Fri, Jan 18, 2002 page12

• Public TV wouldn't likely work in Taiwan

  • By Chang Shr-syung 張世雄
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  As the old Chinese saying goes, "A tree's tangerines will become sour if you transplant the tree (逾淮為枳)."

  The same could be said of transplanting foreign systems to Taiwan. Once a supposedly ideal system is adopted in Taiwan, it usually deteriorates because of our overabundant creativity.

  The nation is debating about whether to make local terrestrial television stations public to try to keep them away from political or military control.

  But some people predict that such a plan will fail. Why? The answer to this question is simple, but its social significance is somewhat complex.

  First, the word public is so misused in Taiwan that people are not even sure they want "public" local terrestrial TV stations.

  Consider, for example, the controversial amendment to a video-game bill that will allow video-game arcades to offer tokens to patrons that can be exchanged for gifts at certain "public welfare stations."

  This is a commercial creativity riddled with linguistic equivocation, as the amendment effectively seeks to legalize electronic gambling in the name of promoting public welfare.

  On a superficial level, perhaps this linguistic violence is just a reflection of the twisted values and social chaos of the post-modern period -- where a prostitutes' right to work is used to justify prostitution.

  Moreover, in an extreme case of such linguistic violence, the local media argue that they have reported on and even distributed the sex VCDs involving the New Party's Chu Mei-feng (璩美鳳) in order to serve the public. That same, twisted logic might equally be used to defend drug trafficking.

  But we still have to consider certain characteristics of our social and cultural behavior. Then we can understand that public TV stations are unworkable not because there is no notion of public interest in Taiwan, but because the traditional behavior patterns of Taiwanese people are unsuitable for such a system.

  Those who have optimistically brought to Taiwan the Western concept of a strict "society of citizens" (市民社會) are unaware that what really exists in our culture and daily lives is the spirit of only a very loose "civil society" (民間社會).

  The pursuit of rational and open democratic dialogue will therefore often degenerate into private exchanges of benefits and secret deals that are far from what democratic systems are intended to promote.

  Although we should not underestimate the power of those who are willing to serve society voluntarily, as well as those who devote themselves to humanitarian activities, in the end such power is insufficient to establish a healthy public system.

  Existing cultural values and traditions in our daily lives have limited the establishment of public systems.

  But this does not need to be a permanent state of affairs. In fact, the enlightened education of our children and of society at large are both crucial to the transformation of Taiwan's society. Unfortunately, today's education system needs to be improved urgently, making the reconstruction of our social systems even more complex. Because Taiwan is adopting the US trend of giving schools and teachers more autonomy over what they teach, we have turned our education system into a political game that is full of "political booty-sharing" (政治分贓).

  Is Taiwan's problem a result of its systems, or a result of its unique cultural creativity? The more we consider this issue, the more pessimistic we become.

  Chang Shr-syung is an associate professor of social welfare at National Chung Cheng University.

  Translated by Eddy Chang
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