Sat, Nov 16, 2002 page8

• Editorial: Taiwan needs a flag to call its own

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  At a campaign rally last Sunday presidential advisor Alice King (金美齡) said that she found the sight of the ROC flag offensive. And so do we. And so should anybody who supports democracy in Taiwan and self-determination for the people of Taiwan. The ROC flag is a piece of KMT self-aggrandizement masquerading as a national icon. It is the symbol of the one-party state the KMT intended the ROC to be.

  The white sun and blue background motif was a logo adopted by Sun Yat-sen's (孫中山) Society for Regenerating China (興中會) in 1895. The crimson background was added to the society's flag before the 1911 Chinese revolution. The society became the KMT in 1919 and proclaimed its flag to be the Chinese flag in 1921. Until that time the ROC had used an entirely different five-colored striped flag, each color supposedly representing the five major ethnic groups in China.

  So let it be clear, the flag the ROC uses is not a sacred symbol of the Chinese revolution -- and of course we might argue what the revolution itself has to do with Taiwan, at that time a Japanese colony -- it is a sacred symbol of the KMT. Is it fitting to have such a symbol in a democracy? Imagine if the US Republicans sought to replace the Stars and Stripes with a large elephant in a red white and blue background. It seems laughable; actually it's contempt-ible, and it is the reality of Taiwan's so-called national symbol. Actually the message of the current flag is quite clear, and that is that the ROC was meant to be a one-party state, ruled forever by the Leninist KMT. How in these democratic days can anyone countenance such a thing?

  Of course the ROC flag is one of the world's more unusual -- in that it is rarely allowed to be flown outside of the ROC. Such is Taiwan's international isolation that all it usually gets to show is the equally ridiculous plum-blossom flag, which is also, incidentally, adorned with the repulsive KMT symbol.

  If the flag wasn't bad enough the national anthem is even more of a disgrace. One gags on the first line: "The Three Principles of the People is the goal of our party." Of course it's not surprising that the anthem sounds like a KMT party song; it is is a KMT party song, adopted as such in 1928.

  The assumption behind the flag and anthem, as the luckless Presidential Office Secretary-General Chen Shih-meng (陳師孟) pointed out earlier this week was that the KMT was going to rule China for ever. Such a sentiment can hardly be appropriate in these more democratic days.

  Countries do, of course, change their flags when their circumstances change. Many of the countries of Eastern Europe remodeled their flags after emerging from Soviet domination. Russia itself changed its flag when the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991. Should Scotland ever separate from the UK, no doubt the Union flag -- one of the world's most readily identifiable -- will also change.

  Yesterday TSU Legislator Chien-Lin Hui-chun (錢林慧君) said that the flag should be changed "to better reflect the truth." What is that truth? For many years it was that Taiwan was a territory illegally annexed after World War II by the so-called ROC and ruled as a colony thereof. This is no longer the case. It is separate, an independent country and it is time that it developed the symbols to stress this.

  In this light it is a wretched shame that the president in his lack of wisdom saw fit to stamp down hard on the debate that Chen Shih-meng opened up this week. The longer this administration lasts the more it feels like a KMT administration in all but name.
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