Dignity is at stake
A moral crisis is erupting across East Asia and it will lead to a great deal of weeping and gnashing of teeth when it is over. Across the region, states are slowly aligning themselves with China, especially as doubts about the durability of Pax Americana grow in the wake of the Iraq War and the global financial crisis.
Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama is being hailed as a watershed for Japanese democracy, but his desire for Japan to find its niche in a new and emerging East Asian economic order founded on an ill-defined set of East Asian values (but without abandoning the US alliance) amounts to acquiescence to Chinese domination of the region.
Hatoyama’s position and that of Japan more generally is not unlike Taiwan’s. China is an 800 pound baby gorilla and there seems to be little alternative but to placate it and take advantage of it. At the same time, everybody wants to be on good terms with the US, in case China unexpectedly throws a fit.
If Taiwan is too politically and economically weak to stand up to China on its own, Japan is too morally weak to provide leadership for a more liberal Asian order because of its imperial past. South Korea’s position is perhaps even more precarious, being completely surrounded by historical competitors. To curry favor with Beijing, she commits the minor indiscretion of temporarily detaining a Uighur activist.
Then there is President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). After all the posturing as a genuine democrat over the years, one wonders what this man has actually ever stood for.
Perhaps former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) was a crook, whose actions did great damage to his party and people.
Ma, however, is starting to appear as a fawning mandarin who has never stood for anything other than being a mandarin. His rejection of the Dalai Lama’s attempt in December to visit Taiwan and then his grudging and apologetic approval of the exile’s subsequent attempt after Typhoon Morakot reek of cowardice and obsequious opportunism, with the consequence that Taiwan’s international position seems more diminished than ever.
The vituperation directed against the Dalai Lama by the KMT and then the attempt to prevent the film about Rebiya Kadeer from being shown at a film festival in Kaohsiung, on the grounds that Chinese tourists will boycott the city, are beneath contempt. If Ma, the KMT and the Chinese believe that an economic deal with China will be enough to satisfy Taiwanese aspirations in the long run, they are all in for a rude awakening.
East Asia is slowly and collectively turning away from liberal, democratic values and turning toward China, a train wreck waiting to happen. When the flood of liquidity released by the world’s central banks and governments (China’s foremost among them) filters down through the financial and property sectors into commodities and consumer goods in the coming months and years, China will be the least prepared for the social, economic and political consequences of inflation. If the US has a shocking fiscal crisis looming, China has a looming crisis of legitimacy. The Chinese have been praised by investors around the world for their robust reaction to the financial crisis, but the truth is that they panicked and overreacted because of their fear of unemployment and instability. They may have succeeded in delaying the danger by a few years, but the price is probably the dawn of a Great Stagflation.
For those around the world trying to take advantage of the Chinese bubble today, the inevitable question arises as to how they will know when to get out and what it is they may have sacrificed in the process. Dignity, like legitimacy and money, tends to be lost slowly, then all at once.
J. TAVIS OVERSTREET
Chiayi
Conceptual confusion
The recent screening of the film The 10 Conditions Of Love — initially scheduled to be shown at the Kaohsiung Film Festival — created some controversy over its rescheduling.
It is understandable that festival organizers and others would be irritated by Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chu’s (陳菊) decision to reschedule the showing for the sake of potential tourism benefits from China.
Moreover, there are many who would point to the decision as illustrating Beijing’s tactics of political suppression — directly in Xinjiang, where it can more easily prevail by force, and indirectly in Taiwan, where “softer” means of coercion are more likely to succeed.
What has been consistently missing from your pages is penetration beyond this facile level of analysis.
The fact of the matter is that the hive ideology thriving in Beijing is being unwittingly aided and abetted by its very opponents here in Taiwan — especially in the south.
The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) represents, if it can be said to represent anything at all, the use of government power to shape society in reference to various political standards — e.g., “democratic,” “environmental,” “progressive,” “nationalist” and so on.
The communists in Beijing similarly represent government power to shape society in reference to other political standards, albeit with a numerically much greater degree of power at their disposal.
All three political parties — the DPP, KMT and Chinese Communist Party — operate according to the same basic principles of thought and action, although they of course have different strategic objectives in mind.
The tone-deaf chiming of the oxymoronic terms “democracy” and “freedom” in your pages and elsewhere muffles these other harmonics within which the term “freedom” has no place whatsoever.
It is high time you got somebody on your reporting or editorial staff who can integrate the concepts “democratic” and “communist” with regard to their essential difference from the concept “freedom.”
MICHAEL FAGAN
Tainan
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