As the Dajia Matsu procession passed through Changhua County on Saturday last week, China Unification Promotion Party (CUPP) founder Chang An-le (張安樂) led a group of party members to welcome the palanquin bearing a statue of the sea goddess Matsu. A scuffle ensued between police, CUPP members and others. The incident was a publicity stunt. As the CUPP has been marginalized in Taiwan, it has been trying to grab attention by stirring up trouble.
From the CUPP members’ “dress code” that day — vests bearing the words “Taiwan independence will lead to war” — people should be able to see through their ruse. CUPP supporters have never been shy about showing their loyalty to the “motherland” by intimidating and threatening Taiwanese.
Little did people like Chang know that the Matsu temple in Meizhou in China’s Fujian Province — regarded as the birthplace of the goddess — had been destroyed by the Chinese Communist Party during the Cultural Revolution. The current Matsu temple was rebuilt by Taiwanese devotees.
Politicians often take advantage of religion to buy popularity, but they are only opening themselves to ridicule by ignoring facts. Their claim that “Matsu is also from China” is meant to be an attack on independence supporters. Using this as a reason for “unification” only exposes the CUPP’s ignorance and idiocy: Matsu was a person from the Song Dynasty, not “Chinese.”
For these pro-China factions who use religious festivals to garner publicity, aside from holding them in contempt, care must be taken not to spread their ideas, to stay out of the fray and to ignore them, to deny them the one thing they want: publicity.
Chen Chi-nung is principal of Shuili Junior High School in Nantou County.
Translated by Rita Wang
Jan. 1 marks a decade since China repealed its one-child policy. Just 10 days before, Peng Peiyun (彭珮雲), who long oversaw the often-brutal enforcement of China’s family-planning rules, died at the age of 96, having never been held accountable for her actions. Obituaries praised Peng for being “reform-minded,” even though, in practice, she only perpetuated an utterly inhumane policy, whose consequences have barely begun to materialize. It was Vice Premier Chen Muhua (陳慕華) who first proposed the one-child policy in 1979, with the endorsement of China’s then-top leaders, Chen Yun (陳雲) and Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平), as a means of avoiding the
The last foreign delegation Nicolas Maduro met before he went to bed Friday night (January 2) was led by China’s top Latin America diplomat. “I had a pleasant meeting with Qiu Xiaoqi (邱小琪), Special Envoy of President Xi Jinping (習近平),” Venezuela’s soon-to-be ex-president tweeted on Telegram, “and we reaffirmed our commitment to the strategic relationship that is progressing and strengthening in various areas for building a multipolar world of development and peace.” Judging by how minutely the Central Intelligence Agency was monitoring Maduro’s every move on Friday, President Trump himself was certainly aware of Maduro’s felicitations to his Chinese guest. Just
A recent piece of international news has drawn surprisingly little attention, yet it deserves far closer scrutiny. German industrial heavyweight Siemens Mobility has reportedly outmaneuvered long-entrenched Chinese competitors in Southeast Asian infrastructure to secure a strategic partnership with Vietnam’s largest private conglomerate, Vingroup. The agreement positions Siemens to participate in the construction of a high-speed rail link between Hanoi and Ha Long Bay. German media were blunt in their assessment: This was not merely a commercial win, but has symbolic significance in “reshaping geopolitical influence.” At first glance, this might look like a routine outcome of corporate bidding. However, placed in
China often describes itself as the natural leader of the global south: a power that respects sovereignty, rejects coercion and offers developing countries an alternative to Western pressure. For years, Venezuela was held up — implicitly and sometimes explicitly — as proof that this model worked. Today, Venezuela is exposing the limits of that claim. Beijing’s response to the latest crisis in Venezuela has been striking not only for its content, but for its tone. Chinese officials have abandoned their usual restrained diplomatic phrasing and adopted language that is unusually direct by Beijing’s standards. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs described the
RSS