Two stories about the callous indifference of some humans made headlines this week, and while the details are completely different, the protagonists’ blinkered view of the world unites them.
The first story was about a 23-year-old man who died during a marathon gaming session at an Internet cafe and whose body sat unremarked by other gamers for more than 12 hours. Police said they were surprised that the other patrons were barely disturbed from their screens while they conducted their investigation. It was that reluctance to stop playing that was offensive. One might also ask why police did not clear the venue, after taking the patrons’ details and statements, and make them go out into the real world.
However, far more disturbing were comments from China Times owner and Want Want Group chairman Tsai Eng-meng (蔡衍明), who made headlines this week for an interview published in the Washington Post on Jan. 21.
Tsai told the Post that he used to fear the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and did not want to do business in China, but he changed his mind after the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, which he does not consider a massacre at all. He said he was struck by the image of a lone man standing in front of a line of tanks and that the man wasn’t killed.
“I realized that not that many people could really have died,” he was quoted as saying.
Since he gained the spotlight with these comments, Tsai has said his remarks were taken out of context and he would ask the Post for a correction. One might ask why he took three weeks to realize that there was a problem with the story. Perhaps he was too busy jetting back and forth to China in his bright red corporate plane to have the Post story translated.
Or maybe he just dismissed it, just as he apparently dismissed other images from Tiananmen, of bicycles crushed under tank treads and pools of blood on the road, of wounded people being rushed to hospitals in wooden carts and on friends’ backs. One wonders just how many people would have to be killed before Tsai would consider it a massacre?
However, it was not just the comments about Tiananmen that were offensive. He also thinks that China “is very democratic in lots of places” and that elections are fine, but economics should come first.
“From the standpoint of ordinary people, the most important thing is to eat a little better, sleep a little better and be a little happier,” the Post quoted him as saying. No wonder he gets along so well with the CCP and wants to see Taiwan united with China as soon as possible. His vision of democracy is in sync with that of the CCP leadership.
Tsai may not think much of elections, but most Taiwanese value their hard-won chance to have a say about who governs them and how. Why should they go back into the dark ages of the Martial Law era, which is what Chinese rule would bring. It certainly would not make them sleep better or feel happier, no matter what Tsai thinks.
He also told the Post that he only wants to help Taiwan get over its wariness of China. What he does not seem to understand is that it is Beijing’s own actions — events like Tiananmen, the imprisonment of Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo (劉曉波), the persecution of people like Ai Weiwei (艾未未), Gao Yaojie (高耀潔), Tibetan and Uighur rights activists and far too many others, the laughable system that Beijing calls its judiciary and the outright venality of CCP officials — that has made Taiwanese wary of China.
Not everyone can be blind to man’s inhumanity to man. Both the Internet cafe patrons and Tsai have been tested and found to be sadly wanting in humanity. Perhaps the young people in the cafe will have been sobered by their experience and emerge the better for it. However, Want Want’s boss will still be found wanting.
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan. In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new
If you had a vision of the future where China did not dominate the global car industry, you can kiss those dreams goodbye. That is because US President Donald Trump’s promised 25 percent tariff on auto imports takes an ax to the only bits of the emerging electric vehicle (EV) supply chain that are not already dominated by Beijing. The biggest losers when the levies take effect this week would be Japan and South Korea. They account for one-third of the cars imported into the US, and as much as two-thirds of those imported from outside North America. (Mexico and Canada, while
I have heard people equate the government’s stance on resisting forced unification with China or the conditional reinstatement of the military court system with the rise of the Nazis before World War II. The comparison is absurd. There is no meaningful parallel between the government and Nazi Germany, nor does such a mindset exist within the general public in Taiwan. It is important to remember that the German public bore some responsibility for the horrors of the Holocaust. Post-World War II Germany’s transitional justice efforts were rooted in a national reckoning and introspection. Many Jews were sent to concentration camps not
RSS