The logic of China's realpolitik has never eschewed cognitive dissonance. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that while that country undertakes a huge crackdown on religious groups, it is organizing by proxy a frenzy of religious fervor here in Taiwan.
Surely our readers are politically sophisticated enough that we don't have to explain to them just how ridiculous is the notion that the Buddha's finger being sent here from China just happened to be a friendly gesture between two temples yearning for cross-strait peace. For all his appearance of saintly asceticism, the mainland-born Master Hsing Yun (
What is going on here is actually part of a long-running strategy which seems to be gaining momentum. It is a deliberate attempt by Chinese authorities to oppose as best they can, manipulating what we might call cultural and heritage-related capital, of which they have a lot at their disposal, the trend in Taiwan of nativization or, as they prefer to call it -- we assume because it sounds like a rejection of something and therefore "bad" -- "de-Sinicization."
Taiwan has a number of interesting cultural transformations occurring at the the same time. At the institutional level there is a changing of the cultural guard. The mainlanders who dominated Taiwan's cultural and educational institutions throughout the KMT occupation are retiring and dying off. For 40 years they peddled a fraudulent, but widely believed, ideology that Taiwan was simply a region of China and Taiwan's culture was simply Chinese culture. Now they are rapidly being replaced by a generation of Taiwanese who as research students in the 1980s rejected a "Chinese heritage" as the pet ideology of a despised regime and who have built their careers on redefining Taiwan as a "new country" with a 400-year history characterized by a uniquely developing "frontier" society with diverse ethnic and cultural inputs. And along with this hugely important change among the educational and cultural elite has been the development of a popular culture which looks for its models first to Japan and then to the US. Who can name a Chinese pop cultural artiste with iconic status here in Taiwan?
So China is losing the Kulturkampf. How can it fight back? By using its own cultural capital to awe the people of Taiwan. In the past year or so we have seen terracotta warriors, dinosaur fossils and now the Buddha's finger. You don't have to be Roland Barthes to work out what the connotation is here, namely how amazingly rich China's cultural heritage is and how the people of Taiwan would impoverish themselves by deliberately alienating themselves from it. It might not be a subtle ploy, but it might be effective in a way that political nonsense about "the motherland" and "one country, two systems" could never be. Many people see longevity and production or possession of impressive artifacts as indicative of a culture's worth.
These recent spectacles all deliver the same message, namely look at what you too, as a Chinese -- or in the case of the finger, as a Buddhist -- can lay claim to as part of your heritage as long as you accept that "Chineseness." That the heritage is cultural or religious and "Chineseness" is political is a transition in meaning that is carefully obscured.
How many might be taken in by China's strategy here we cannot guess. We can, however, wonder why the government facilitates this sort of event. And, by the way, if anyone gets tired of the Buddhist chanting that goes with viewing the reliquary, a suitable change of soundtrack might be Oh, what a circus from Evita.
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