donald Kagan’s Pericles of Athens and the Birth of Democracy

I perhaps should have underlined Kagan’s claim that all true historians judge history, whether they’re conscious of it or not.  Because after making a point of admonishing his readers not to judge history, Hung goes on to do exactly that:

The fact, however, is that despite [the 2-28 Massacre and the White Terror], Chiang was a good autocrat…But for [Chiang’s] defense force and American intervention, Taiwan would have been a province of the People’s Republic of China before the end of 1950.

Now, I happen to agree it was A GOOD THING that Chiang helped prevent Taiwan from falling to the communists, but I also recognize that that sentiment is a JUDGMENT.  A judgment with which most Marxists, and more than a few leftists, are liable to disagree.

I’ll close with a story about a friend of mine, a semi-professional videographer.  Fellow went down to 2-28 Memorial Park with an interpreter on February 28th to conduct a few interviews with family members of 2-28 Massacre victims.  He’s hoping to do a documentary on 2-28 sometime, though he apparently has other projects on the front burner right now.  Anyways, instead of a FEW interviews, he was surprised to find that a long line of Taiwanese old-timers began to form, each wanting to tell the wai-guo-ren*** with the camera their story.

Their stories were depressingly similar.  "The KMT army came to my house one night and took my father away, and we never saw him again.  I just want to know the truth of what happened to him."  This my friend heard, over and over.

I wasn’t there, so I don’t know what questions my friend asked of the interviewees.  For that reason, I don’t know if it even occurred to him to ask them whether they thought Chiang Kai-shek was "all that bad".

I’ll venture to say though, that they would have scoffed at the notion that that’s something they shouldn’t be allowed to judge for themselves.


* Particularly amusing is Hung’s statement that Chiang’s KMT controlled runaway inflation.  While it is true that there was high inflation in Taiwan at the end of World War II, inflation increased – not decreased – during the first few years of KMT administration of the island.  The uprising that occurred on February 28, 1947 was in part a reaction against the KMT’s gross economic mismanagement, if not outright thievery.

It takes a bit of nerve for Dr. Hung to praise the KMT for controlling hyperinflation, when in fact it was something they were largely responsible for.

** It should be clear what Hung’s Georgetown professors were driving at.  It is indeed a tricky thing to judge those who have gone before us by our own moral standards.  The ancient Greeks and Romans lived in a different moral universe from our own, and I don’t see much use in spending a lot of time denouncing them for keeping slaves.  The question then, I think, is whether the KMT of Chiang’s time also dwelt in a different moral universe, or whether it was one which more closely resembled our own.

I would argue the latter.  I suspect that if one looked carefully enough, one could still find original records of slave sales in ancient Rome.  Why would anyone conceal such records, when they were a normal part of the world in which they lived?  Contrast that to the KMT’s behavior after 2-28; they concealed evidence, and even attempted to justify their conduct by inventing a cockamamie story about there being 100,000 Japanese troops hiding in the Taiwanese mountains waiting – waiting! – to join forces with the Taiwanese rebels. [note to self: find the link for this later]

100,000 Japanese troops hiding out in the Taiwanese mountains.  In 1947.  Riiight.

In the world of law, people who commit crimes sometimes try to plea criminal insanity.  "I didn’t know what I was doing – I didn’t know what I was doing was WRONG."  But such a plea is usually not taken very seriously if it can be proven that the suspect tried to lie or conceal evidence after the fact.

Maybe that’s because the act of hiding evidence is not usually associated with men who are innocent.

*** Mandarin for "foreigner"


UPDATE (Mar 27/07):  A good Johnny Neihu piece mostly devoted to this topic.  He expresses astonishment that Chiang could not have known what his subordinates were doing in Taiwan around the time of the 2/28 Massacre:

Unaware! Chiang was a control freak who distrusted his subordinates so deeply that he countermanded his generals mid-battle. At one point he held 82 government posts simultaneously, including chief of the government, army and party, plus — rather bizarrely, the presidencies of the Boy Scouts and National Glider Association. To believe that he could have been "unaware of conditions on Taiwan" is pushing it just a little.

