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Johnny Neihu's Mailbag

Acrid tree hugging

Dear Johnny,

Your language is acrid — but mostly meets the points. “Fraud” and “face” seem to match Chinese culture as elegantly as its glamorous and mystic history — what a mystery!

Please write more on the hazards of Taiwan’s destruction by man. Concrete is not the concretion of the Formosa (Beautiful) Island. The Taipei 101 tower, the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant (I hope it will serve merely as a museum some day), the gigantomanic Hsuehshan tunnel — hell, why not a gondola to everyone’s residence everywhere to avoid road traffic, or even across the Taiwan Strait?

Don’t forget the Kaohsiung City Government’s proposal to build a gondola from the 85-story Tuntext tower across the harbor to Qijin (Cijin or Chi-Chin or Tshi-dshin or however you want to write it).

Engelbert Altenburger

I-Shou University



Johnny replies: I prefer to write it as 旗津, but Cijin will have to suffice for you Tongyong diehards. And that’s the way it’s gonna stay unless the Cabinet can bribe the Kaohsiung City Government into abandoning Tongyong and using Hanyu pinyin, thereby replacing the “C” with a “Q.” Snore.

As for your environmental compliment, I have to say it’s a strange experience being praised for my love of Mother Nature given that in my day I loved shooting helpless animals and vegetation as much as the next idiot doing compulsory military service. Back in those days I only saw weeds, not trees. These days I only see cement, not trees.

Regional trappings

Dear Johnny,

I found President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) recent promotion of Taiwan as a “region” of a surreal Republic of China quite interesting.

It is a given that the state-controlled Chinese media will have grabbed hold of his statement that relations between Taiwan and China are not state-to-state in nature but region-to-region.

But the Chinese media will have almost certainly truncated Ma’s theory of a greater Republic of China (ROC) comprising Taiwan (and the islands under its control), China, the Republic of Mongolia, what is now Russian territory and the territory of a number of central Asian states.

It seems painfully obvious to me that the “region to region” statement will do nothing for the status of either Taiwan or the surreal ROC and will simply be seized by the Chinese media as justification for eventual annexation of Taiwan — the inevitable, final nail in the coffin of the ROC’s legacy (except for a few nostalgic ethnic Chinese living abroad with their sentimental Double Ten celebrations).

Anyway, I was wondering how much the credibility of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) depends on prolonging the concept of the ROC — real or surreal. If the KMT were to embrace the concept of localization or “Taiwanization” and were to face up to the blatantly obvious fact that the area Taipei exercises sovereignty over does not include China, then the logical thing for the KMT to do would be to change its name to the “Taiwanese Nationalist Party.”

I know that many who read this statement would roll their eyes and call me a dumb big nose but I think there is a link between the KMT maintaining credibility (indeed, the justification for its existence) and the party seeking to prolong the ROC in some form or another.

Andrew Whyte



Johnny replies: How about being called a smart big nose? The key to KMT credibility is much the same as the key to the credibility of the Chinese Communist Party: practical results and economic prowess. Without that credibility, the KMT would get kicked out on election day — assuming there are more to come — while the Chinese would need to increase police and military spending to cope with the riots of the landless, jobless and mirthless.

The irony is that both parties are enslaved to ideological trappings (even if most don’t really believe in them) and struggle to move forward when these trappings and economics clash.

Well, what did you expect? They all came from the same household of revolutionaries in the first place — before embarking on the biggest and bloodiest family tiff in the history of modern warfare.
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