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
RSS