It seems right and proper that public employees — military personnel, civil servants and public-school teachers and education professionals — should play an active role in the formation of a nation. This group is different from other people in that they receive their salaries from the state, paid out of tax revenue collected from ordinary people.
Their income is stable — hence the name “iron rice bowl” — quite unlike the huge fluctuations in income ordinary people might have to deal with throughout their lives. When the economy is slow, many people entering the workforce for the first time choose the iron rice bowl positions, seeking this kind of job security.
A sense of responsibility in government employees is manifest among military personnel in martial virtue, in the national spirit; among civil servants it is seen in the devotion to fulfilling one’s duty to the best of one’s ability; in teachers it is the responsibility to inspire, instruct and train other members of society.
The formation of the nation is bolstered by its military, civil service and schools. Whether a nation can function properly and be robust and healthy depends not only on politicians — those in whom power is invested at the ballot box — to lead and create policy, as these, in turn, depend upon the military, civil service and schools to support them and provide a practical foundation.
During the long years of martial law in Taiwan, in which one party monopolized political power, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) entrenched the party-state ideology within this framework. Through ideological consolidation and the offering of special benefits, the idea that the party and state were one and the same became deeply embedded in the minds of many of these public employees. With the lifting of martial law and the advent of democracy, many people within this group routinely opposed reform.
The government held public hearings on pension reform throughout the nation. Neither police nor barriers were able to prevent many retired public employees from staging mass protests. Not that they were there to engage in the debate: they were there only to obstruct. From helping forge the party-state to consolidating a political order through the long years of martial law, they are now unable to countenance reasonable modifications of their interests. It is heartbreaking to see how far such highly respected members of society have fallen.
If democracy is to continue to develop, and Taiwan is to rebuild itself, then it is going to have to cure itself of these deeply ingrained maladies.
To understand how it has come to this, people will have to go all the way back to the Chinese Civil War in 1949, when the People’s Republic of China took over from the Republic of China: What then for the military, the civil service and public-school teachers? What happened to their counterparts in defeated Germany, Italy and Japan in World War II? Indeed, what of these sections of society when East Germany and West Germany reunited, or of the individual nations in eastern Europe following the collapse of the Soviet Union?
Taiwan still has some way to go on the road to transitional justice. Right now, it is impossible to even make reasonable adjustments to public employee’s pensions, or to introduce any reforms, because of the obstructionism of this united group, and how beautifully it is exemplifying all the traditional Confucian virtues.
How on earth is Taiwan going to rid itself of the poison of this party-state ideology and of the self-interested parties it has spawned, to forge a new, healthy public sector made of people showing upright national character and personal integrity?
Lee Min-yung is a poet.
Translated by Paul Cooper
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