The subconscious is a curious thing. The more people repress their impulses, the deeper the impulses go into the subconscious and grip people at the roots. Sometimes they return without people being aware of them.
Hon Hai Precision Industry Co founder Terry Gou (郭台銘), who last week threw his hat in the presidential ring, seems to have a hard time grappling with his pro-China complex. His mannerisms and remarks betray his subconscious at every turn.
At a news conference last week at which he announced his intention to run, Gou said: “I implore the people of Taiwan to give me four years. I promise that I will bring peace to the Taiwan Strait for the next 50 years.”
“The Democratic Progressive Party [DPP] has been in power for more than seven years, and it has brought the danger of war to Taiwan,” he added.
Taiwanese presidents serve a four-year term, and a maximum of two terms, so the longest he could be in office would be eight years. It would be reasonable for Gou to promise to bring peace for a four or eight-year period, but that he dares to promise “50 years of peace” is either overblown or based on a secret deal with China.
It is an interesting coincidence that Gou promised 50 years, not 10 or 100. Use of the number 50 was a Freudian slip. It harks to the promise that former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平) once made to Hong Kong as part of the “one country, two systems” arrangement that guaranteed Hong Kong’s economic and political systems would not be changed for “50 years.”
Of course, China has proved that its “50 years, no change” promise was a joke. Only 23 years have passed and Hong Kong has gone from “one country, two systems” to become “one China, one system.”
After all, the Chinese Communist Party would not have earned such notoriety if it had not repeatedly gone back on its peace deals with its frontier regions, such as Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang and Tibet. Instead of peace and autonomy, the regions got genocide, oppression and concentration camps.
On other issues, to address Taiwan’s plummeting birthrate, Gou proposed a pet policy.
“Give birth to a child and I will let you raise one more pet,” he said, according to a translation by Formosa TV. “A cat, a dog. Give birth to two, and I will let you adopt two more.”
Taiwan’s declining birthrate is a serious national security issue, while pets can make people feel good.
However, to put childbirth and pets on the same level and use them in such a policy is absurd.
Moreover, people can have as many pets as they like, as long as they register them, keep an eye on them while in public, clean up their waste, and do not abandon or torture them.
Perhaps Gou thought that if he were elected president, he could become like Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) and turn Taiwan into an autocratic country, where he calls the shots and that the right to own pets would reside with him, not the people.
According to his logic, people would need Gou’s permission to have a pet, and if Gou orders that people have one, they would not be allowed two.
If he is already indicating that he would put his tentacles into pet ownership, it would not be long before Taiwan became an autocratic country if he were elected.
Gou’s habit of parroting China’s party line, such as blaming the DPP for causing cross-strait tensions, is apparently to pander to the overbearing Beijing government instead of preparing for war to counter China.
Perhaps in Gou’s subconscious, he is not running for president of Taiwan, but chief executive of the “Taiwan region.”
Chang Kuo-tsai is a retired associate professor of National Hsinchu University of Education.
Translated by Rita Wang
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