Chou Chin-cheng (周晉澄), the dean of National Taiwan University’s School of Veterinary Medicine, was one of those invited to take part in a technical advisory group meeting on US beef last week. Chou called for the meeting to be held openly and for everything that was said to be made public, but his suggestion was not accepted.
The other experts were not willing to go along with his idea, and the Ministry of Agriculture went so far as to tell those in attendance not to talk about it in public. Chou found it unacceptable that the meeting should be held behind closed doors and did not want to endorse its decisions if they were made in private, so he walked out of the meeting in anger 10 minutes after it began.
Chou is to be admired for his courage, rectitude and adherence to scholarly principles.
Sad to say, there are few experts and academics in Taiwan these days who would insist on holding a meeting in a fair and principled way, and for that reason one has to worry about Chou’s prospects after making such a stand.
If the government has to deal with similar problems in future, it definitely won’t invite Chou to be an advisor or assessor. From now on, his prospects in the world of academic politics will be rather limited. It would not be surprising if he runs into difficulties in applying for research funding from the National Science Council or the Ministry of Education.
For one thing, his action runs contrary to the values of today’s academia, so he is sure to be penalized within the system. For another, Chou’s case touches upon two of the most important questions in politics today — the question of how government manipulates public and expert opinion to make them serve its own purposes, and that of how it keeps experts under control and penalizes them if they step out of line.
Nearly 100 years ago, US political commentator Walter Lippman observed that one of the greatest crises of modern politics is that governments employ trickery, propaganda, selective news reporting and various other means to manipulate public opinion. Lippman described this kind of setup as one in which the government processes and manufactures public consent, and he said that this kind of manipulation of public opinion was becoming more widespread while the methods used became more refined.
Our government under President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), for example, has long since mastered the art of manipulating public opinion. Whenever a problem crops up, the government knows how to use media and pundits to release an overwhelming barrage of propaganda to support its cause. It is very good at reviewing its own position and censoring any information that is unfavorable to it, or else blurring the focus of discussion. That accomplished, a confused public can be expected to let things proceed in the direction dictated by the government. The issue of the so-called “1992 consensus” that Ma and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) played upon in the Jan. 14 elections is a fine example of this kind of manipulation.
Among the various ways of manipulating public opinion, securing endorsement from experts and academics is most common and has grown into a big collaborative network. Whenever an issue crops up in which bureaucrats realize that their views are not authoritative enough, they can always find plenty of experts to back them up. These people’s academic prestige is often enough to put a veneer of acceptability on an unreasonable policy.
Contemporary US historian Russell Jacoby says that academic research work is dreary and lonely, but that if academics hook up with powerful people they can get out of the rut and become famous pundits. If they do a good job of endorsing their patrons, they are sure to be well rewarded. They may even be given jobs as ministers or department chiefs. That is why it is so easy for collaborative networks to be formed in which powerful people find experts to endorse their policies.
The Ma administration has a well-established network of connivance between officials and academics. Every ministry, department, bureau and office has its list of fellow-traveler academics who can be called upon when needed to serve on advisory and appraisal committees and endorse official policies. Their meetings are always held behind closed doors, and officials always make up more than half the members of each committee, to make sure that things do not go the wrong way even if the discussion gets a bit out of control.
The recent meeting about US beef was held in private, with more than half the committee members being bureaucrats, and this is the usual state of affairs. There is nothing unusual about experts and academics being used to usher through and endorse official policy.
As Taiwan and US reopen their negotiations about beef imports, the whole logic involved in the arguments has been turned topsy-turvy. To begin with, the government tied the US beef issue in with the proposed US-Taiwan Trade and Investment Framework Agreement (TIFA), trying to scare the public by suggesting that the TIFA could not be signed if talks on US beef were not reopened. Now, however, Premier Sean Chen (陳冲) says that negotiations about US beef should not be linked to the TIFA.
Evidently the US has turned down Taiwan’s request for negotiations, and even if talks are reopened the US still will not sign a TIFA.
Having finished with the TIFA argument, the government has started scrabbling for evidence to back up the idea that the cattle and hog feed additive ractopamine is not harmful and is desperately trying to find experts to endorse its preposterous policy. Its efforts to manipulate public opinion on this occasion have been very crude.
Chou made a stand by refusing to endorse the official position. The connivance between politicians and academics to manipulate public opinion can only be broken by letting people know what goes on in committee meetings. It is regrettable, therefore, that all the other experts and academics attending the last did not follow Chou’s example. Instead, they insisted that the meeting should not be made public, because only if it was held in private could they avoid public scrutiny of whether they were acting in good conscience.
One of the ways that meetings are kept under control these days is to make decisions by secret ballot. When voting is done in secret, it makes it easy for those attending to evade responsibility. When an unjust decision is made, they can claim that it was not themselves, but all the other people that made it. What they don’t realize is that at the moment they willingly act as rubber stamps to endorse government policy, they become accomplices to the crime.
In recent times the powerful have become accustomed to manipulating public opinion. The US beef issue carries all the hallmarks of such manipulation. By walking out of the meeting, Chou showed that he was not willing to be manipulated. Other experts and academics should have the courage to follow his example, because only when they refuse to act as rubber stamps for official policy can the public be protected.
If the public interest is to be upheld, our respected academics and experts must have the guts to stand by their principles.
Nan Fang Shuo is a columnist.
Translated by Julian Clegg
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