Living in a flat on the edge of Molenbeek in Brussels, precisely where the majority of the suspected terrorists live, my daughter Lucy e-mailed me in London to describe the lockdown atmosphere of the capital of the new Europe. After a scare-filled Saturday, on Sunday she and a friend ventured out and “walked through Grand Place [the main square] and that was very odd. Reasonably busy — though not as busy as it normally would be on a Sunday afternoon — but a strange mix of army men with giant machine guns, tanks, and tourists taking selfies with the tanks.”
All this primarily because one terrorist, chased from Paris to Brussels, might have been a suicide bomber and there might have been a plan to reproduce the Paris murders in Brussels. What instigated this was the announcement that the Belgian authorities were attempting to hunt down the terrorists involved in the Paris outrages. The fear of terrorism spreads quickly, especially across proximate borders, and in all truth most of Europe is scared.
However, there is little reason to think that the display of the Taiwanese flag in an Islamic State video is of any real concern. Taiwan is not Europe.
As one ponders all this from London, a financial and cultural center of past and present wealth and power, historically ready enough to deploy gunboats in the service of diplomacy — the latter of which was often undisguised colonialism — the seeming unique case of Taiwan forces itself into the picture.
When we think of Taiwan and terror over the past 100 years and more, we can only discover state-induced horrors. From 1895, the bloodthirsty activities of the early Japanese took some years to resolve themselves into a more controlled and commercially inspired colonial occupation. Although this was disturbed by the eastern mountain resistance of Aborigines, conflict tended to be at the frontier sites where natural interactions occurred daily and where tensions could turn into violence — it did not involve terror in west-coast Taiwanese cities.
The coming of the forces of Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) were the result of terror induced by the horrendous escalations of the long civil war with Mao Zedong (毛澤東), but the tense settlements of 1949 did not spark random terror attacks between Taiwanese going about their normal business.
The White Terror and Martial Law eras established after 1947 were triggered by repressive and murderous attacks on dissenting civilians in that year, but was the framework for a long civil coercion that saw very little in the way of anarchic guerrilla responses, and nothing in the way of suicide bombers or child-rapists running riot. The Taiwan Garrison Command, with seemingly boundless powers against insurrection, communist affiliation or against those who merely criticized the official Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) position on relations with China, arrested without trial perhaps 90,000 civilians — about half of whom were executed. However, nothing that would today be labeled terrorism against the state or by the people arose out of this.
This is all interesting enough and is some sort of measure of Taiwan’s ultimate inner strengths. What is much more staggering given the long years since 1949 is the absence of terrorism of any sustained sort as a direct result of the seemingly imminent clash of two contrasting political civilizations facing each other across the Taiwan Strait.
Remember, this was a potential two-way global street. As far as I know, the speech by then-US president Ronald Reagan in 1979, directly addressed to Beijing, which contained the famous warning that so long as Taiwanese showed unwillingness to be “either liberated by you or unilaterally reunited with you — then so long will they also have the specific and clear support of the United States of America,” was not followed by any terrorist outbreak of Chinese young people, Chinese agents or anyone else against either Taiwanese or US civilians in any place.
Much more recently, when Taiwanese students took over and closed down the main seat of government in Taipei in the Sunflower movement, not a single terrorist gunshot or knife wound was inflicted. No Taiwanese communist or extreme right-winger aimed a gun at either student or official, thus allowing a settling down of the situation that can never occur when children and women are being randomly slaughtered.
Whatever else might hinder further Taiwanese political development and democratization, it will not be terrorism; it will not be from within, bloodthirsty and horrific.
However, more significantly at a global level, despite the many missiles China points at Taiwan, no terrorists have crossed the Taiwan Strait to instil that added visceral fear among a civilian population that is so beloved of bigots and their henchmen. Inside their borders, Taiwanese have remained safe, despite the political, territorial, cultural and ideological disputes and tensions that stem from across the strait.
