The nation’s democracy has come a long way since the end of the Martial Law era in 1987. Political parties have been established and the public’s freedoms of expression and publication are protected. Taiwanese have the right to participate in politics, form associations and hold demonstrations — even if these rights are incomplete, limited as they are by such laws as the Referendum Act (公投法), Civil Servants Election and Recall Act (公職人員選舉罷免法), Assembly and Parade Act (集會遊行法) and Civil Associations Act (人民團體法).
However, safeguards for many social and economic rights are still overlooked. The rights to subsistence and to work, environmental rights, as well as rights to housing, education, health, equality and so on are also important, but these rights are violated repeatedly. Collusion between business and elected and appointed officials is commonplace. As long as ordinary people lack the power to monitor and recall bad government officials and elected representatives, they cannot really be called the masters of the nation.
For Taiwan’s democracy to be further deepened, society and the nation must eliminate the feudal elements that persist in interpersonal relations.
These feudal elements arise from the feudal class culture under which Chinese people have lived for thousands of years, which emphasizes the obedience and blind loyalty to higher ranks from the lower. It is a culture in which outcomes are often decided according to who, rather than what, is involved. In the wake of such attitudes come mistrust, fawning, infighting, spying, “gangsterism” and graft. Further, political parties are riddled with factions who allow personal and factional interests to take precedence over those of the party. In turn, the interests of the party take precedence over those of the public and the nation. In describing members of the Control Yuan as “domestic servants,” former Control Yuan president Wang Chien-shien gave expression to the kind of feudal relationship that exists between the leader and the led in the world of officialdom.
In order to deepen Taiwan’s democracy, the nation must abolish these feudal vestiges that lead to inefficiency and the waste of public funds.
A typical example of feudal culture in education is the existence of so-called “scholar-tyrants” — high-ranking academics whose command of resources, power and influence gives them a stranglehold over the academic community. Together with their acolytes, these academic overlords form factions which fight one another. These “scholar-tyrants” have minions to do all the hard work for them. That is how plenty of theses come to be published in the names of people who did not write them, or reviewed by fictitious peers. Chiang Wei-ling (蔣偉寧), who resigned from his post as minister of education last month, is a relatively benign example — there are many others more malignant than he.
Senior officials frequently present themselves as being akin to parents of the public. This is another feudal mindset. If ordinary people have to obey officials as children obey their parents, how can they be the masters of the nation?
As long as society sticks to feudal ways, the nation will remain feudal. China is still a major feudalistic autocracy. Although Taiwan is a newly emerged democracy, feudal attitudes and relationships still persist in families, academia, education, civic groups, local political factions and parties.
Let us hope that the nation can soon rid itself of this “minor feudalism” and become a genuine democracy where everyone is truly free and equal.
Andrew Cheng is a professor of psychiatry and former president of the International Federation of Psychiatric Epidemiology.
Translated by Julian Clegg
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