It is said that President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) salutes a portrait of the Republic of China’s founding father, SunYat-sen (孫逸仙), every day on entering the Presidential Office Building.
Recently, a Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislator, with a background in a local factional politics, as a way of expressing her loyalty to the party, directed the premier and the legislative speaker in a bow to Sun’s portrait during a question-and-answer session at the Legislative Yuan.
The KMT is a freak of a political party that specializes in going against public opinion. It seized national assets and then converted them into party assets. Now that the public wants to pursue the KMT over its ill-gotten gains, it is secretly selling them off and refusing to return them to the nation. And yet, rather ironically, the party is attempting to force down the throats of Taiwanese its one and only legitimate asset: Sun and his “last will and testament.”
In his last will and testament, Sun refers to two groups of people: “comrades” and “the people.” The testament was intended as a warning to his “comrades” in the KMT; Sun did not leave it as instructions for “the people” about what would come next. This is an undeniable asset to the party, yet the KMT has sought to nationalize Sun and force him and the worship of him upon Taiwanese.
Apart from “Retake the mainland, free our countrymen,” the most frightening political slogan found in government organizations and school assembly halls during the Martial Law era was: “The revolution is not complete, comrades must continue the hard work.”
Even schoolchildren were submitted to the KMT’s brainwashing and had to recite the “father of the nation’s last will and testament” like monks reciting Buddhist incantations.
There is only a three-word phrase in Sun’s last will and testament that is still relevant to Taiwan today: “Awaken the people.”
During the final years of the Qing Dynasty, the revolutionary organization that Sun brought together called on the people to wake up and overthrow the “alien Manchurian Qing rulers” of China.
Prior to the lifting of martial law, the KMT used brainwashing techniques and obscurantist policies to keep the masses ignorant and maintain their grip on power. The KMT made use of the education system and the media, all of which belonged to the party. It wanted to keep Taiwanese in a comatose state from which they would never awake. Those who followed their conscience and spoke out were branded “dissidents” by the KMT and were jailed or forced to go into exile.
The nation’s democratization broke the KMT’s stranglehold on power, but it relied on buying off local groups with party money to maintain their hold on political power while refusing to reform.
Instead, it is the Democratic Progressive Party, together with the participants of the Sunflower movement, that has lead a defiant revolution and had the most outstanding success in “awakening the people” and defeating the corrupt KMT.
The old and decrepit KMT only knows how to ritualistically bow in front of Sun’s portrait. What the party fails to understand is that the “father of the nation’s last will and testament” has turned into a spell from which it cannot break free.
James Wang is a media commentator.
Translated by Edward Jones
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