Not long ago, Hon Hai Precision Industry Co chairman and Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) presidential hopeful Terry Gou (郭台銘) said in a TV interview: “I’m opposed to buying arms from the US, because when you have a lot of arms on hand, someone will hit the place where you put your arms, so where our artillery is is where we will be attacked and the surrounding area will be full of bomb craters. If you have no knife and no gun, perhaps someone won’t attack you.”
Of all democratic nations, Taiwan is probably one of very few where such a person could run for president and earn the trust and admiration of “economic voters” for being as wealthy as a small country.
Gou might have been doing business in China for more than 30 years, building the Hon Hai empire and earning mountains of money on the back of the blood, sweat, tears and even dead bodies of Chinese workers, but this statement shows that he has not learned to understand the innate character of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
His understanding of China certainly does not measure up to the naive and innocent students who were slaughtered in the Tiananmen Massacre on June 4, 1989.
The students in Beijing 30 years ago were armed with nothing but passionate patriotism and yearning for democracy. The vast majority could never have imagined that the CCP regime would send out a fierce field army with tanks, machine guns and dumdum bullets to kill them.
Following Gou’s logic, the CCP should not have killed them, since these students and Beijing residents had neither knives, nor guns nor the ambition to overthrow the CCP government.
Still, they were fired upon.
Zhang Jian (張健) — a student at Beijing Sport University and a Tiananmen leader who on April 15 passed away while traveling due to sudden ascites, an abnormal buildup of fluid in the abdomen — was only 17 years old in 1989. As he was strong and forceful, he became the leader of the security team.
On the evening of the massacre, he was hit by three bullets. The last one was lodged in his leg and he had to live with it for 20 years until French doctors could remove it when he moved to France in 2008 and was given health insurance.
He gave the bullet to the June 4th Museum in Hong Kong, so whenever Gou passes through, there is nothing to stop him from visiting the museum to see what a bullet looks like after having been lodged in a person for 20 years.
This bullet unambiguously states that the CCP kills people, not because they are armed and not because their arsenal equals the party’s, but because when the CCP has defined you as its enemy, it does not matter if it is the KMT that has already laid down its arms and surrendered, childish students who only want to protest against corruption, Tibetan monks draped in robes, unarmed Uighur intellectuals or Nobel Peace Price laureate Liu Xiaobo (劉曉波) saying: “I have no enemies” — it will just kill you, and rejoice afterward in having done so.
Killing is the time-tested secret to the CCP’s rule, proven repeatedly since its founding.
If Gou is elected president, how will he protect the nation? He says that “national defense depends on peace” — will he halt arms sales, dissolve the army and invite the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to come to Taiwan to protect the nation as if it were an army of mercenaries?
In the eyes of this incomparably shrewd businessman, this would be a great deal that would make him even more money than Hon Hai does.
When China retook control of Hong Kong in 1997, not many people in the territory thought that 20 years later, Hong Kong would see political trials and Hong Kongers would be forced into political exile.
The people in Hong Kong were far too naive and they did not know what they know now: The day the PLA moved into Hong Kong was the day when freedom and the rule of law collapsed.
The same applies to Taiwan. A nation that does not take up arms to defend itself is not worthy of freedom and independence.
Yu Jie is an exiled Chinese dissident and writer.
Translated by Perry Svensson
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