So National Taiwan Normal University has dropped the “national” from its name in its advertising across the Taiwan Strait to help it attract Chinese students.
Unsurprisingly, like bulls to a red rag, Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) legislators were quick to denounce the latest example of this government allowing local institutions to denigrate Taiwan’s sovereignty in their dealings with our communist cousins across the water.
A Ministry of Education suit was duly wheeled out to placate the pro-independence posse with prosaic platitudes.
So far, though, there has been only stony silence on the issue from government bigwigs. This is unusual, as in the past they could not wait to wade in at the slightest hint of criticism at the results of their policies.
Maybe they have already exhausted the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT)-issue “Handbook of Excuses to Counter Charges of Denigrating Taiwan’s Sovereignty.”
Either that or Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) was still busy trying to extract his foot from his mouth following last week’s numerous slips of the tongue.
‘ABNORMAL’
My favorite comment on the issue came from the DPP’s Lin Shu-fen (林淑芬), who quipped that if the university could drop the “national” from the title then it might as well just change the “normal” to “abnormal.”
Seriously, I do not know why they even bother attempting to keep up the facade anymore.
Anyone who has observed Taiwanese politics for long enough knows that it is pretty easy to tell when a KMT member is being dishonest: His lips move.
We Taiwanese are smart enough to realize when we are being taken for a ride — just look at the president’s approval ratings.
We can put up with some cross-strait nomenclature shenanigans, as long as it does not affect the bottom line: our ability to make a profit at the expense of our Chinese friends. However, push us too far and we will come out fighting — providing we have imbibed enough Gold Label beforehand, that is.
The attitude of the majority of Taiwanese to enhanced ties with our communist cousins is similar to that of the Chinese to their foreign visitors.
We let them come, let them see the sights, let them have a good time, let them spend their money and let them pick up the ugly women. We will be pleasant to their faces, but that is as far as it goes.
EMPTY PROMISES
We can accept hideous Chinese officials coming here in their droves, their Grand Hotel schmoozing with their KMT brethren and their attempts to wow us with empty promises of how many tonnes of fruit they are going to buy.
Over the past three years, we have even put up with the ever-so-slight erosion of some of our hard-earned democratic freedoms, such as freedom of speech, freedom of the press and the right to an independent judiciary.
We have done this because we reserve the right to vote the offending bums out of office next time round.
We can withstand a lot, but if one day a Ministry of Foreign Affairs official takes to the podium and says, with a straight face, that the US has seriously “hurt the feelings of the Taiwanese people,” then that might just wake us up enough to see how far and how fast we are being propelled toward China and finally push us over the edge.
Joe Doufu is a Taipei-based satirist.
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