“Taiwan sacrificed its environment for industry,” says Liang Yeon-fong (梁永芳), a bespectacled, quietly spoken gentleman who knows what he’s talking about. A fully paid up member of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) for four decades, he started working as an adviser for the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) soon after it was formed in 1987, leaving only a few years ago.
When the Japanese left the country in 1945, he says, they left it in fairly good shape. But when the KMT arrived, trees became timber, the mountains were stripped and claimed as betel nut and tea plantations. The island was plundered of its natural riches, while countless tons of cement were poured to produce highways and houses, factories and sea defenses.
This rape of the land left it filled with trash, the air foul, rivers flooded with pig effluent and chemicals. Ugly, good for nothing but production, Taiwan lost her beauty but created an economic miracle for the country’s new regime. Liang observes the relatively untouched eastern side of the island from Hualian to Taitung was “the only paradise left.”
Photo: Jules Quartly
It’s refreshing to hear a KMT official being so honest about the party’s past mistakes. “Politicians come and go, but Taiwan is the environment,” says the 67-year-old. It was his job as a civil servant at the EPA to clear up the mess and that’s what he did. As we know, the job is only half done.
Like many KMT party members, Liang and his family were not part of the 1949 exodus from China following the civil war. He describes himself as a “moderate benshengren” (本省人), those who came to Taiwan before World War II; as opposed to the KMT outsiders, or waishengren (外省人), who came afterwards.
His family were farmers from Kaohsiung. “They felt secure under Japanese rule because Taiwanese society was preserved and kept safe. But when the KMT came over it was chaotic. The soldiers were wild and undisciplined. My mother didn’t feel safe walking home at night after working in the fields because there was a danger of being raped, or worse.”
“There was no trust in the KMT or China,” he says, explaining to some extent the country’s North-South political divide and widespread distrust of China to this day.
But you go with the flow. When Liang finished college he had to do his military service. There was martial law and no opposition parties. “If you didn’t join the KMT they would make sure your life was miserable,” he says.
A big brain, he did well in his chosen subject of agricultural chemistry and eventually won a scholarship to study at the University of Alabama, in the US. After completing his post-doctoral research at Texas A&M, he worked for a number of American companies, from oil to plastics engineering. It was only after his wife was diagnosed with cancer that they returned to Taiwan.
Interestingly, it was his wife who was keen on the US. “I always wanted to return. In my opinion, most men (who left Taiwan for the US) were not happy with the American Dream. They were lonesome, they didn’t mingle much with other Americans and weren’t at home in the culture.”
Eventually, Liang married again and has three children, who live in the US, Taiwan or both. He joined the EPA in 1989 and began to tackle the mountains of trash that were on every corner, in the mountains and by the sea.
Since there wasn’t much land, it was decided that incineration was the way to go. In 15 to 20 years, the government built 24 incinerators. There were fears they brewed up poisonous dioxins, there were demonstrations from a nascent and highly politicized environmental movement, but gradually the trash was tamed.
The next big issue was energy, specifically nuclear energy.
“In the 1970s there was martial law and no problems because the people had no voice. But in the 90s there was a movement against nuclear power. We built four nuclear power stations and three ran smoothly, but opposition to the fourth [New Taipei City’s Gongliao District (貢寮)] was enormous.”
Though the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) campaigned on a anti-nuclear platform in 2000, former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) did a rapid about-turn after a visit from the American Institute in Taiwan, Liang says. Money (General Electric was hired to build the reactor, while the US supplied fuel for the other three reactors), fear and military protection swayed the day.
Chen’s political compromise eventually came to naught and the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant is mothballed today. Liang suggests it should be a nuclear museum.
“The only museum in the world fully demonstrating the past, present and future of the nuclear industry. At US$10 billion, it will also be the world’s most expensive museum,” he says, laughing at the absurdity.
