Friends in Taipei laughed at me: "The Taiwanese only care about Taiwanese matters. Who are you writing for about Hong Kong?" "Sorry," I said, "Taiwan has no regard for anyone except the Americans." Although the way things go in China affects Taiwan, the Taiwanese simply couldn't care less. At the same time, every trifling matter in Taipei is aired live. What a magnifying glass for navel-gazing.
Once society breaks through stupid taboos, the focus of the media pendulum naturally swings to local affairs.
In the days of White Terror in the 1960s, Taiwan's newspapers were filled will vapid political indoctrination. Private newspapers could take advantage of some loopholes, hyped-up murder cases and crime news to sell. But the Central Daily News, hampered by bureaucratic authority, could only rely on international news and literature pages to compete. This led to curious college students snooping around, hoping to pry open the cracks in the international news and take a peek at the little occurrences in the outside world.
I can only blame myself for being so stupid as not to have studied history well when I was in Taiwan. Taiwan's history was taboo; the study of Chinese history was fragmented and disconnected; Chinese history and the histories of other countries were entirely separate. After I left Taiwan, I found out that George Washington lived in the same era as the Qing Dynasty emperor Qianlong. This reference framework brought a great deal of new meaning to history.
I came to understand the vicissitudes on the two sides of the Pacific Ocean over the past 250 years. Before that, Chinese history was Chinese history; US history was US history. There was no connection, much less any view of Chinese history from the perspective of world history.
The voice of globalization is soaring into the clouds. Countries are both integrating (the EU) and splitting (the Balkans). They both cooperate (environmental protection, anti-terrorism, human rights) and control (Pentagon, Wall Street, Hollywood). Cultural attitudes are both international and local; they make for a very complex debate.
The Cold War has ended. The US, the vicious youngster, is running amok, pushing for democracy domestically and unilateralism internationally. The US is the world and the Earth revolves around the US. International news barely has a presence in the US and a good half of it is focused on the corners of the world where the Americans are having conflicts and fighting wars. The US is the sole superpower and it is difficult for the world to resist its domination.
Taiwan does not have the resources for domination. It can only seek survival and development in the cracks in the international order.
A while ago, Taiwan Television Enterprise put together a program called Looking at the World from Taipei in an attempt to establish a vision and self-awareness for Taiwan.
The approach was correct but it was a difficult project to carry out. If Looking at the World from Taipei is not complemented by "looking at Taipei from the world," wouldn't that be like looking at the sky from the bottom of a well, believing that Taipei has actually moved from the fringe of the world to the center?
Taiwan certainly should develop localization and seek historical justice, but localization should be complemented with internationalization. In other words, talk about localization in the context of internationalization; talk about internationalization on the basis of localization.
I browsed through the international news reports of Taipei newspapers on the Internet.
They were few, fragmented and shallow -- even worse than newly arising Chinese newspapers. The ETTV news channel was the most senseless, fragmented and confused.
Now back to the view of Hong Kong from Taiwan. It's like you haven't wiped your glasses clean. It appears both familiar and foreign. When in office, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Lien Chan (連戰) crowed that Taiwan would replace Hong Kong as the "Asia-Pacific media center." I poured a little cold water on this statement in a short article. In return, I received admonishing letters from the readers at the Government Information Office.
In slogan politics, officials say things off the cuff. Then they wait for the next slogan to come along.
After just a few years, Lien is running for president again. Jason Hu (
Lee Chin-chuan is head of the Department of English and Communication at the City University of Hong Kong.
Translated by Francis Huang
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