I didn’t know that.  Though Neihu’s list DID jog my memory about something else – that Chiang’s army was based on Leninist lines, with each unit having both a military and a POLITICAL officer.  The job of the latter was to spy on the former, to make certain he was loyal.  If it looked like the military officer might be mutinous, the political officer was authorized to put a bullet in his head.

It’s therefore hard to imagine Chiang not being aware of the situation in Taiwan with all of those political officers floating around, each one of them regularly reporting back home.

Acts Of Brutality

Well, there goes THAT promise.  The one where I was going to wait a few days before commenting on current events here in Taiwan.  Let’s just say the devil made me do it.

Actually, it was the China Post, and its claim yesterday that changing the airport’s name from Chiang Kai-Shek to Taiwan Taoyuan International was "a show of brutal power".

Somebody call the International Criminal Court.  President "Snidely Whiplash" Chen just renamed an airport.  Why, this is the greatest injustice in the history of the world!

Cost

The China Post‘s first objection was the expense.  Twenty one million NT dollars ($640,000 US), give or take.  That, and the move did nothing to improve the economy.

Which isn’t bad as arguments go.  It’s just that I wonder if someone could produce for me an editorial by that paper denouncing the KMT’s renaming of Taiwanese streets, neighborhoods and mountains back in the late ’40s.  A great many of THOSE had Japanese names prior to retrocession, and all of them were given Chinese names afterwards.

In the process, I daresay the KMT spent a whole lot more than $21 million NT.  And on top of that, post-war Taiwan was in a far poorer position to afford that kind of money than it is today.

So I ask you: Did any of the KMT’s more expensive name changes do anything to improve Taiwan’s economy back then?  If they didn’t, where was the China Post‘s outrage?

Cutting the cord

Even more absurd was this statement:

"The name change of Chiang Kai-shek International Airport is but the latest example of [President] Chen’s…all out efforts to cut the umbilical cord between China and Taiwan."

Maybe there are some linguists out there who could help me out a little here.  Isn’t the word "Taoyuan" Chinese, or does it originate from some other language, like Swahili or something?  Pray tell, how does an airport name change from Chiang Kai-shek (a Chinese PERSON) to Taiwan Taoyuan (a Chinese PLACE*) move Taiwan any further from China?  They’re still both Chinese names, or am I missing something?

It’s a bloody Cultural Revolution, is what it is!**

Next, the China Post makes mountains out of molehills.  Renaming airports is just like the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and will end up just as badly.  President Chen and Chairman Mao are the same, both denouncing and destroying people.

It seems more than a little ironic that on the same page as this bit of hysterical hyperbole was a column about the REAL Cultural Revolution.  You know, the one where 11 year-old kids had to denounce their parents after the Red Guards killed them.  Re-education camps, that sort of thing.

Try as I might, I found nothing in that column about the survivors objecting to any airport name changes Mao might have made at the time.  Though I’m sure the ones he actually DID make must have increased their sufferings immeasurably.

Actually, when you think about it, Chiang’s wholesale renaming of Taiwanese place names and his White Terror period resembles Mao’s Cultural Revolution far more than anything that Chen’s done.  Despite that however, the China Post continues to hail Chiang as a "symbol of the Chinese nation and a towering figure in contemporary Chinese history".

As for Chen?  Why, six years in office, and he STILL hasn’t killed or imprisoned anyone yet.

Amateur!

A Rose by any other Name, yada yada

The paper closes with philosophical food for thought, asking us, "What’s in a name?  A rose smells as sweet if called by any other name."

Which of course, is a testable claim if ever I saw one.  Perhaps instead of "Taiwan Taoyuan", the airport should have been named in honor of another "towering figure" in contemporary Taiwanese and Chinese history:

Hideki Tojo (Prime Minister of Japan 1941-1944)


* Please, no objections that Taoyuan is Taiwanese and not Chinese.  There’s at least one "Taoyuan" township in northeast China.

** This heading sounds a lot better when read aloud in a Cockney accent.


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Feb 28. On The Other Hand…

A day after writing my post February 28, it dawned on me that there was another way of thinking about The China Post‘s editorial on Taiwan’s infamous February 28 Massacre which was was a bit more sympathetic.  My earlier post was predicated on the assumption that The China Post is a KMT newspaper.  However, if one supposes that it’s actually a mainlander paper, then one can view what they wrote in rather different terms.

