Nothing works better to redirect the pressure cooker of public anger than the emotions attached to a state and, conversely, the fear of the “other.” In the 1930s, the “other” turned out to be Jews; in the 1990s, Milosevic used nationalist sentiment to his benefit and transformed public dissatisfaction into hatred for Croats and Bosnians, only to repeat the feat in 1999, this time targeting Kosovars.
Taiwan’s reaction to the Diaoyutai incident is of a much lower order, but it was nevertheless discomforting to see images of the Japanese flag being burned on the street, or hear calls for a boycott of Japanese products. Nationalism, meanwhile, was trumpeted by the Ma administration and gleefully picked up by the media. Just as in the Balkans in the 1990s, overnight the friendly neighbor turned into an object of hatred. The KMT government’s handling of the matter, which exacerbated the problem, invites speculation that the small matter of an accident at sea had provided a timely instrument to deflect growing public discontent.
If this indeed was the strategy, it bodes ill.
In the realm of diplomacy, the Ma government has put most of its eggs in one basket and pinned its future on better relations with Beijing. With great fanfare and expediency, the KMT launched cross-strait talks with its Chinese counterparts while promising that reduced tensions would only bring benefits, however vaguely those were spelled out.
As with the economy, however, the Ma administration’s strategy is contingent on things going its way — or rather, on events following the path that the KMT government has blurredly painted for public consumption — and leaves it exposed to Beijing’s predatory foreign policy.
Already there are signs that things may not go as planned, such as when Beijing insisted during a visit by a Japanese delegation last week that it would not allow Taiwan to join the WHO, which would seem to contradict a statement, made by Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) on May 28 that Taiwan would be given more international space and that its application to join the WHO could be discussed in bilateral talks.
Of course, anyone who believed that Beijing would allow such a development could just as readily have believed that the economy would improve simply by virtue of the KMT being in power.
Unfortunately, there are many such gullible people out there, which means that as Beijing reneges on its “promises” — from reducing the number of missiles it targets at Taiwan to ending the counterfeiting of Taiwanese products, to name a few — disillusionment with the KMT government is bound to increase.
Unless some tangible benefits in the KMT’s strategy are presented to the public, its popularity will only continue to drop. The temptation to deflect criticism by creating or amplifying incidents “out there” may therefore once again be too strong for Taipei to resist.
Taiwan’s future diplomacy could well serve as a barometer for popular discontent.
J. Michael Cole is a writer based in Taipei and author of Smokescreen: Canadian security intelligence after September 11, 2001.
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