During the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) years of brainwashing, the most common subject for student essays was “the person I most admire.”
In those days, an essay written under such a title was expected to be about “the father of the nation,” meaning Sun Yat-sen (孫中山), or then-president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石). It certainly would not be about Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leaders such as Zhu De (朱德), Mao Zedong (毛澤東) or Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平).
Such essays were no more than fairy tales, but some people took them on faith.
Who would have thought that when 69-year-old KMT Chairman Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) was asked the same question on Thursday last week in an interview, his answer would span both sides of the Taiwan Strait and mix chalk and cheese by naming former president Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國) and Deng as his favorite people.
Wu said he admired them, because Chiang Ching-kuo carried out the “10 major construction projects” and the “10-point administrative reform,” while Deng set China on the path of reform and opening up.
The KMT chairman’s favorite people include former leaders of the KMT and the CCP. Former president and KMT chairman Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), who Wu once lauded as a “rare talent,” was not on his list, nor was Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平).
Wu changes color quicker than a chameleon.
Chiang Ching-kuo and Deng both studied at the Moscow Sun Yat-sen University and became members of the Soviet Union’s All-Union Leninist Young Communist League, where they underwent the kind of education typical of a Leninist party dictatorship.
Deng later rose through the ranks of Mao’s CCP, from which he was purged and rose again three times on his way to becoming China’s paramount leader.
Meanwhile, Chiang Ching-kuo was elevated on account of his father, Chiang Kai-shek, who he ended up following to Taiwan.
As leader of China, Deng promoted “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” which involved half-baked reforms and maintaining a political dictatorship, while setting the economy on a capitalist path that led to a huge wealth gap and widespread corruption.
He left a shady legacy by purging CCP general secretaries Hu Yaobang (胡耀邦) and Zhao Ziyang (趙紫陽), and calling the Chinese People’s Liberation Army to massacre students and crush the 1989 pro-democracy movement.
Deng worked to undo Mao’s legacy, but Xi is now trying to reinstate it.
As for Wu, he has the gall to mock Xi by putting Deng first.
Some people have said that Chiang Ching-kuo was only authoritarian when fighting corruption, but those who experienced the regimes of both Chiangs know what a lie that is.
In the late 1940s, Deng, along with military commander Liu Bocheng (劉伯承), led the CCP’s Central China Field Army, which was locked in fierce combat with KMT forces.
Deng also oversaw the normalization of relations between China and the US, thus sounding the death knell for the KMT’s foreign relations, and called on Chiang Ching-kuo to surrender.
If Taiwanese still admire Chiang Ching-kuo for anything, it is for his steadfast refusal to surrender to China and for ending martial law, albeit toward the end of his presidency.
How can Wu list two such bitter opponents as the people he most admires? It is just another joke that underlines his contradictory, dishonest and fence-sitting character.
James Wang is a media commentator.
Translated by Julian Clegg
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