New Taipei City Mayor Hou You-yi (侯友宜) is a so-called “native blue,” meaning an ethnic Taiwanese member of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT).
Ever since the KMT nominated Hou as its presidential candidate in July, public support rating had been in the doldrums. The KMT’s “blue fighters” look down on Hou, as most explicitly expressed by songwriter Liu Chia-chang (劉家昌), who called him “a sack of straw minus the straw.”
With the party’s prospects looking rather shaky, the KMT negotiated with the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) about forming a “blue-white” joint presidential ticket with Hou and TPP Chairman and presidential nominee Ko Wen-je (柯文哲).
However, the negotiations turned into a farce and finally broke down over the question of who should stand for president and who should for vice president.
Following the failure of the “blue-white” joint ticket, No. 1 blue fighter Broadcasting Corp of China chairman Jaw Shaw-kong (趙少康) has unexpectedly emerged as Hou’s running mate. This coming together of the “native blues” and the “blue fighters” has generated an unexpected improvement in Hou’s poll results. Some pro-unification newspapers say that Jaw’s entry into the campaign has boosted the KMT’s morale and reformed the ranks of the blue camp.
Has Jaw really rejuvenated the blue fighters? Let us consider the history and characteristics of the blue fighters faction.
In October 1971, Jaw became the chairman of National Taiwan University’s Graduate Student Association. The young Jaw penned an editorial in the association’s newsletter, in which he said: “What is our common aspiration? It is to recover the mainland [China]” and “What is the basis of our mutual trust? It is faith in our leader, trust in our government and fighting the communists to revive the nation.”
To be sure, Jaw and others like him were born and grew up in an age when the KMT taught everyone that Taiwanese must revive the nation like Tian Dan (田單), (a general of China’s Warring States period) and Shao Kang (少康), (a legendary emperor of China’s Xia Dynasty). Jaw’s father even named him after Shao Kang.
Who could have imagined that Jaw, who once pledged to “recover the mainland,” would eventually change his tune to saying that “If you vote for the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), young people would be sent to the battlefield?”
Apparently he has forgotten the militaristic songs that he once sang with such gusto.
“Children of mainlanders” such as Jaw, former Kaohsiung mayor Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜), former KMT chairwoman Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱) and KMT legislators Alex Fai (費鴻泰), Wang Hung-wei (王鴻薇) and Wu Sz-huai (吳斯懷) have been described by some as the “refugee party.” This is no compliment, but neither is it misleading, because they are the offspring of KMT members or supporters who followed former Republic of China president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) into exile in Taiwan.
As refugees, one might expect them to be humble and modest, but they put on airs when dealing with Taiwanese. They have a sense of superiority that is unlike most refugees in the world. Why so? The refugees we are talking about are distinct from ordinary former KMT soldiers who were transported from China to Taiwan and are mostly at the lower end of the social ladder. The ones we mean here are either members or adherents of the ruling class.
According to US sociologist Ronald Weitzer’s settler state theory, a settler state is a country established by new immigrants who dominate the original inhabitants. Although the settlers have emigrated from their home country, they retain their political dominance in the new world. Weitzer classifies Taiwan from the end of 1949 onward as a settler state. That state’s ruling class is, as World United Formosans for Independence former chairman Ng Chiau-tong (黃昭堂) said, a colonial dynasty that has no home country.
Jaw and others like him are accomplices of this settler regime. In the post-Chiang era, former president Chiang Ching-kuo’s (蔣經國) successor, Lee Teng-hui (李登輝), tried working with the democracy movement to localize the KMT, but people such as Jaw found that intolerable. In 1989, they organized the New KMT Alliance, which broke away from the KMT in August 1993 to form the New Party. At the time, I wrote an article in which I asked what could be “new” about this party when it had such an old-fashioned mindset.
After Lee was expelled from the KMT in 2001, most of these “blue fighters” rejoined the KMT, while some of them aligned themselves with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
However, they had already completely abandoned the anti-communist line of their former idol Chiang Kai-shek and had become the CCP’s keenest sycophants. The blue fighters know almost nothing about democracy and human rights, and Jaw’s attitude to the democracy movement was that those involved should all be arrested.
Jaw cohosts a program broadcast by the China-friendly station TVBS called the TVBS Situation Room. In normal countries, “situation” in the context of “situation room” means the military situation with regard to external enemies, but Jaw’s version of it means a campaign of criticism within Taiwan and against the DPP, while the “communist bandits” that he once hoped to exterminate have now become his comrades-in-arms.
Instead of calling for “faith in our leader” and “trust in the government,” like he used to, he now collaborates with the CCP’s “united front” strategy by harshly criticizing and denigrating the Taiwanese government.
The blue fighters were originally few in number, but they have since been joined by some Taiwanese who were schooled under the KMT’s one-party state, along with some opportunistic politicians. By the looks of things, Jaw might really revive something, but this revival runs completely contrary to the ideals he was promoting back in the days when he was faithful to Chiang Kai-shek.
If Chiang could come back to life, he would not hesitate to sign a warrant for Jaw’s swift execution.
However, today’s Taiwan is a democracy where political opponents can no longer be shot. Since bullets can no longer be used, we must fight them with ballots instead.
Lee Hsiao-feng is an honorary professor of National Taipei University of Education.
Translated by Julian Clegg
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