One morning early last month, I saw a poster on the outside of a clinic on Shida Road in Taipei that proclaimed: “When youth meets Zen — 2023 mainland [China] monastery visit camp.” The poster explained that the organizers were recruiting unmarried young people aged 18 to 35 to take part in the activity, with free accommodation and food provided, and an 80 percent ferry or air travel subsidy for students.
On Aug. 31 last year, the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) released its “OHCHR Assessment of human rights concerns in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, People’s Republic of China,” confirming once again that China is a country that lacks religious freedom, yet the same country is organizing virtually free monastery tours for young Taiwanese. This contradictory behavior is a cause for concern.
The June 15 edition of Britain’s The Economist published a report titled “China hopes Mazu [Matsu], a sea goddess, can help it win over Taiwan.” The article discusses how, following the lifting of COVID-19 restrictions, the head of the Taiwan Matsu Fellowship met in Beijing with China’s Taiwan Affairs Office Director Song Tao (宋濤) in February and talked about how to use the goddess to promote the idea of “one family” on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. The article suggests that such activities are intended to influence next year’s presidential election.
The article describes how elders of the small Taian Temple (泰安宮) in Taipei have visited China, where they were treated as honored guests and have even engaged in some business dealings.
However, the Meizhou (湄州) Matsu Temple in China’s Fujian Province, which they visited, has links with the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference and conducts “united front” operations in the name of religion, and under the guise of cultural and other exchanges.
Most Taiwanese pay serious attention to “divine instructions,” even if they do not necessarily care about politics. China’s use of religion in its “united front” strategy is therefore an amazingly effective means of infiltration.
What is even more worrying is when criminal gangs take the opportunity to infiltrate and take control of religious bodies. In 2018, CommonWealth Magazine published a report titled “White Wolf’s China Unification Promotion Party [CUPP] is more grounded than you think.” The report describes the deployment by CUPP founder Chang An-le (張安樂), known by his gangland nickname “White Wolf,” of allies in temples across Taiwan.
Reporting on this year’s Dajia Matsu Pilgrimage, the United Daily News praised “White Wolf” for meeting Jenn Lann Temple chairman and former legislator Yen Ching-piao (顏清標) face to face, ensuring that the Dajia Matsu idol could be carried peacefully through an underpass where factional clashes have happened in earlier years.
Is this to say that Taiwanese should be thankful to self-proclaimed Chinese Communist Party (CCP) fellow traveler “White Wolf” and to Yen, whose long list of criminal offenses includes corruption, unlawful possession of firearms, attempted homicide, incitement, concealment of offenders, banditry and aggravated robbery?
The last paragraph of The Economist article quotes National Taiwan University political scientist Chang Kuei-min (張貴閔) as saying that China has created a narrative in which the CCP is a champion of folk religion, while Taiwan’s government opposes it.
It is hard to know what the government can do about this situation, but it is worrying to see the CCP, which has been confirmed by the UN to allow no freedom of religion or expression, implementing its “united front” strategy in the name of religion.
Tiffany Hsiao is a Taiwanese physician residing in the US.
Translated by Julian Clegg
Two sets of economic data released last week by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) have drawn mixed reactions from the public: One on the nation’s economic performance in the first quarter of the year and the other on Taiwan’s household wealth distribution in 2021. GDP growth for the first quarter was faster than expected, at 6.51 percent year-on-year, an acceleration from the previous quarter’s 4.93 percent and higher than the agency’s February estimate of 5.92 percent. It was also the highest growth since the second quarter of 2021, when the economy expanded 8.07 percent, DGBAS data showed. The growth
In the intricate ballet of geopolitics, names signify more than mere identification: They embody history, culture and sovereignty. The recent decision by China to refer to Arunachal Pradesh as “Tsang Nan” or South Tibet, and to rename Tibet as “Xizang,” is a strategic move that extends beyond cartography into the realm of diplomatic signaling. This op-ed explores the implications of these actions and India’s potential response. Names are potent symbols in international relations, encapsulating the essence of a nation’s stance on territorial disputes. China’s choice to rename regions within Indian territory is not merely a linguistic exercise, but a symbolic assertion
At the same time as more than 30 military aircraft were detected near Taiwan — one of the highest daily incursions this year — with some flying as close as 37 nautical miles (69kms) from the northern city of Keelung, China announced a limited and selected relaxation of restrictions on Taiwanese agricultural exports and tourism, upon receiving a Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) delegation led by KMT legislative caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅崑萁). This demonstrates the two-faced gimmick of China’s “united front” strategy. Despite the strongest earthquake to hit the nation in 25 years striking Hualien on April 3, which caused
In the 2022 book Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, academics Hal Brands and Michael Beckley warned, against conventional wisdom, that it was not a rising China that the US and its allies had to fear, but a declining China. This is because “peaking powers” — nations at the peak of their relative power and staring over the precipice of decline — are particularly dangerous, as they might believe they only have a narrow window of opportunity to grab what they can before decline sets in, they said. The tailwinds that propelled China’s spectacular economic rise over the past