Our neighbor Japan is currently dealing with the biggest national catastrophe it has had to face since World War II — the aftermath of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami and the subsequent nuclear crisis.
Taiwan has much in common with Japan. An island located in an earthquake zone, it has several nuclear plants, relies on imported energy sources and has the majority of the population living on a small proportion of the land, in low-lying areas flanking a central mountain chain, with high concentrations in major urban areas — Tokyo for Japan, Taipei for Taiwan. However, this seems to have been lost on the government here, which apparently refuses to learn from Japan’s experience.
The Ministry of Education recently announced the second phase of its “Five Year, 50 Billion” program, aimed at making Taiwanese universities among the top 50, or even top 10, in Asia. It seems that the public servants in the ministry, who boast the highest number of doctoral degrees of any government department, are no better or worse than those in other departments: They are just as archaic and resistant to change.
Taiwan’s very existence, both physical and political, is pretty precarious. It is forever treading the very thin line between survival and destruction, and cannot afford to put a single foot wrong. If everyone in this country, both the governing and opposition parties and government officials together with the general public, works together to find solutions for these pressing issues, we may have a chance to divest ourselves of these archaic elements once and for all, replacing dinosaur policies and dinosaur public servants with a new system.
A full half, perhaps more, of Taiwan’s 23 million people live and work in the Greater Taipei Area of Taipei, New Taipei City (新北市), Keelung and Taoyuan city and county. The majority have moved there from south and central Taiwan, something that becomes apparent during national holidays such as Lunar New Year or the Tomb Sweeping Festival, when people go back to their family homes en masse and leave the capital feeling like a ghost town.
Forget for a moment the sense of spending NT$50 billion (US1.7 billion) over five years, or NT$1000 billion over 10, trying to shoehorn Taiwanese universities into the world’s top 100, or whether the idea is perhaps a little naive. The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is in power now, but five or six years ago it was the Democratic Progressive Party. Both drew up the budget for the five-year program, both passed it, both are happy to implement it. The handover of political power did little to change the government’s mindset of trying to buy prestigious universities through heavy investment.
Following the earthquake and tsunami, the scale of which Japan has not seen in living memory, and the subsequent — and, for Japan, unprecedented — nuclear crisis unfolding there, the ability of Tokyo to function as a capital has been put in jeopardy. The folly and danger of having so much concentrated in the capital is recognized, if not actually admitted.
We have consistently followed this policy in Taiwan, where we have concentrated the majority of our financial, technological, human and cultural capital, as well as our political and economic power, in the Greater Taipei region (and, to be honest, pretty much Taipei itself), which relies on food, water and energy supplies to be brought in from outside. This is an obsolescent idea.
Of course, development often entails the selection of certain locations and the concentration of resources therein. -Nevertheless, running a country without understanding the importance of the diversification of risk leaves one vulnerable to the prospect of complete annihilation.
This is what we refer to as “local rationality,” the idea that some policies are rational when seen from a local or short-term perspective, but not from a more global — in the sense of inclusive — or long-term perspective, from which they may even be seen to be completely irrational. The nuclear crisis in Japan is a perfect example of this.
It makes no sense whatsoever in these days of natural disasters and social change for so much of Taiwan’s economic resources, or even the funds made available to universities, to be concentrated in the Taipei region.
A more comprehensive policy is needed, including on education, culture and the arts, that involves the whole country. This is something that we can now consider given Japan’s experience. This is the duty of our leaders and public servants. If they refuse to change, they will find it difficult to shake off the label of “dinosaur government.”
Chen Yung-feng is the executive director of Tunghai University’s Center for Japan Area Studies.
TRANSLATED BY PAUL COOPER
“History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes” (attributed to Mark Twain). The USSR was the international bully during the Cold War as it sought to make the world safe for Soviet-style Communism. China is now the global bully as it applies economic power and invests in Mao’s (毛澤東) magic weapons (the People’s Liberation Army [PLA], the United Front Work Department, and the Chinese Communist Party [CCP]) to achieve world domination. Freedom-loving countries must respond to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), especially in the Indo-Pacific (IP), as resolutely as they did against the USSR. In 1954, the US and its allies
A response to my article (“Invite ‘will-bes,’ not has-beens,” Aug. 12, page 8) mischaracterizes my arguments, as well as a speech by former British prime minister Boris Johnson at the Ketagalan Forum in Taipei early last month. Tseng Yueh-ying (曾月英) in the response (“A misreading of Johnson’s speech,” Aug. 24, page 8) does not dispute that Johnson referred repeatedly to Taiwan as “a segment of the Chinese population,” but asserts that the phrase challenged Beijing by questioning whether parts of “the Chinese population” could be “differently Chinese.” This is essentially a confirmation of Beijing’s “one country, two systems” formulation, which says that
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrived in China yesterday, where he is to attend a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) and Russian President Vladimir Putin today. As this coincides with the 50 percent US tariff levied on Indian products, some Western news media have suggested that Modi is moving away from the US, and into the arms of China and Russia. Taiwan-Asia Exchange Foundation fellow Sana Hashmi in a Taipei Times article published yesterday titled “Myths around Modi’s China visit” said that those analyses have misrepresented India’s strategic calculations, and attempted to view
When Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) stood in front of the Potala Palace in Lhasa on Thursday last week, flanked by Chinese flags, synchronized schoolchildren and armed Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) troops, he was not just celebrating the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the “Tibet Autonomous Region,” he was making a calculated declaration: Tibet is China. It always has been. Case closed. Except it has not. The case remains wide open — not just in the hearts of Tibetans, but in history records. For decades, Beijing has insisted that Tibet has “always been part of China.” It is a phrase
RSS