In 1949, following the Chinese Communist Party’s takeover of Beijing, former Peking University chancellor Hu Shih (胡適) flew to the US and stayed there for a while. In September of the following year, his son Hu Szu-tu (胡思杜), who was still in China, wrote a newspaper article denouncing his father.
Asked about this matter in an interview, Hu Shih said that one freedom that is more fundamental than freedom of speech is freedom of silence, and that people in China did not even have the freedom to stay silent. Hu Shih said that what his son had done was the best proof of this.
Former president Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國), who was born in southern China, similarly wrote that when he was studying abroad in the Soviet Union and relations between China and the Soviet Union began to sour, he, too, wrote an open letter to a newspaper in which he slandered his father, Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石).
Most people would not berate these sons who had no choice but to publicly denounce their fathers, but would instead blame those who forced them to do so. Such inhumane things, which only happen in totalitarian states, should remind us how lucky we are to have been born and grown up in a free country.
Some political remarks made recently by Taiwanese entertainers who have gone to China to develop their careers have made a lot of people in Taiwan unhappy. Asked about this matter by reporters, President William Lai (賴清德) said that he felt sorry for these entertainers who come under pressure while staying in someone else’s house. Speaking in their defense, Lai said that the things they say might not be what they really think, and that he hoped people in Taiwan would understand the quandary they find themselves in.
As well as the opposition parties, who always oppose anything that Lai’s Democratic Progressive Party says or does, some Taiwan-centric media personalities and opinion leaders have also found fault with Lai’s remarks, even asking where his comments leave the 100,000 people who have recently joined street protests against the opposition parties’ proposed legislative reforms.
Soochow University assistant professor Chen Fang-yu (陳方隅) was right to commend Lai for his warm, gentle and truly presidential response.
As fathers, Hu Shih and Chiang Kai-shek might have been upset about the things their sons wrote under duress. They felt sorry for them, but they did not blame them for it. Likewise, Lai’s magnanimous response shows his willingness to set political ideology aside and put himself in the shoes of those who find themselves in a tight spot while trying to make a living overseas. Surely this compassionate attitude is what one would hope for from a head of state.
Absurdly, former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) got his spokesperson to harshly criticize Lai for his compassionate remarks by asking: “Since when has anyone needed to be forgiven for saying ‘I am Chinese?’” Does Ma not realize that the real reason these entertainers need to be forgiven is that their remarks have hurt the feelings of many of their fans in their homeland?
When Ma was campaigning for election, he said that he was a Taiwanese who grew up eating Taiwanese rice and drinking Taiwanese water. When he visited the US, he told senior US politicians that he was the president of Taiwan, yet after he left office he crossed the Taiwan Strait to China, where he sobbed and bowed as he visited the land of his ancestors. What a change of tune, without even blushing. Has there ever been such a two-faced head of state?
Gentle Hong is a retired employee of CPC Corp, Taiwan.
Translated by Julian Clegg
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