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A friend of mine overheard this remark while listening to two young women on a bus in Taipei some time after the 2000 presidential election. The tone of that remark was more of contempt than of despair or regret.
This may anger people from southern Taiwan, but it won't surprise them. They know very clearly where the prejudices of some Taipei people came from.
During the authoritarian era, Taipei hogged the biggest portion of political and economic resources merely due to the need for "stability of the core leadership." However, after the political strongmen departed and Taiwan began to have a democratic awakening, the massive gaps between cities and the countryside, northern and southern Taiwan, or western and eastern Taiwan have reinforced both the latent holier-than-thou arrogance of Taipei people and the "center" and "fringe" statuses of Taipei and other cities and counties.
From daily language usage, to the proportion and angle of media coverage, to the tendencies for partisan support during elections, these people always find some standards for distinguishing themselves from people who are "different" from them. Such standards frequently take shape as a vilification of residents from other cities and counties.
In the early days, one tag they applied to people from other cities and counties was uncouth -- in contrast to the high class that they believed they possessed.
Now that localization has become a politically-correct ideology, urban lifestyles and consumer habits have become new standards for differentiation. By being the first or the only place to possess the symbols of "fashion," "progress" or "prosperity" -- a mass rapid transit system, Eslite bookstores, Starbucks, the Living Mall -- Taipei residents have distanced themselves from people of other areas and built a self-enclosed urban identity.
The material development and the establishment of Taipei's status as the political, economic, cultural and media center has gradually caused some people to have negative perceptions of people from outside -- much in the same way as some Hong Kong people, believing themselves to be "internationalized," perceive Taipei people.
The seriously lopsided tilt toward Taipei in media reports is the most obvious example. There is always a priority order in the importance of local news. First comes Taipei City, followed by the "Greater Taipei Area," then by other counties and cities in western Taiwan. The "back mountains" of Hualien and Taitung take up the bottom places on Taiwan proper. The offshore islands such as Penghu get the least media attention.
When there is an earthquake in northern Taiwan, the first thing that someone in Chungli City hears is not about damage and casualties in Taoyuan County, where the city is located. Instead, it's more likely to be the news that Taipei's MRT system was halted for three minutes. When northern Taiwan faces a water shortage, the media always worries about the water level at the Feitsui Reservoir, which supplies water to Taipei, before telling people that water storage at the Shimen Reservoir is "also" low. A shortage in Taipei is described as shortage in northern Taiwan, or even as a "drought throughout Taiwan."
Nantou County was the hardest hit area in the 921 earthquake, but media coverage of that area came out two days later than the coverage on Taipei, where only one building collapsed.
Have you noticed that Taipei City is a geographical area outside of the "Taipei Area" in weather reports on TV -- even though most viewers will find it difficult to imagine how the weather at the CKS Memorial Hall could be so vastly different from the weather at the Panchiao train station in Taipei County?
When the elephant Lin Wang (林旺) died at the Taipei Zoo, city residents said it was the loss of "a memory shared by all Taiwanese." For most people living in other cities and counties who have never had a chance to visit the zoo, everything about Lin Wang was merely a story circulating within the Taipei population -- a story that does not overlap with their own life experience.
How could a history be a "shared memory" if they had not participated in it? Or perhaps the memories of Taipei residents are equivalent to the memories of Taiwanese? Does having control over the most resources qualify people to monopolize the making and interpretation of history? Residents of other communities may have different opinions.
Taipei people should understand that the "exquisiteness," "refinement," "elegance" and "magnificence" of the city's material life has been the result of a lopsided distribution of political and economic resources over half a century. They should understand that they are the vested interests favored by the heavens. It is shocking to see some Taipei people hold contemptuous attitudes toward people from other cities and counties while enjoying the products and services they provide.
This is as much the case in politics as it is in daily life.
From their inception, some highly metropolitan political parties operate only in Taipei, rarely stepping out to other cities and counties. After neglecting to nurture local talent in normal times, they parachute in candidates from Taipei in election time.
Such slothfulness implies that voters from other cities and counties should be guided by the tendencies of Taipei voters. When the ballot results turn out to be far different from their expectations, they blame voters from those cities and counties for their "poor upbringing." When the long-running impression of "backwardness" about other cities and counties is projected onto observations of election behavior, the act of voting also comes to be divided into high- and low-quality votes.
What these people do not know is that in the eyes of voters from other cities and counties, the choices of Taipei voters are not necessarily as classy as they claim. The ethnic "unity" and strong exclusivity of some groups are especially frightening.
The Tamshui and Hsintien rivers have cloistered Taipei residents in a palace that is not self-sufficient. Other cities and counties are merely the backyard that they can't bother to acknowledge. If, in the eyes of a Taipei boy, the fireworks festival of Yenshui and the pole-climbing ceremony of Toucheng exude a kind of exoticness akin to that of Rio de Janiero's Carnival or Munich's Oktoberfest, then we have reason to worry about the future of our native education.
Hsu Shun-min is a doctoral student in political science at the University of Munich, Germany.
Translated by Francis Huang
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