To start with, a quick background:

The population of Taiwan is composed of four major groups: Hoklos, Hakkas, mainlanders and aborigines.  About 70% of the population are Hoklo – descendants of southern Chinese who migrated to Taiwan four or five hundred years ago.  The feelings that this group has towards China are ambivalent, sometimes hostile.  Another 10% are Hakkas, who arrived from the mainland about three or four hundred years ago.  Roughly 20% are "mainlanders" – immigrants from China (or their descendants) who arrived in Taiwan after the KMT was defeated on the mainland.  And finally, about 2% are aborigines related to Pacific Islanders.  Numerically, economically and politically, aborigines are the least influential of the four groups.

With that explained, it is now possible to view the February 28 Massacre through two different lenses.  On the one hand, it can be seen as a political conflict between the KMT party and the native Taiwanese.  But on the other, it can be interpreted as an ethnic conflict between Hoklos and mainlanders.

The dangerous thing about thinking about 228 as an ethnic conflict is that doing so threatens to create rancor among ethnic groups, and may make future inter-ethnic conflict more likely.  That of course is in no ones interest, least of all minority mainlanders.  Wide-scale bitterness towards a political party can always be remedied by closing up shop or by the party renaming itself, which is what communist parties in the Eastern Bloc did after 1989.  But your ethnicity is your ethnicity until the day you die.  Hence The China Post‘s perfectly valid desire, as a mainlander paper, to ease hostility towards mainlanders.

Of course, The China Post is both a KMT AND a mainlander paper, so the analyses in BOTH this post and the previous post are partly true.  My chief objection to The China Post‘s editorial was its suggestion that the Taiwanese should not only bury the hatchet, but sweep all their questions under the rug as well.  It seems to me that if I were a mainlander, I wouldn’t want people to stop asking questions about the 228 Massacre.  Instead, I would want to do all that I could to direct the blame away from mainlanders per se and onto the KMT of old, along with its former leader, now long dead.

But because The China Post is also a KMT newspaper, this is something we will never see.

February 28

It’s not just a date in Taiwan, but a national holiday.  The day commemorates the 1947 massacre of 27,000 Taiwanese by KMT troops from China, which followed a failed revolt instigated by the KMT’s rapacious occupational policies.  It’s always an uncomfortable time for the capitulationist KMT party, which still wields considerable influence in Taiwan and indeed holds a majority in the Taiwanese legislature.

Interesting then, how the English-language pro-KMT China Post tries to paper over the massacre:

As a matter of fact, it is not important to find out the chief culprit. He may be Gen. Chen Yi, the administrator-general of Taiwan from 1945 to 1947. He may be Keh Ching-en, Chen’s chief of staff. He may be Maj. Gen. Liu Yu-ching, the commander of an infantry division sent to Taiwan from China to "suppress" what was considered a rebellion. He may be Chiang Kai-shek, the head of state, as [a new] special report charges. The fact is that they are all dead, and it’s of no practical use to blame any of them, unless the writers of the [latest] report and the man who commissioned it had some ulterior motive.

Just who exactly does the China Post think they’re kidding?  Of course it matters whether Chiang Kai Shek, former dictator of Taiwan, was responsible for the February 28 Massacre.  It matters a great deal whether Chiang Kai Shek was a decent leader who simply made an error in judgement in appointing a bad governor to administer Taiwan, or whether he was chief architect of an atrocity.  If the former is true, then he deserves our sympathy.  If the latter, his portrait should immediately be removed from Taiwan’s currency, public schools and government offices.  Mass murderers do not merit statues in public places, nor should roads or buildings be named in their honor.  There is no Adolf Hitler International Airport in Germany, for obvious reasons.  (And let me be clear: Chiang Kai Shek was no Hitler, but 27,000 people winding up murdered isn’t small potatoes, either.)  If the Generalissimo was behind the massacre, then I can’t for the life of me see why there should still be a Chiang Kai Shek International Airport.

