A la Harry Potter, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) continues to place Taiwanese in the Chamber of Secrets. Secrets? Yes, and we are talking about more than just President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) refusal to provide transparency on the economic cooperation framework agreement, the mythical beast that will salvage his failed economic policies.
As he gives the farm away, Ma wants Taiwanese to blindly trust his last-ditch speculation. The bigger secret we are talking about is the way KMT leaders enter into discourse with China. Just like the fearsome villain of the Harry Potter books, whenever the subject of the country of Taiwan comes up, it is treated like the Voldemort of Asia, “That-which-must-not-be-named.”
KMT Chairman Wu Poh-hsiung (吳伯雄) is the most recent example. In his meeting with Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤), Wu said that he came from and represented “that island over there.” What island over there? Like an uncultivated savage before an emperor, Wu in this belittled way sought to explain his origins, for the country of Taiwan “must not be named” in the presence of Chinese officials. That would supposedly jeopardize negotiations on the farm give-away.
FICTION
Ma similarly refuses to refer to himself as “President of That-which-must-not-be-named.” He hides behind statements like: “We won’t talk about it, if you won’t talk about it.” And of course, the last thing that China wants to talk about or admit is that Taiwan is a country. So Ma obliges them and prefers to go back to talking about the fiction of the “1992 consensus.” Fiction is always better than reality for Ma.
Even the US is party to this fakery. The US State Department prefers to leave it in the limbo of discourse. Some 60 years after World War II, Taiwan’s status is still spoken of as “undetermined.” At least that is better than “That-which-must-not-be-named.”
Others, like former KMT chairman Lien Chan (連戰) and People First Party (PFP) Chairman James Soong (宋楚瑜), missing the good old days of the privileged KMT one-party state, have sought to keep their dinner and state invitations to China open. They have regularly refused to mention the sovereignty of Taiwan in China.
That is understandable, however, since neither of them was ever able to win the presidency of Taiwan in free elections.
Thus they may be looking for last-ditch ways to prolong their defunct political careers. Is there an age limit on being appointed Provincial Governor in China?
So the list goes on and on; no one in the KMT dares to mention Taiwan’s sovereignty or its president in front of any Chinese officials or to promote its democracy.
IRONY
But then comes the irony of ironies, the embarrassment of embarrassments: A woman, Chen Chu (陳菊) the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) mayor of Kaohsiung, has dared to name the unnamable and speak the unspeakable in China. And even stranger than that, stranger than fiction, she has managed to survive in the dragon’s den, lived to tell the tale and return safely to her country, Taiwan.
What remains is for the rest of the world to learn that reality is better than fiction.
Leave the fictional world of Harry Potter behind and face the reality of the 21st century. Taiwan is Taiwan; China is China. Dispense with the hypocrisies, dispense with the chamber of secrets; from now on, no one should be afraid to name “That-which-must-not-be-named.”
Jerome Keating is a writer based in Taipei.
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