At a Taipei City Council meeting, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) City Councilor Li Keng Kuei-fang (厲耿桂芳) asked Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) if he would dare to say that he was Taiwanese as well as Chinese.
Ko’s answer was that “there is no standard answer to that question. I think of myself as a member of the Chinese cultural area.”
Taipei Department of Education Deputy Commissioner Tseng Tsan-chin (曾燦金), who was also at the meeting, said: “I am a person from the Chinese region,” while Taipei Cultural Affairs Commissioner Chung Yung-feng (鍾永豐) said: “I am a Taiwanese who is influenced by Chinese culture.”
The three responses are all expected products of the KMT’s educational system. Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) knew what he was doing when he shouted himself hoarse promoting the revival of Chinese culture. When the KMT fled to Taiwan after having been defeated by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the Chinese Civil War and discovered that Taiwanese were not attracted to the Three Principles of the People, he played the last card in his hand — the Chinese culture card.
As the communists on the other side of the Taiwan Strait were “yellow Russians” and the destroyers of Chinese culture, the KMT was the only entity fit to pass on Chinese culture. Although the KMT was defeated on the battlefield, it could still defeat the communists when it came to poetry, literature and culture, preserving a slice of a utopian and cultural paradise.
As a result, Taiwan was inundated with streets named after Confucian concepts, such as Siwei (四維, “the four social bonds”), Bade (八德, “the eight virtues”), Renai (仁愛, “benevolence”) and Xinyi (信義, “trust and justice”), while Taiwanese were taught to affect Confucian courtesy and sanctimonious demeanor.
This is why, many years later — following the bloody Cultural Revolution — when Chinese tourists started traveling to Taiwan, they would stop and say with surprise: “So Taiwan is the place where we can find Chinese culture.”
However, this kind of self-evidently “truthful, high-quality Chinese culture” is nothing more than a rainbow-colored soap bubble: an illusion. Chinese culture has never been as dignified, righteous and forceful as recorded in the “Four Books” and “Five Classics.”
In the words of Chinese author Lu Xun (魯迅), Chinese culture “eats people” (吃人), historian Bo Yang (柏陽) called it the “never-changing Chinese value system” (醬缸文化, literally “soy sauce jar culture”) and Chinese writer Liu Xiaobo (劉曉波) referred to it as “knockout drops” (蒙汗藥).
Many Chinese — including many Taiwanese — are guilty of believing in two specious concepts.
First, they think that the CCP and China can be looked at separately; that the CCP is bad and China is good, and that as long as the party disappears, China will once again become good and pure. This is an utterly absurd idea. There would have been no CCP without China, as China was the hotbed for the party. The CCP is much more evil than the communist parties in other countries and it is also more long-lived — it might become the world’s longest-ruling communist party.
The second misconception is that the CCP and Chinese culture can be looked at separately; that the party is bad and Chinese culture is good, and that once the foreign Marxist-Leninist thought can be uprooted and eliminated, the culture will shine in all its glory and become the savior of the world. This is another utterly absurd idea. The CCP is a flower of evil, born of the soil that nurtured Chinese culture.
Mao Zedong (毛澤東) read many more Chinese classics than he read works by Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin. He absorbed most of his crazy and perverted ideas from old Chinese works. He might have criticized Confucius, but he was obsessed by the legalists and praised tyrants — such as Qin Shi Huang (秦始皇), the first emperor of the Qin Dynasty, and Zhu Yuanzhang (朱元璋), who founded the Ming Dynasty and ruled as Emperor Hongwu (洪武) — and imitated them.
What is Chinese culture? Chinese culture is not a good thing. It is lies, it is violence and it is personality cults. It is the erosion of Taiwanese society by Chinese culture that has resulted in the bizarre phenomenon that is Taipei’s mayor, Ko, and it is the erosion of Chinese society by Chinese culture that has resulted in the bizarre phenomenon that is the personality cult of Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平).
Chinese culture is turning China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and every place with Chinese people into a dye workshop, a crocodile pond, an Animal Farm and a miserable world.
Yu Jie is an exiled Chinese dissident writer.
Translated by Perry Svensson
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