The China Post‘s editorial goes on:

The [new] report is supposed to be a result of historical research. The writers are all historians, one of whom heads the Academia Historica. It seems that they forget what history is. History is understanding. History is a dialogue between the past and the present. History does not pass judgment. History is what notable events historians record just as Leopold von Ranke says "wie eigentlich gewesen (as is truly seen)."

What blather is this?  "History does not pass judgement"?  Of course it does!  It’s history’s job to tell us who’s responsible for what.  What did Nixon know, and when did he know it?  Some historian somewhere positively SALIVATES over the possibility that he’ll be the one who finds the memo that definitively answers that question.  Regarding the matter of World War I, historians initially assigned the lion’s share of the blame to the Central Powers.  Twenty or thirty years later, revisionist historians found evidence that the war wasn’t caused by evil intent, but by a series of misunderstandings and tragic blunders.  And about twenty years after that, the counter-revisionists found new evidence that once more pointed to prior German militarism as the war’s prime motivator.

And so it goes.  Future evidence will be found to strengthen the claims of one side or another, for the study of history never ends.  But the China Post‘s point that history is "a dialogue between past and present" eludes me.  Yes, history can speak to me, at least in a metaphorical sense.  And yes, people of today can ask questions about the past that perhaps never occurred to those who came before us.  But precisely how does claiming that history is a dialogue between past and present invalidate the latest study regarding Chiang Kai Shek’s culpability?

If anything, this claim is an unintended DEFENSE of the motives of the authors of the study.  For it is THEY who are engaged in dialogue with the past, asking tough questions – questions that were forbidden during the dark days under dictatorship.

There is then the obligatory attack on Taiwanese President Chen Shway-bian:

President Chen Shui-bian spoke at a meeting to mark the publication of the special report. He cited Chiang Kai-shek as the chief culprit. Is he one of those few people wishing to know who masterminded the massacre? Is it part of his hate-China campaign?

First, the China Post implies that few Taiwanese are interested in knowing the truth regarding the massacre.  I have no reason to know whether this is true or not.  But even if it is, how does it invalidate the question?  Discovery of the truth, like discovery in general, is always pioneered by the few.  Galileo was one of "those few wishing to know" about the heliocentric solar system.  Why should scorn be heaped upon Galileo for wanting to know what most others were too busy or uninterested in learning?

The statement about Chen hating China is one of the reasons why I’ve avoided using the term, "pro-China" to describe the KMT and its political allies.  For if one faction is pro-, then it’s natural for most to assume that the other side must be anti-.  At that point, it’s too easy to characterize the "anti-China" parties as haters.

But seekers of Taiwanese independence are not necessarily China haters, any more so than young adults moving away from home are haters of their parents.  It’s possible to like China (or ones parents) without wanting to live under the same roof as them.

The China Post feels that the next point is important, for it’s mentioned in Joe Hung’s column as well:

The people of Taiwan are not hateful people. Nor are they vengeful people. They know hatred makes everybody unhappy.

It’s indeed proper to point out that the Taiwanese people have not been hateful or vengeful, and have not visited revenge upon Chiang Kai Shek’s descendants.  For Taiwan’s former dictator has been dead many years, and whatever his responsibility for the 228 Massacre was, his grandchildren are blameless of the crime.*

But the implication here is not that the Taiwanese should be congratulated for the extraordinary decency they’ve shown to the Chiang family, but that those asking questions should be condemned for bringing up painful periods of history.  Let sleeping dogs lie; don’t threaten the peace of Taiwan.  Murderers of 27,000 people mustn’t be blamed, for blame is something to be reserved for those who ENQUIRE about the guilt or innocence of historical figures.

Finally, the China Post closes with a plea for forgiveness:

In fact, they believe the feud between islanders and mainlanders that the February 28 Incident begot was disarmed when President Lee Teng-hui proclaimed Peace Memorial Day in 1998. He apologized for the massacre on behalf of his Kuomintang government.

The massacre should not be condoned, but what is needed is forgiveness, which does not seem to be included in the dictionary of President Chen and those who wanted to publish the special report.

