The consensus in Taiwan is that the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is ill and, unlike KMT presidential candidate Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱), most people do not need to isolate themselves for three days in order to gain that insight.
The KMT is suffering from innumerable ailments as it has been unable to adapt itself to this land. It is weak, incompetent, boastful, unstable and confused. The aged party is also suffering from dementia and nothing can be done about it, no matter how many temples are visited and how much incense and paper money is burned.
It was rather absurd for Hung, nicknamed the “Little Red Pepper,” to say that the nation is ill. For anyone supporting the “one China” policy, “nation” should include all the areas that are ruled by Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) and not only the small corner that is Taiwan. Still, she only criticizes former president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝), not Xi, and goes as far as to discredit Taiwan’s democracy as mere “populism.” It is quite obvious, then, that her “nation” is Taiwan.
Taiwan is in good health; it is the KMT that is ill. When the party’s interests were threatened by the nation’s democratization 20 years ago, some people found that hard to accept, so they maligned Taiwan’s democracy by calling it populism and tried to divert attention from their anti-democratic nature by substituting the Chinese word for “populism” — mincui (民粹) — with the Chinese word for “Nazism” — nacui (納粹).
Hung has shown how shallow she is by flogging the same old horse: claiming that populism will destroy the country and saying that Taiwan is ill — only to criticize Lee.
When she first announced that she was running for president, she portrayed herself as a “brick” that was meant to attract “jade” in the form of more qualified candidates, and likened her road to the presidency to Buddhist monk Xuanzang’s (玄奘) legendary pilgrimage. When that did not work, she pledged to act like Kuanyin to deceive devoted followers of the bodhisattva into supporting her.
However, she is more like a quack trying to cure a fatal illness or a “mud bodhisattva,” who can hardly protect herself while crossing a river.
Hung also attacked Lee by citing National Taiwan University professor Hwang Kwang-kuo’s (黃光國) 1995 book on populism, further highlighting her poor judgement.
Hwang’s father, Hwang Tzu-cheng (黃子正), was born in Taiwan as a Japanese national. After graduating from the Taipei Medical College, the elder Hwang was sent to Japanese-ruled Manchukuo in northeastern China. He served as a royal doctor to Pu Yi (溥儀) — the emperor of the puppet regime. When the Second Sino-Japanese War ended, he was one of eight people appointed to escort Pu Yi to Japan, meaning he was a top “loyal subject” of the Japanese emperor.
Hung wished to mobilize pan-blue supporters by attacking Lee for having been a Japanese national and soldier in the past.
However, she made the mistake of citing material from the works of the son of a “loyal subject” to support her argument. In addition, she chose to spend her seclusion at New Taipei City’s Yuantong Temple (圓通寺), a Japanese-style temple built in 1926, during the Japanese colonial period.
Similarly, President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) said that Lee has distorted historical facts about the relationship between Taiwan and Japan, but he still continues to work at the Presidential Office Building, which used to be the Taiwan governor’s office during the colonial period.
Surely such people are confused.
James Wang is a senior journalist.
Translated by Eddy Chang
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