Turn on any TV channel or pick up any newspaper these days and you see images of civilians killed or injured in the Iraq war, with comments and articles insinuating the "injustice" of the US-led attack. You would think that Taiwanese have been overwhelmed by criticism of the government's support for US military action to overthrow and disarm Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. In addition to criticizing US President George W. Bush for starting the war, these editorials and commentaries in pro-China media have used the issue to cast President Chen Shui-bian (
These suggestive articles try to draw similarities between Bush and Chen aside from the fact that they are both presidents. They take the word "war" as the link and the logic quickly spirals into a dangerous fantasy-world. The Chinese threat of war against this nation has nothing to do with the nature of the US-led attack on Iraq, but both refer to "war" and that's enough for schizophrenic pro-China media to create a stir. No wonder, local TV channels and newspapers have, time and again, coupled the horrifying images of casualties in Iraq with criticism against Chen for supporting the US' decision to depose Saddam Hussein violently and thereby tacitly encourage China to take pre-emptive action against Taiwan.
These reports reflect the basic message of the pro-China camp: Look, they say, war is so terrible. Do you really want to follow Chen down the dead-end road of war between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait? And US imperialism is so evil, they drone on. The West invaded our China a century ago and now it's invading Iraq. Why don't the people of Taiwan rise up and express their anger?
The historical experience of Taiwanese over the past century has been very different from that of the pro-unification groups that hail from China. Facing round-the-clock bombardment of propaganda on TV channels and brainwashing in newspapers, many ordinary people have become in fact bewildered. They do not understand the reason for fighting, nor what the fundamental interests that Taiwan has in this war.
This bewilderment keeps them from gaining a realistic picture and it indicates to us that mind games are endemic to much of Taiwan's media. Local media can be considered not so much an instrument of community as it is one of the pro-unification camp thanks to these mind games.
Ultimately the local media landscape reveals the tragedy that most media are controlled by the pro-unification camp. This can be traced back to the KMT's White Terror period, during which the public had such deep fears of participating in politics and public affairs that even local elite chose careers in areas relatively untouched by politics such as science, engineering or commerce. Grinding rural poverty led ambitious natives without China ties to try and leave the agricultural sector, and they were even more likely to seek politically clean careers in areas such as health care and trade.
The majority remain a minority in the nation's cultural, legal, political and mass-media spheres. Far-sighted people have tried to reverse the imbalance, but their efforts have not yielded desirable results because people from Mandarin-speaking families naturally speak eloquent Mandarin. Most TV reporters are still multi-generation immigrants from China because of their perfect accent. This explains why FTV's news channel is a stronghold for the pro-unification voice even though FTV is chaired by DPP Legislator Trong Chai (蔡同榮). How could such a lop-sided media environment reflect the sentiments of the majority?
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