Sat, Jan 01, 2011 page8

• Who will stay behind as Taiwan’s people flee?

  • By Lee Min-yung 李敏勇
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  An 83-year-old Mainlander who could no longer stand to see his 79-year-old wife suffer from Parkinson’s disease is suspected of drugging her with sleeping pills and then hitting her on the head with a screwdriver and a hammer before finally calling the police after she died.

  I am not sure how the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), which runs Taiwan as a one-party state and is about to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Republic of China (ROC), feels about this. This government and those who fled to Taiwan together with former dictator Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) ran it as a dictatorship during the Martial Law era through its privileged party, government and military officials. Those with power remain in Taiwan, while their family members emigrated to the US or other developed, democratic nations.

  Chiang and his son Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國) no longer rule Taiwan, but those who served under them have inherited their attitude, assuming that power is their god-given right.

  The old man in the story mentioned above came over with Chiang Kai-shek after the war, and his wife was especially skilled in Chinese and English.

  However, this man, who felt that he had no other choice but to kill his wife left a message that read: “Everyone wants to go to the US and be Americans. What is the good in all this? All I know is that my children have all gone to the US and that this is bad for us.”

  President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) two daughters are also in the US. Ma started out waiting on the powerful leaders of Taiwan’s past and now he is supposed to be our president, but even people within his own administration have the guts to refer to him as only “Mr Ma” and not president. Ma and his father probably never believed in the status of their “nation.” While Ma often talks about the sovereignty the ROC in an attempt to look like he is running a country, it just never seems genuine.

  How do the children and grandchildren of this old man who felt he had to kill his wife, feel about this? Do they really believe their mother died at their father’s hands? Surely, their mother died at their own hands; the hands of the children who went far away to the US to become Americans. This old lady actually died in the shadow of the KMT’s ROC theory. And at this time, the KMT is busying itself putting up decorations to celebrate what they think is great about their “country” when in fact so many horror stories have happened over the last 100 years, with the aforementioned story being only the most recent example.

  How many of Taiwan’s 23 million people have US citizenship or citizenship in other countries? If the percentage is 10 percent, that would be 2.3 million people. What if the ratio is even higher? It is understandable if people from Taiwan get citizenship in other nations because they are uneasy about Taiwan’s status as a nation, a status that is purely fictitious. However, there are those people who talk about how great the ROC is while they also hold US citizenship. These people are normally involved in politics, the military and other privileged groups or work in state-owned enterprises or are civil servants. Such people are a perfect example of the pathetic nature of the KMT’s whole party-state fantasy.

  Lee Min-yung is a poet and political critic.

  TRANSLATED BY DREW CAMERON
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