Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Vice Chairman Hau Lung-bin’s (郝龍斌) response to Tuesday’s slapping incident involving Minister of Culture Cheng Li-Chiun (鄭麗君) and a supporter of Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) shows how difficult it is to implement transitional justice in Taiwan.
Cheng was slapped in the face at a public event by former entertainer Lisa Cheng (鄭心儀), who told a cameraman immediately afterward that she should have slapped Cheng twice for “being ungrateful” by trying to shut down the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall.
Hau said on Facebook that the slap was the result of “the government forcing people to rebel” against desinicization efforts.
Hau went so far as to compare Lisa Cheng to several members of the public who stormed into the house of a father and beat him up after footage emerged of him allegedly hitting his child and wife for forgetting to ask for hot sauce on a meatball.
“Why did they want to teach him [the father] a lesson? Because people have had enough of this kind of thing and can no longer tolerate it,” Hau said, insinuating that the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) government’s transitional justice effort is as intolerable as domestic violence.
After his post was criticized, Hau justified his comments by pointing out what he perceived to be the DPP’s track record of condoning “violent behavior” by its supporters, such as vandalizing statues of Chiang, burning Republic of China flags and hurling shoes at former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九).
Hau’s remarks underline several problems, and while the pan-blue camp is to blame for most of them, the pan-green camp shares some responsibility.
One of the main reasons the attempt to remove authoritarian symbols has been extremely challenging is because there are some groups, especially those who retreated to Taiwan with Chiang’s regime in 1949 and their descendants, who still see him as a heroic figure who did more good than harm.
As the public’s stance on most issues tends to fall along party lines, it can be argued that if the KMT had taken the high road by telling its supporters it believed in the long-term benefits of transitional justice, public resistance to the removal of images of Chiang would be far lower. Instead, tensions between the pan-blue and pan-green camps over transitional justice has only escalated because of remarks such as Hau’s — which could incite more violence — and the oft-adopted strategy of other high-ranking KMT members, who have said that transitional justice is a political witch hunt.
Meanwhile, the DPP government’s lack of criticism regarding sporadic vandalism of statues of Chiang — which the pan-blue camp considers provocative and violent — has been viewed as tacit encouragement. This, coupled with the tendency of some hardline independence advocates to resort to high-profile, provocative acts to attract attention to their cause — one of them called on other like-minded people to seek revenge by tearing down statues in their neighborhood following the slapping incident — has created a vicious cycle of violence surrounding transitional justice. This is why useful dialogue across party lines has been nothing but a pipe dream.
Although it has proven to be almost impossible for the green and blue camps to work together, for transitional justice to be implemented peacefully, they need to begin discussions to decide what changes are necessary and where compromise might be possible.
More importantly, they should neither condone nor incite violent acts and should adopt a unified, zero-tolerance stance on violence.
This is the first necessary step toward making it possible to have rational public discourse on transitional justice.
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