When looked at comparatively or globally it is not in fact clear why this should be so. The obvious reason, that on both sides of the Taiwan Strait there are common blood relations and identical ethnicities and language did not stop the Americans on opposing sides of the US Civil War of 1861-1865 slaughtering each other on a massive and wholly bloodthirsty scale, nor does it today stop Islamic State militants killing masses of the very civilians from which it gathers its misguided — and mostly very young — supporters.
The political significance of the religious disputes between different groups of Muslims has become enormous, the actual theological differences are minute and probably forgotten or not known by most of them. Manipulations among leaders easily override actual identities between combatants in the Middle East, but not seemingly in and around Taiwan and China.
Nor is the appeal to a shared Confucian culture much more convincing. There are sects and tendencies within Confucianism, Buddhism and many other East Asian social philosophies and religions that are at odds with each other, and Islam — at least historically — has at least as much of a unifying culture as the East Asian cultural systems.
Such factors are easily outweighed by more obvious ones that would tend, if anything, toward terrorist violence in East Asia. A much greater understanding of high-tech communications and weaponry is an obvious new element, another is the clear proximity and population concentrations in both Taiwan and China that could make both systems vulnerable.
So we might contend that the Taiwan-China case does throw up doubts about the normal arguments raised when “explaining terrorism,” especially as it now manifests itself from Europe to Indonesia. If I had the definitive response to such doubts, I would probably not be at my desk writing this column. However, a suggestion is possible: When terrorism is a product both of poverty and statist weakness, then you incubate the terrorist. The states that harbor the Islamic State — itself not even a state regardless of how it describes itself — are militarily controlled; they are weak states.
Taiwan is the opposite, glued together by civil mutuality even in the middle of the Sunflower movement, a strong state wielding soft power. Many Islamic states at the center of the terrorist phenomenon are hard power, weak states, keeping hold of power uncertainly and fearfully at the point of many guns. Whatever we might think of China, it cannot be described in weak state terms. Though it might be slowly turning toward more democratic ways — time will tell — there is little sense of crisis in this move, a belief in the modified communism is held by a huge number of even young, middle-class Chinese, who might get impatient with rather boring television and monochrome vacations, who want more cultural excitement and environmental protection, but who are not at present violently disturbing the great inertia that is Chinese political civilization.
So the Taiwan Strait tension does not as yet involve failed states in which anarchic forces wielding religious difference stride across the land.
In both Taiwan and China, things are getting better. Poverty is not increasing and more Chinese are moving into those middle-class lifestyles that created the demographic downturn that is now well under way and which acted as one inducement to the recent turn-away from the one-child policy. Any poverty that remains in either nation cannot be put at the door of the rapacious state as such.
This is in real contrast to failing Islamic nations, which exploit natural resources to aid the incredible personal riches of the Middle Eastern elites and have done so for decades, during which oil revenues could have been dispersed into general development efforts based on petrochemicals, fertilizers, animal feed and land reclamations within their own nations.
Such states found it far easier to support religious extremism and blame Western imperialism for the poverty of their people than to institute the structural changes that could have released whole populations from mere survival living.
Religion became the tool of an elite and violence became the outlet for poor youngsters who were told that their hatred could be channeled to a cause that would serve the elite and guarantee them eternity.
In Taiwan or in China there is no foundation for this sort of vicious negative cycle to spin itself on. And for this we must all be thankful.
So terrorism might be far away from Taiwan and long may this remain so. Nevertheless, the complex and frustrating coexistence of Taiwan and China is a great and standing exception that measures what is really closer to the heart of the present global terrorism — not young people, not insane ideology run amok, not anything inherent in the Koran, not even the Islamic State and its unwholesome leaders.
Global terrorism is the global flack of the failed states that have used religion to redirect the anger of poverty away from their own pathetic governance and toward both their own regional enemies and that Western capitalism which began the long period of military-industrial development, helping create and define the so-called Middle East itself. In the years during which Taiwan and China have somehow maintained their long and confused compromise, enmity among and within failed states has resulted in the Islamic State and young people dying around the world.
Ian Inkster is professorial research associate at the Centre of Taiwan Studies, SOAS, University of London, and editor of the international journal History of Technology.
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