Editorial: The obscenity of pandering to China

Now let's try and work out the difference here.

Protesting for several days in front of the KMT headquarters in March last year, blocking a major traffic artery, driving patients at the nearby National Taiwan University Hospital to distraction with the noise of air horns, smashing up cars and beating up 70-year-old Hsu Li-teh (徐立德) is apparently legal in "free" China. No action was taken against the demonstrators.

Cause as much mayhem around KMT headquarters as you like, especially if it thereby contributes to the party's own palace coup, but woe betide the irresponsible anarchist who seeks to make a political gesture outside the Hilton hotel, as Taiwan Independence Party member Chou Chao-yang (周朝陽) has found out. Chou is at the moment serving a month in jail over a protest in 1998. What Chou actually did was to stand outside the hotel and burn a paper flag.

Unless he was standing a gas station while doing it -- which might merit a charge of reckless endangerment -- which he was not, it is hard to see how this might be considered illegal. It happened, after all, in a city where people are burning large quantities of ghost money both outside and inside buildings every day of the year without running afoul of the law. So Chou's "crime" must have been something else.

We know that protesting without a license, even rioting are no longer crimes in Taipei -- at least, not if you are a member of the KMT. Could that have been Chou's mistake? To be in the wrong party? That was always a possibility in then KMT-ruled Taiwan.

Or has such behavior only ceased to be illegal under the benign custodianship of Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九)? In which case Ma the Merciful could have sought to have the matter dropped.

If what Chou actually did is not regarded as criminal anymore, then his transgression must have something to do with the circumstances in which he did it. Now let's see; what he actually did was to burn a PRC flag in front of the hotel where a Chinese poodle by the name of Su Ge (蘇格) was staying, while visiting Taiwan to discuss the possibility of a trip here by his master, cross-strait "negotiator" Wang Daohan (汪道涵).

So Chou's crime is apparently the heinous one of embarrassing PRC envoys. The anarchist! We are shocked, shocked that anyone in Taiwan could publicly perform any action which might discountenance a Chinese Communist official. That Chou was a little worked up by China's repeated threats to wage war on Taiwan should the Taiwanese continue in their apostasy toward the Greater Chinese empire can hardly justify doing something so monstrous as to cause a low-level Chinese official to lose face on behalf of his government.

Sarcasm aside, we see, alas, another example of Chinese sensitivities coming before the rights of Taiwanese. How many more times are we going to see flags folded, photographs removed, the nation's name obscured and any number of other concessions made to Chinese visitors for reasons of political expediency? It is exactly in such situations that Taiwan should assert itself. If the Chinese don't like what they find here, they needn't come, and this pandering to their sensibilities is shameful.

We don't know what Chou has in mind when he comes out of jail but here's a suggestion. It is about time Taiwan's toilet paper came in colors other than white. The Chinese flag is bright red. What more needs to be said? This is a bathroom commodity whose time has come and should Chou organize its manufacture, we can assure him that, here at the Taipei Times, we would never use anything else.