In a strange twist of fate, Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) and former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) on Tuesday gave speeches that targeted the young people of their respective nations.
In his speech in the Great Hall of the People to commemorate the centennial of the May Fourth Movement, Xi said it was shameful if a person was not patriotic, adding that in today’s China: “The essence of patriotism is to combine one’s love for the country with love for the party and socialism.”
Ma was also focused on patriotism, albeit a bit more obliquely, as he reiterated comments he made in December last year when he was plugging former Presidential Office deputy secretary-general Hsiao Hsu-tsen’s (蕭旭岑) account of Ma’s two terms in office and lamenting the failure to implement the 2013 Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement.
Xi told his audience that it was through the May Fourth Movement that “the youth of China discovered their own power. The Chinese people and the Chinese nation discovered their own power.”
What is so paradoxical about Xi’s hour-long oration is that he is simply the latest in a line of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leaders who have tried to co-opt the 1919 student-led movement against Western imperialism, which morphed into a call for cultural, scientific and political changes to modernize China.
The party has demonstrated time and again that it will not tolerate a protest such as the one staged by thousands of students who marched on Tiananmen Square in 1919, from the crushing of the Hundred Flowers Campaign in 1956 and the brutal military crackdown in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, to Xi’s own campaign in the past few years to eradicate those calling for the human, civil and religious rights guaranteed in the People’s Republic of China’ constitution to be actually enforced.
The CCP does not really want the youth of China to think too much outside its own strict parameters and Xi is trying to whitewash Chinese history by glossing over the May Fourth Movement’s anti-authority theme.
As Xu Zhangrun (許章潤), a law professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, told the New York Times, May 4 represents a time when the Chinese “awoke” to their right and duty to speak out about the nation’s political future.
The right and duty to be concerned about one’s nation’s future is a key element of patriotism by almost anyone’s definition. However, it is exactly that kind of right and duty on the part of Taiwanese students that have put them in such disfavor with Ma.
In his speech, Ma said the youth-led Sunflower movement of 2014 should share the blame — alongside the Democratic Progressive Party — for the sorry state of Taiwan’s economy. Calling them “sinners,” he said it was their obstruction of the service trade agreement that led to its failure.
Ma could have borrowed a line from Xi, who said that young people need to avoid what he called “mistaken thoughts.”
It was the effort by Ma’s administration and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) to rush the treaty through the Legislative Yuan without a clause-by-clause review that triggered protests by students and civic groups, which became known as the Sunflower movement.
It was because young people were concerned about the nation’s economy that they occupied the Legislative Yuan in March 2014. They were not sinning — they were voicing their concerns. They were being patriotic.
Hiding behind nationalism to suppress the rights of citizens is an authoritarian tactic. Taiwan’s democracy is stronger and more vibrant today because of the actions of those who spoke out and acted in 2014.
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