For someone who has been a government official for much of his working life, it’s surely understandable that Liang is suspicious of politicians. He describes Taiwan’s democracy as immature and believes many of the country’s leaders are in it for gain, rather than good.
Even so, he calls the soon departed President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) a man of integrity, “a model individual but not a good politician.” He says Ma’s failure was to surround himself with academics rather than realists. Liang also admits Ma’s pro-China policy backfired, since he thought he was leading but turned out to be led by China.
“It’s a good idea to make money, rather than make war. But we lost our advantage to China, in industry, agriculture and high-tech. That, and Taiwan’s people became afraid he would lead us into China. I don’t think he had that intention, but that was the feeling. The grassroots don’t want to be part of China.”
He believes the KMT has to “Taiwanize” and divorce itself from the historical legacy of Sun Yat-sen (孫逸仙) and China to remake itself. He’s hoping for a strong, new KMT leader who is Taiwan-centric.
As for the incoming president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), she’s “moderate DPP,” hasn’t riled the Chinese by calling for independence, is business friendly and international in her outlook. “She looks competent,” he says. “But they all look competent to begin with.”
He believes environmental policies are increasingly important to the public and sees them as a corrective to long-term overdevelopment. He wants overpasses built of recyclable steel rather than cement blocks, and better landscaping. He wants technology to protect the environment, rather than spoil it. He hopes industries that create a mess, like intensive pig farming and cement production, are culled. “We sacrifice the environment for so little gain.”
“I would prefer tourism to industry,” he says citing the record 10 million people who visited Taiwan last year. He also adds that in the case of China’s dust storms, warming and the icecaps melting; these are international issues needing a global response. “Actually the environment has no borders, so we should cooperate and this will bring us together.”
1 0H 1: Can refer to Taipei 101; an introductory course or analysis; One uh One, a spare male at a party, or a useless person — always male; there are about 1.01 men for every 1 woman, thus, every one hundred and first male is not going to find a partner; a one-on-one interview
May 6 to May 12 Those who follow the Chinese-language news may have noticed the usage of the term zhuge (豬哥, literally ‘pig brother,’ a male pig raised for breeding purposes) in reports concerning the ongoing #Metoo scandal in the entertainment industry. The term’s modern connotations can range from womanizer or lecher to sexual predator, but it once referred to an important rural trade. Until the 1970s, it was a common sight to see a breeder herding a single “zhuge” down a rustic path with a bamboo whip, often traveling large distances over rugged terrain to service local families. Not only
Ahead of incoming president William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20 there appear to be signs that he is signaling to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and that the Chinese side is also signaling to the Taiwan side. This raises a lot of questions, including what is the CCP up to, who are they signaling to, what are they signaling, how with the various actors in Taiwan respond and where this could ultimately go. In the last column, published on May 2, we examined the curious case of Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) heavyweight Tseng Wen-tsan (鄭文燦) — currently vice premier
The last time Mrs Hsieh came to Cihu Park in Taoyuan was almost 50 years ago, on a school trip to the grave of Taiwan’s recently deceased dictator. Busloads of children were brought in to pay their respects to Chiang Kai-shek (蔣中正), known as Generalissimo, who had died at 87, after decades ruling Taiwan under brutal martial law. “There were a lot of buses, and there was a long queue,” Hsieh recalled. “It was a school rule. We had to bow, and then we went home.” Chiang’s body is still there, under guard in a mausoleum at the end of a path
Last week the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) released a set of very strange numbers on Taiwan’s wealth distribution. Duly quoted in the Taipei Times, the report said that “The Gini coefficient for Taiwanese households… was 0.606 at the end of 2021, lower than Australia’s 0.611, the UK’s 0.620, Japan’s 0.678, France’s 0.676 and Germany’s 0.727, the agency said in a report.” The Gini coefficient is a measure of relative inequality, usually of wealth or income, though it can be used to evaluate other forms of inequality. However, for most nations it is a number from .25 to .50