"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven." So wrote the poet Wordsworth on his experience of the French Revolution.
Overthrowing a tyranny would tend to put a spring in your step. Yet few of our foreign readers will realize that the same kind of feeling was to be had here in Taiwan at the previous turn of the decade. Spring 1990 was about as revolutionary a moment as bottom-line driven Taiwan is likely to see.
It is hard to convey the electricity of that period to those who were not there. Hou Hsiao-hsien's City of Sadness (
It was hardly surprising that in this ferment of politics and culture the presidential election held that spring was so controversial. The election was the prerogative of a National Assembly, composed of geriatrics elected in China in 1948, popularly known -- along with their legislative counterparts -- as the "old thieves" (
Unlike their ill-starred counterparts in China the year before, however, the protesters had a solid goal: the calling of a National Affairs Conference, a convention to thrash out constitutional change. Also, unlike the Tiananmen demonstrators, part of the political establishment was on their side. Lee Teng-hui (
Ten years on, with another presidential election in the offing, it is instructive to weigh what has changed and what hasn't. Back in 1990, the KMT resembled nothing as much as England's King George IV as described by Shelley: "an old, mad, blind, despised and dying king." Or perhaps the same poet's description of a monarch: "the string that ties the robber's bundle." Yet the KMT is still with us, as rich and corrupt as ever, loading the electoral dice in its favor as ever.
The make-up of Taiwan's representative institutions has changed but the old thieves merely seem to have given way to young thieves -- as the passage of the Gambling Article by the legislature and the term extension by the National Assembly this year both show. The government's preposterous claim to China has been dropped but no other identity for Taiwan and its polity has been clearly asserted. A decade ago, people were wary of China but not seriously afraid. In cultivating the idea that only the KMT can handle China and that somehow it can preserve the status quo forever, the zest of a decade ago to redefine what Taiwan is has collapsed into a defeatism that can be panicked even by Hong Kong's Wen Wei Pao daily.
What is needed is a new resolve to push reform through, to bring around the separation of party and state and, as importantly, party and business; to eradicate money politics; to reinforce judicial independ-ence; and to assert Taiwan's independent sovereignty. Much of the business of spring 1990 remains unfinished. Time to stop being nostalgic, and take action.
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