In Chinese, words such as freedom, democracy, human rights and humor are all translations of foreign concepts.
As the Chinese proverb goes: “An orange tree from the south will turn into a different plant when grown in the north.”
When Western notions entered China, they became distorted, Sinicized versions of what they originally meant.
On March 31, 2012, the Chinese Web sites Sina and Tencent Weibo were told to “take a holiday” by the government, which shut down their comment sections.
On the third day of the crackdown, a Beijing official shamelessly said that China has the “freest Internet in the world.”
Han Zhen (韓震), Chinese Communist Party (CCP) secretary of the Beijing Foreign Studies University party branch, on Nov. 18 published an article entitled “China is the largest democracy in the modern world” in the CCP-owned magazine Qiushi (求是, “Seeking Truth”).
Although Han knows the word “democracy,” he knows nothing of its definition or meaning. China has no understanding of universal suffrage, why it should count heads instead of breaking them or that replacing the party-state with healthy political competition is part of Democracy 101.
China dares to call itself the largest democracy in the modern world, although “democracy with Chinese characteristics” means having the government decide for the people — to real democracies, this is nothing but a joke.
Any Taiwanese aged 60 or above remembers Taiwan’s past dictators and how they treated people as if they were numbers rather than human beings.
The White Terror era deeply affected every Taiwanese. During that time, the nation was tightly controlled by Chang Kai-shek (蔣介石) and his son Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國), and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) was the nation’s only political party.
Under martial law, anyone could be arrested for “collusion with communists.” People lived in fear, knowing that even staying at home might not prevent them from being accused of promoting communism or hiding communists.
Knowing all these facts about the White Terror era, Ho Chan-hsu (何展旭), a representative of the KMT’s National Policy Foundation think tank and a Chinese living in Taiwan, still denied what happened, saying: “Taiwan did not experience authoritarianism, so how can there be talk of transitional justice?”
Ho’s remarks — completely detached from reality — are part of the KMT’s final battle against the Act on Promoting Transitional Justice (促進轉型正義條例), which was passed on Tuesday.
Such an anti-intellectual representing the KMT’s think tank shows that the party remains unwilling to admit and apologize for its cruelties, injustice and attempts to impose its Chinese version of human rights on Taiwanese for more than six decades.
During a speech on June 18, 2014, at Mansion House in London to British think tanks the Royal Institute of International Affairs and the International Institute of Strategic Studies, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang (李克強) said that Chinese are peace-loving by nature and it is not in the Chinese DNA to desire expansion.
However, China has built artificial islands and military facilities in the South China Sea and continues to send military aircraft and ships near Taiwan and Japan. It has been involved in a series of disputes with Vietnam over the waters, while its standoff with India over disputed border areas remain unresolved.
How is China peace-loving and how are Chinese not interested in expansion? Li’s sense of humor is not interesting or funny, but shocking and appalling.
Chang Kuo-tsai is a retired associate professor at National Hsinchu University of Education and a former deputy secretary-general of the Taiwan Association of University Professors
Translated by Tu Yu-an
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