Editorial: A dangerous liaison

The Central News Agency reported the following yesterday: "New Party lawmaker Elmer Fung (馮滬祥) announced Sunday that he will lead a group of more than 30 retired generals and military experts on a visit to mainland China in June."

Fung, of course, we know well. We are also more than familiar with his ideology -- rabid unificationism -- and his current stature as Beijing's mouthpiece in Taiwan. We also remember quite clearly that while a politically-biased court, inspired by James Soong's (宋楚瑜) determination to root out dissident thought, found President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) -- then legal counsel for the tang wai (黨外) magazine Neo-Formosa -- guilty of libel for suggesting that Fung had plagiarized foreign scholars in his book A Critique of New Marxism, the North American Taiwanese Professors Association produced a 77-page report substantiating the allegations against Fung.

What does this little history lesson tell us? It suggests that Fung is a liar and it shows that Fung was in the past prepared to conspire with the more repressive elements of the murderous martial law regime to prevent Taiwan's democratization. Since Taiwan democratized against his wishes, Fung has warmed to the embrace of the thugs across the Strait. Currently he has become a mouthpiece for Zhang Mingqing (張銘清), the spokeswoman for China's Taiwan Affairs Office.

Fung is not interested in the political wishes of the people of Taiwan. He does not pretend, like Soong, to respect the rights of the people to be masters of their own destiny, while admitting a preference for what that destiny should be. He openly prefers the methods of fascism to democracy, which makes it ironic that he owes his prominence to the 3.5 percent of Taipei City's electorate who cast their votes for him in 1998.

A contempt for democracy, conspiracy with a foreign power that seeks to control Taiwan -- based on nothing more substantial in international law than cultural affinity -- Fung resembles nothing better than a Nazi collaborationist from the 1930s such as Konrad Henlein, the head of the Sudeten German party, Adolph Hitler's chief instrument in subverting Czech democracy and bringing about the Munich Pact. (Readers will have to forgive our frequent references to European politics of that period but China today resembles nothing more closely than a pre-World War II Fascist dictatorship, our point being that the world has been here before and should have learned lessons.)

Let us be clear about this. Fung is the agent of an enemy power, China, that has threatened Taiwan with annihilation unless it capitulates to its terms "soon."

This puts us in a huge ethical dilemma. We have always tried to be a staunch supporter of civil liberties in Taiwan -- God knows they are new and weak enough. But how much liberty should be given to man like Fung to pursue his goals? Is he, for all his welcome in Beijing, a real threat, something festering in Taiwan's body politic, or just a rancid but powerless crackpot? To what extent does the extraordinary access of people like Fung to the media have any connection with the rather bleak defeatism about Taiwan's chances of holding off Chinese aggression that showed itself in so many vox pop interviews following George W. Bush's remarks last week? Is Taiwan being too complacent? Are we, beacons for liberalism that we try to be, being too liberal for our own good? It's happened before, as the late Eduard Benes, president of Czechoslovakia, found out to his cost. Whether Benes should have been tougher against Henlein is an argument for historians that might have valuable lessons for us. Whether the government should be tougher against Fung and his like is a practical question for which there might be no easy answers. But it is surely about time in Taiwan that there was a debate.