A few points here.  As a pro-KMT paper, it’s in the China Post‘s interest to argue in favor of forgiveness for the KMT.  Let’s face it:  it’s a tough job politically to get people’s votes after you’ve massacred their grandparents.  People don’t usually forget little things like that.

This doesn’t mean that the China Post is necessarily wrong in asking people to move on; it just means that they’re not a disinterested party in the discussion.  At the same time though, one should note that the China Post has no trouble demanding additional Japanese apologies for World War II, yet reflexively shrinks from calling for KMT apologies for the 228 Massacre.  Former KMT leader Lee Teng-hui (whom the China Post openly despises) apologized ONCE they say, and that ought to be good enough for everybody**.

One last point, a point about forgiveness.  Christians might read and be sympathetic to the China Post‘s calls for forgiveness, because it’s what their religion instructs them to do.  Sometimes I get the sense that in America this is given a bit too freely, as illustrated by the parents of a school shooting victim I once saw on TV, who tearfully stated in front of the camera that they didn’t hate the perpetrator, and that they forgave him.

That interview was conducted on the same day their son was murdered.

The same freakin’ day.  I’m sorry, that’s not godly; that’s downright creepy.

I’ve since become slightly familiar with the Jewish attitude towards forgiveness, which is a little more grudging than that of Christians.  Jews too, believe that forgiveness is an imperative, but that the perpetrator must first apologize, and then promise not to repeat the transgression.  Only then, can they ask forgiveness from the victim.  At that point, only the victim – not his friends, not his family, not even God Himself – can grant that forgiveness.

It logically follows from this that murder is perhaps the one truly unforgivable sin. 

Why?

It is unforgivable because only the victim can grant forgiveness.  But once murdered, the victim is NO LONGER ALIVE to offer that forgiveness. 

Agree with that approach or not, it’s something to think about the next time some huckster comes by opportunistically demanding from you forgiveness on the cheap.


* The Chiang family may be blameless for the crimes of Chiang Kai Shek, but they are not above using the force of the law to bludgeon those who would learn the truth.  The editorial also states that John Chiang has mounted a lawsuit against academics who would dare to look at the historical record and suggest that his grandfather may have fallen somewhere short of sainthood.  Perhaps Mr. Chiang should be reminded that the study of history should be conducted using reason, research and argumentation, rather than bailiffs, judges and 154 million dollar libel suits.

** This brings to mind a Finnish joke I once read in Ann Landers or Dear Abby.  A woman asks her husband of twenty years why he never says, "I love you."  The man replies, "I told you that the day we were married.  Why should I have to repeat myself?"


UPDATE (Mar 4/06):  The Taipei Times had an account the February 28 commemmoration, along with KMT chairman Ma Ying-jeou’s appearance at same:

Ma, who spoke in broken Hoklo, was heckled by the audience…

He spoke in Hoklo (the native Taiwanese language), rather than Mandarin?  Wonder how his Hoklo compares to the pandas?

OK, cheap shot.  Anyways, the hecklers called the capitulationist chairman a "slave of China", and shouted, "Long live the Republic of Taiwan."

As Rodney Dangerfield used to say, "Tough crowd, tough crowd."

A Trip to the Past

Anyone out there interested in the political wrangling over a flood prevention bill here in Taiwan?

Flood prevention bill

No, didn’t think so.

Since it’s such a slow news day,  I thought I would feature kind of a sad story about a missed opportunity that was outlined in Sunday’s Taipei Times.  Back in the early ’70s, the Republic of China (Taiwan) still held the seat reserved for "China" on the UN Security Council.  It became clear to everyone except the Taiwanese government that the ROC would lose its seat to the People’s Republic of China.  While there were many who wanted dual UN recognition for the PRC and the ROC, Chiang Kai-Shek was set against it.  He was certain that the ROC would be able to cling to its seat.

The rest is history.  Taiwan lost that security council seat, and because of the obstinancy of an aged dictator, wasn’t even given the consolation prize of a General Assembly seat.  For the last 15 years or so, newly-democratic Taiwan has gone to the UN, cap-in-hand, asking for the seat that it could have had in 1971.

Each time, its request is rebuffed.  And the chance that it was once given may never come again.

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2005/10/23/2003277026