I watched the clashes between supporters of Taiwanese independence and security forces near the Grand Hotel in Taipei on Thursday night with much sadness — and foreboding.
Among the crowd were your usual devil-may-care types, ready to stand and sneer in the face of an advancing line of riot police. Some retreated, some threw rocks and others were rounded up simply for being there. Hapless Formosa Television reporter Tsai Meng-yu (蔡孟育) had his microphone in full view, but was still beaten by a riot policeman with a wooden pole — right in front of a camera. We journalists are such easy targets, don’t you know?
I was sad because I could see in the faces of a lot of ordinary police a distinct lack of joy. They were simply doing what they do: follow orders. It’s not in their job description to analyze the niceties of cross-strait diplomatic intrigue when they’ve got a bunch of people coming at them with very-pissed-off expressions on their faces.
Even if a good proportion of those people are women and old men.
I have police in my family. A lot of people do. What this means is that among the thousands of police, riot police and pimply parapolice mobilized to deal with this week’s protests are a lot of fine young men and women who don’t care for sleazy Chinese envoys with culpable hair sense any more than I do.
Dear reader, as long as you’re not involved in a car accident, our police are by and large very helpful and quite sensible. Very ke’ai. They deserve our support and sympathy, and should be encouraged to be the best they can be.
One of the failings of the former Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) administration was its lack of commitment to the professional development of police officers. It was a bad oversight after years of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) neglect and manipulation, because a police force that increases the social, legal and professional awareness of its members is one that earns a community’s trust and delivers better service. It also helps to address the police suicide rate.
I can tell you that if you get your policeman brother-in-law or policewoman niece drunk as a sailor and ask them about their job, it doesn’t take long for the complaints to start spewing out. Shitty pension restrictions. Work conditions. Chain of command problems. Morale issues. Salaries. And these are the conscientious officers.
Watching TV on Thursday night, I was also sad because I fear that my good friends in the force are being called upon not just to keep order, but also to stifle legitimate expressions of opposition to a political agenda that millions of Taiwanese find frightening and demeaning. And because police are trained to understand that following orders trumps following the law, they are easily put into positions of difficulty when issues of civil liberties arise.
Put it this way: When you’ve got a family to feed in a worsening economic environment and no genuine police union to defend you against poor management and politicization of the force, you will close the shutter on that music store that’s playing patriotic Taiwanese music if your commander says so, no matter how much it infringes upon human and commercial rights.
You will seize that national flag from the hands of a protester, throw it away and shove its owner to the ground, no matter if the protester wasn’t breaking any law, nor how much this action desecrates a supposed national symbol at a time of profound sensitivity.
You will do these things and you will not express misgivings to your superiors — not even in private.
During the day on Thursday, the commander of Taipei City’s Wenshan (文山) First Precinct, Tsai Tsang-po (蔡蒼柏), was injured during the protests. That did not stop him from tearily requesting the crowd to calm down.
“Be peaceful, be peaceful, be peaceful,” he shouted, over and over again. It was a show of emotion and apparent sympathy for the ordinary, if angry, people he saw before him. Such qualities are shared by police around the country.
But it was a display of humanity that could get him demoted to desk duties in the personnel department if his political overseers watched the telecast.
Are we in a police state?
No. Not yet.
Let us see how things develop in the calmer days ahead. Let us see which police commanders are rewarded and which are given a stern lecture.
Anyway, you always expect hyperbole from demonstrators. The protests that followed Chen’s re-election in 2004 accused him of fixing the poll. Utter bullshit, of course, and everyone seems to forget that then-Taipei mayor Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), now president, supported demonstrators who broke the law. The anti-Chen protests led by former Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) chairman Shih Ming-teh (施明德) were also full of exaggerations and accusations that bordered on psychosis, though many of that mob would feel vindicated by the legal morass Chen and his family find themselves in.
Likewise, this week’s accusations of police brutality and of a return to the White Terror and martial law are more a challenge to the authorities not to resume such patterns of behavior than a coherent analysis of reality. But the signs are there, and people are worried: Not just the hotheads, but also university students, their professors, civic groups and activists, as well as some of the most respected experts in Taiwan studies around the world.
So let’s get to the meat of the matter.
The Ma government has comprehensively botched the domestic angle of the Chinese visit. Instead of urging restraint on all sides and allowing protesters to blow off steam near the Grand Hotel, Ma and his team of crack ministers suffered brain flatulence and lashed out at the DPP for fomenting violence while defending police errors and outright illegalities to the hilt.
It was Ma’s first test, and it should have been an easy one because the cross-strait deals explicitly excluded politics. But he flunked it.
His guest, Chen Yunlin (陳雲林), the head of the Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait, looks like a typical Chicom: well dressed but unsettling for the squeamish. He’s got the right hair and security detail for an East Asian autocrat; all he needs is platform shoes and a porn addiction and Kim Jong-il would sue for copyright violation.
And let’s face it. He talked like a typical Chicom: pompous, presumptuous, patronizing. He couldn’t help himself. And the KMT hardliners and the cross-strait business czars lapped it up.
It’s all they know and all they want to know. “Please, Brother Chen,” they seemed to say, “we will do anything, absolutely anything, if you invite us into your inner circle so that we can exchange presents, calligraphy and paintings and impress our Beijing masters with how well we have retained our northern accents after 60 years in this wretched wilderness.”
When the media juxtaposes this kind of five-star Red circus with police roughing up ordinary people, you are bound to provoke a reaction in a place with as bloody a history as this. Poor old Prez Ma seems to have forgotten about the history part. Maybe he wasn’t feeling well on each of the days that he commemorated the 228 Incident. I guess he must have missed the bit about Chinese soldiers killing Taiwanese civilians by the thousand.
Now, alas, my buddies in uniform are being sent to clean up a political mess. But it can’t be cleaned up this way for too long, or we will have a police state.
As if in preparation, senior DPP identities are being arrested and locked up in a Singapore-style purge-by-judiciary. Not just the Chen Shui-bian gang, but also sitting elected representatives. Like Singapore, there is just enough legal process to satisfy ignorant foreign media, but way too much for local newspapers and TV stations to be bothered with.
After I turned off the TV, I had a sense of foreboding because I now know how it’s going to play out. Every step of what parachute-packing foreign correspondents call “cross-strait detente” or “rapprochement” or “easing of tensions” will, by necessity, include encroachment on domestic civil liberties — and therefore political liberties — at the reluctant hands of Taiwan’s finest. I also know that there are a lot of people who will fight to stop this from happening.
We’re on our way, dear reader. Will you join me on this journey?
Got something to tell Johnny? Go on, get it off your chest. Write to dearjohnny@taipeitimes.com, but be sure to put “Dear Johnny” in the subject line or he’ll mark your bouquets and brickbats as spam.
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