President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) is doing a pretty good job of getting Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) presidential candidate Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) elected. Through his arrogance, slander and distance from the general public, he is alienating even the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) staunchest supporters.
Take, for example, the nation’s Aborigines. Taiwan’s original inhabitants have shown a marked tendency to vote for the KMT in past elections — in the past two presidential elections, the KMT received a majority in Hualien, Taitung and Pingtung. The same goes for legislative districts. In contrast, DPP candidates have consistently found it difficult to get Aboriginal constituents to vote for them.
The reasons for this trend are manifold. Aborigines, who now only make up about 2 percent of Taiwan’s population, have a complex history with the early Han Chinese settlers who emigrated to Taiwan from southern China and are now commonly known as Hoklo.
Most of the people who moved to Taiwan over the past 400 years speak Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese) or Hakka, groups that have a long and not always peaceful history with Aborigines. First in the western plains, and then elsewhere, Hoklo supplanted Aborigines, who either moved to the mountains or were slowly bred out of existence.
This is a simplified explanation of a complex process, but it does highlight that Hoklo and Hakka speakers and the Aborigines have not always been on the best of terms.
Then, hundreds of years into this process of integration and assimilation — something similar to what’s happening in Tibet today — Japanese colonizers arrived and went to war with the Aborigines.
Under the Qing Dynasty and during Japanese colonial rule, Hoklo speakers fared rather well, while Aborigines were beaten down. This experience likely bred strong feelings of resentment first toward Hoklo people and then toward the Japanese in people who had originally inhabited this country, but who were then made into second-class citizens.
Then came the KMT and millions of so-called Mainlanders — Chinese fleeing the victorious communists in the Chinese civil war. For the first time, the Hoklo found themselves treated harshly by a new class of rulers who did not accept their autonomy in the same way the Qing Dynasty had, and who did not value their industry, like the Japanese.
Shortly after taking over Taiwan, the KMT began to view the Hoklo with suspicion, either assuming they were loyal to Japan or too alien to be trusted by the KMT. The 228 Massacre and the White Terror era followed, with consequences the ramifications of which continue to play out today.
For once, the Aborigines were more or less ignored, an improvement on their experience under the Japanese. This goes a long way to explaining why many Aborigines view the KMT and the “Mainlanders” it represents in a positive light, while they hold more complex feelings about the DPP and Hoklo-speakers in general.
Despite this historical background, on Wednesday, Association for Taiwan Indigenous Peoples’ Policies Chairman Oto Micya had this to say about Ma: “It is quite clear who we should not vote for in next month’s presidential election. Out of the three candidates, we obviously only have two [Tsai and People First Party Chairman James Soong (宋楚瑜)] to choose from.”
Why the turnaround?
Simple — after more than 60 years, Aborigines are tired of being ignored. That is what Ma has done for the duration of his time in office, even refusing to respond when Aboriginal groups asked him to acknowledge a “New Partnership Accord” signed by former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) and Aboriginal groups.
So much for these staunch supporters.
The image was oddly quiet. No speeches, no flags, no dramatic announcements — just a Chinese cargo ship cutting through arctic ice and arriving in Britain in October. The Istanbul Bridge completed a journey that once existed only in theory, shaving weeks off traditional shipping routes. On paper, it was a story about efficiency. In strategic terms, it was about timing. Much like politics, arriving early matters. Especially when the route, the rules and the traffic are still undefined. For years, global politics has trained us to watch the loud moments: warships in the Taiwan Strait, sanctions announced at news conferences, leaders trading
Eighty-seven percent of Taiwan’s energy supply this year came from burning fossil fuels, with more than 47 percent of that from gas-fired power generation. The figures attracted international attention since they were in October published in a Reuters report, which highlighted the fragility and structural challenges of Taiwan’s energy sector, accumulated through long-standing policy choices. The nation’s overreliance on natural gas is proving unstable and inadequate. The rising use of natural gas does not project an image of a Taiwan committed to a green energy transition; rather, it seems that Taiwan is attempting to patch up structural gaps in lieu of
The saga of Sarah Dzafce, the disgraced former Miss Finland, is far more significant than a mere beauty pageant controversy. It serves as a potent and painful contemporary lesson in global cultural ethics and the absolute necessity of racial respect. Her public career was instantly pulverized not by a lapse in judgement, but by a deliberate act of racial hostility, the flames of which swiftly encircled the globe. The offensive action was simple, yet profoundly provocative: a 15-second video in which Dzafce performed the infamous “slanted eyes” gesture — a crude, historically loaded caricature of East Asian features used in Western
The Executive Yuan and the Presidential Office on Monday announced that they would not countersign or promulgate the amendments to the Act Governing the Allocation of Government Revenues and Expenditures (財政收支劃分法) passed by the Legislative Yuan — a first in the nation’s history and the ultimate measure the central government could take to counter what it called an unconstitutional legislation. Since taking office last year, the legislature — dominated by the opposition alliance of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party — has passed or proposed a slew of legislation that has stirred controversy and debate, such as extending
RSS