The KMT wants to revise its party annals and the DPP wants to set up a party school. Suddenly, the ruling party and the biggest opposition party are withdrawing from the arena of short-term power wrangling and turning to an ideological battleground where the fight may go on for centuries. This is worthy of appreciation, but their motives make one skeptical.
A political party that wants to revise its annals deserves encouragement, as does anyone who wants to write an autobiography or memoirs. A party's annals may contain strongly partisan views, but they are not entirely useless for historical research, according to historian Eric Hobsbawm.
What is questionable, however, is the motivation behind the KMT's revision this time, namely to redefine ex-party chairman Lee Teng-hui's (李登輝) status. The director of the party's history department did not mince words, saying the focus of the revision will be on how Lee collaborated with corrupt "black gold" politicians and how the party lost power.
This is merely the KMT carrying out a vendetta under the guise of historical revision. What's even more ludicrous is that the KMT headquarters wants the revision to be completed by the end of June. This means the party's history, which spans several decades (from Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國) to Lee), must be revised within just five months. And yet the party claims that it wants to "respect reality and will not deliberately distort" it. May I ask: Who will believe it? Even the great historian Sima Qian (司馬遷) would be unable to accomplish such a feat if he were alive -- let alone the so-called historians who are working for the KMT.
The people who are writing the party's history now have the temerity to claim that they can finish the revision in five months. What merits and what ability do they have to make such a claim? Apparently they are laughably amateurish. Could a party history written under such a time limit be readable? Could it be believable? Clearly not.
The DPP's `national talent pool'
Next, the DPP wants to set up a party school that it euphemistically calls a "national talent pool." But the school belongs to party headquarters and a DPP fundamentalist has been appointed as the school's president. It certainly is a full-fledged party school, one that is only nominally different from the Chinese Communist Party's Central Party School and the KMT's National Research Institute. They can all be viewed as the "general political warfare bureaus" of their respective parties.
But democratic countries don't need political parties to create a "national talent pool." More than 60 years ago, the scholar Hu Shih (胡適) put his hopes in universities, like the ones in the West, for training the nation's great statesmen, judges, financial and economic experts, thinkers and educators and other leaders.
Today, if Taiwan's leaders come not from the institutions of higher education such as universities, but from party schools like the Ketagalan Academy and the Lee Teng-hui School, wouldn't it be an aberration? How can a country with such education and talent be democratic or modern?
If the DPP really wants to set up a national talent pool, there is much experience it can learn from Europe and the US. Why does it have to set up a party school? Besides, the school is now short of personnel, money and curricula, but it is rushing to start courses in March. Why the rush, one wonders.
Wang Chien-chuang is president of The Journalist magazine.
Translated by Francis Huang
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