On Sept. 24, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) staged a talent contest called the “Sing! China: Shanghai-Taipei Music Festival” on the campus of National Taiwan University. It ended in chaos amid protests and led to members of pro-China groups beating up protesting students. The incident alerted Taiwanese to the fact that Beijing has covertly infiltrated the nation and is using any opportunity to sow seeds of chaos in society.
China’s “united front” strategy and infiltration of Taiwanese society has been going on for a long time. Over the years, Taiwanese have unconsciously allowed themselves to be taken in by Beijing’s brand of communism, to the extent that they could be said to have already become assimilated into the PRC.
In the era of former presidents Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) and Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國), Taiwanese were fed a diet of anti-communist propaganda from cradle to grave, forced to imbibe the two Chiangs’ anti-communist dogma. However, aside from those who fought in the Chinese Civil War, most Taiwanese had no conception of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) methods.
The two former presidents’ authoritarian rule over the nation inevitably led to a backlash against dogmatism. Despite the verity of their message, many Taiwanese questioned it, or had no interest in understanding it. This is why Taiwanese — especially those whose ancestors predate Chiang Kai-shek’s arrival in Taiwan — possess either an incomplete understanding of the CCP or remain completely ignorant of it.
Over the past 20 years, a chorus of voices in Taiwan have once again begun to talk of the CCP in approving tones and to give credit to the party for China’s economic development and its rise as a global power.
It is common knowledge that the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the leadership of former US president Ronald Regan and former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher during the 1980s — who together spearheaded the resistance to international communism by implementing a system of global free trade — brought about the collapse of the Soviet Union and encouraged former communist states in eastern Europe to embrace democracy and freedom. Even the PRC in 1978, under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平), pursued a policy of relaxing controls to allow profit accumulation and focused on developing its economy.
“Socialism with Chinese characteristics” replaced the doctrine of communism, allowing China to tap into global capital. China leveraged its land, natural resources and the world’s largest population and threw everything it had toward growing its economy.
Meanwhile, Taiwan’s economic growth hit a bottleneck. The nation experienced widespread labor shortages and wage inflation combined with burgeoning labor, environmental and social movements, which were accompanied by stock market and housing market bubbles caused by excessive idle capital and Taiwanese hooked on money games.
The deteriorating situation resulted in Taiwanese manufacturers shifting to offshore production in China, which was further incentivized by financial concessions from Beijing. Taiwanese businesses followed the money, despite the dangers, following the adage “nothing ventured, nothing gained” and reasoning that it would be better to fail while trying in China than to suffer “death by a thousand cuts” in Taiwan.
China’s model of economic development is actually fiendishly simple and founded upon resource-intensive production.
As early as 1994, economics professor Paul Krugman, who was later awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics, exposed China’s growth model as mercilessly forcing down production costs, flooding world markets with cheap goods, copying other companies’ products, selling tainted products and taking over foreign cities and towns under the guise of free trade.
China also forces down the value of the yuan to ensure the flow of its cheaply priced products abroad — setting off global deflation.
Economist and White House National Trade Council Director Peter Navarro coauthored the book Death by China: Confronting the Dragon — A Global Call to Action with Greg Autry, which was released in 2011 and turned into a feature-length documentary film the following year.
The book uses an abundance of statistics to reveal the naked truth of China’s economic growth model. It shows how Beijing uses its vast foreign reserves to manufacture financial bubbles within China that keep its citizens hooked on money, while snapping up assets abroad — whatever the cost — and threatens and bribes politicians, businessmen and media organizations.
As China spreads its poisonous communist ideology around the world, it plunders global resources.
Two documentaries, Agenda: Grinding America Down and Agenda 2: Masters of Deceit, which were recently given a rescreening, are full of theory and factual evidence. They document an elaborate military buildup by China over a nearly 100-year period with the intention of obtaining total control over the US and achieving global hegemony. The films also offer up an effective strategy to counter Beijing’s con game.
Taiwanese would benefit from watching them. It might just help Taiwan to avoid being a society further contaminated by communists and prevent the nation from falling into the abyss.
Wu Hui-lin is a researcher at the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research.
Translated by Edward Jones
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
As former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) wrapped up his visit to the People’s Republic of China, he received his share of attention. Certainly, the trip must be seen within the full context of Ma’s life, that is, his eight-year presidency, the Sunflower movement and his failed Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement, as well as his eight years as Taipei mayor with its posturing, accusations of money laundering, and ups and downs. Through all that, basic questions stand out: “What drives Ma? What is his end game?” Having observed and commented on Ma for decades, it is all ironically reminiscent of former US president Harry