On Saturday’s protest
The civil groups’ grand parade on Saturday unabashedly revealed the banality of greediness in the name of being good public servants.
For one thing, appeals such as rejecting defilement and demanding respect are fairly vague and empty gestures; for another, it totally misses out on the value of intergenerational justice and the institutional problems of the current pension system.
Dignity played an insignificant role in the parade. During the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) early reign of Taiwan, public jobs were granted high rewards because they were unwanted. However, with the economic recession, being a public servant now means to remain protected and possibly lead a better life in retirement.
In this sense, public servants nowadays have a higher reputation than before, which is easy to see from the high enrollment rate for the national examinations.
The struggle among public employees and other jobs has long existed in Taiwan. Yet what keeps the civic groups silent is the government manages to maintain their huge benefits package. Not until recently have these groups been stung by the call for reform.
Dignity merely serves as an excuse to cover indignation about individual interests.
When the society arrives at the point where there is a huge deficit in the pension system, what we see from Saturday’s rally is that public employee groups refuse to admit that they have made themselves a target for revolution.
They pride themselves for being “public” servants, but they are not willing to undertake the responsibility of improving social justice. They do not even consider that maintaining their preferences would mean depriving the interests of the younger generation.
It is one thing to fight for one’s own rights, but it is another thing to claim one’s rights legitimately. If one’s rights are based on overriding others, the inequality and the divide will only continue to deepen.
As a young teacher, I strongly advocate for the reform of the pension system. How can we teach our next generation the virtue of integrity without setting ourselves as an example?
Annie Chuang
Taipei
A response to my article (“Invite ‘will-bes,’ not has-beens,” Aug. 12, page 8) mischaracterizes my arguments, as well as a speech by former British prime minister Boris Johnson at the Ketagalan Forum in Taipei early last month. Tseng Yueh-ying (曾月英) in the response (“A misreading of Johnson’s speech,” Aug. 24, page 8) does not dispute that Johnson referred repeatedly to Taiwan as “a segment of the Chinese population,” but asserts that the phrase challenged Beijing by questioning whether parts of “the Chinese population” could be “differently Chinese.” This is essentially a confirmation of Beijing’s “one country, two systems” formulation, which says that
“History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes” (attributed to Mark Twain). The USSR was the international bully during the Cold War as it sought to make the world safe for Soviet-style Communism. China is now the global bully as it applies economic power and invests in Mao’s (毛澤東) magic weapons (the People’s Liberation Army [PLA], the United Front Work Department, and the Chinese Communist Party [CCP]) to achieve world domination. Freedom-loving countries must respond to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), especially in the Indo-Pacific (IP), as resolutely as they did against the USSR. In 1954, the US and its allies
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrived in China yesterday, where he is to attend a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) and Russian President Vladimir Putin today. As this coincides with the 50 percent US tariff levied on Indian products, some Western news media have suggested that Modi is moving away from the US, and into the arms of China and Russia. Taiwan-Asia Exchange Foundation fellow Sana Hashmi in a Taipei Times article published yesterday titled “Myths around Modi’s China visit” said that those analyses have misrepresented India’s strategic calculations, and attempted to view
When Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) stood in front of the Potala Palace in Lhasa on Thursday last week, flanked by Chinese flags, synchronized schoolchildren and armed Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) troops, he was not just celebrating the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the “Tibet Autonomous Region,” he was making a calculated declaration: Tibet is China. It always has been. Case closed. Except it has not. The case remains wide open — not just in the hearts of Tibetans, but in history records. For decades, Beijing has insisted that Tibet has “always been part of China.” It is a phrase
RSS