Taiwan was part of China
Whilst agreeing entirely with Michael Wise’s comments (Letters, March 29, page 8), I feel I must correct his statement that “Taiwan has never been a province of China.”
In or about 1683, Taiwan was incorporated into the Chinese empire as a prefecture of Fujian Province and Chinese officials controlled contact between the mainland and the island. Taiwan was named as a full province in 1885; indeed it must have been part of China or it could not have been ceded to Japan in the Treaty of Shimonoseki following the Sino-Japanese War (see The Search for Modern China by Jonathan Spence, 1991).
Following the defeat of Japan in 1945, Taiwan was reclaimed by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government.
Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Taiwan has never been part of the People’s Republic of China, and God willing, that it never will be.
PETER WILLIAMS
Dacun, Changhwa County
Prejudice is not all bad
The public furor this past week over the issue of “hateful talk” following comments made on a blog by diplomat Kuo Kuan-ying (郭冠英) has been rather unsatisfactory.
While I in no way condone the remarks of Kuo, prejudice per se is not always the social evil it is frequently and wrongly portrayed to be. Prejudice is a necessary aspect of everyday thinking.
Many women, for example, are prejudiced against jogging in poorly lit parks at night. Some people are prejudiced against taking a ride in a taxi, given that there are no rear seat belts. However, these prejudices have a rational basis in the known facts of reality. To publicly reject prejudice is to publicly reject the rationality of everyday life.
The notion that all people are born equal and should therefore respect one another completely disregards the fact that all people do not remain equal — some commit themselves to a life of crime, for example.
Am I bound to respect mass-murderers, serial killers, rapists, petty thieves or pedophiles? Of course not. To do so would be to destroy the very notion of respect itself.
Respect — like love — can only be earned by action aimed at realizing certain values shared between two or more people. This is not a trivial playing with semantics — words denote concepts and public misuse of them is an offense against the human capacity for reason.
It is not respect, but the matter of civility of tone and tolerance in people’s dealings with one another that is important to the wider context of political freedom of speech. I may tolerate one who holds and expresses views different from mine, provided he extends the same tolerance to me — but that does not imply that I owe him respect or that he owes me any respect. Thus, both he and I ought to be free to express our valuations and prejudices against one another.
In a democratic society, however, there is a peculiar problem with that. Rather than resolving conflicts of value by reason, trade and peaceful social cooperation, the mechanism of majoritarian rule, the essential feature of democracy, only works because there are prejudices and conflicts of value. A democratic society does not resolve conflicts of value between people or groups of people — it merely contains them in a pressurized form between election cycles, with each political coalition longing for the chance to impose their values and prejudices on others.
Thus, prejudice and conflicts of value — whether rational or irrational — are vital to the life of a democracy and that is a terrible corrosive acid to a civilized life of reason, trade and peaceful social cooperation.
MICHAEL FAGAN
Tainan
Politics defiles the spiritual
The refusal — as deplorable, outrageous and craven as it is — of the World Buddhist Forum to invite the Dalai Lama should not come as a surprise to anyone at all, given that the forum began in China on Friday and moved to Taipei on Monday.
A person need only take into account the people who control the political affairs of these two places to resolve this issue. Political affairs on both sides of the Taiwan Strait are currently in the hands of blackguards possessing megalomaniacal and despotic mindsets. As long as Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) is president, the Dalai Lama will never be allowed to enter Taiwan.
In the West, so-called “temporal” or secular power has been conflated with — and has defiled — “spiritual” power. This has been the case since the early medieval period and the crowning of Charlemagne in 800.
Chow Mei-li (周美里) is reported to have asked: “Since when is a personal political view a criterion for participating in a forum about Buddhism?”
Her question is heartfelt and reasonable. Implicit in her question is the assumption that “raisons d’etat” should have no influence on, or connection with, spiritual concerns.
Unfortunately, rogues dressed in clerics’ robes have colluded and conspired with jackals in politicians’ garb all throughout history. Powers temporal and powers spiritual have forever been as intimately associated as briars and roses.
MICHAEL SCANLON
East Hartford, Connecticut
The term “assassin’s mace” originates from Chinese folklore, describing a concealed weapon used by a weaker hero to defeat a stronger adversary with an unexpected strike. In more general military parlance, the concept refers to an asymmetric capability that targets a critical vulnerability of an adversary. China has found its modern equivalent of the assassin’s mace with its high-altitude electromagnetic pulse (HEMP) weapons, which are nuclear warheads detonated at a high altitude, emitting intense electromagnetic radiation capable of disabling and destroying electronics. An assassin’s mace weapon possesses two essential characteristics: strategic surprise and the ability to neutralize a core dependency.
Chinese President and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Chairman Xi Jinping (習近平) said in a politburo speech late last month that his party must protect the “bottom line” to prevent systemic threats. The tone of his address was grave, revealing deep anxieties about China’s current state of affairs. Essentially, what he worries most about is systemic threats to China’s normal development as a country. The US-China trade war has turned white hot: China’s export orders have plummeted, Chinese firms and enterprises are shutting up shop, and local debt risks are mounting daily, causing China’s economy to flag externally and hemorrhage internally. China’s
During the “426 rally” organized by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party under the slogan “fight green communism, resist dictatorship,” leaders from the two opposition parties framed it as a battle against an allegedly authoritarian administration led by President William Lai (賴清德). While criticism of the government can be a healthy expression of a vibrant, pluralistic society, and protests are quite common in Taiwan, the discourse of the 426 rally nonetheless betrayed troubling signs of collective amnesia. Specifically, the KMT, which imposed 38 years of martial law in Taiwan from 1949 to 1987, has never fully faced its
When a recall campaign targeting the opposition Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislators was launched, something rather disturbing happened. According to reports, Hualien County Government officials visited several people to verify their signatures. Local authorities allegedly used routine or harmless reasons as an excuse to enter people’s house for investigation. The KMT launched its own recall campaigns, targeting Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lawmakers, and began to collect signatures. It has been found that some of the KMT-headed counties and cities have allegedly been mobilizing municipal machinery. In Keelung, the director of the Department of Civil Affairs used the household registration system
RSS