Officials last week disqualified a Chinese competitor for attempting to remove a Taiwanese flag during the opening ceremony of the Australasian Handgun Championships in Indonesia.
While tampering with someone else’s flag is considered barbaric and uncivilized from the perspective of democratic countries, it is an act commonly seen in China.
In China, there are idioms about convincing people with virtue and submitting willingly, while ancient Chinese philosopher Mencius (孟子) says that “he who uses force as a pretense of humaneness is a hegemon.”
Such ancient teachings have not been learned in China, not to even mention the idea of tolerance for opponents, a kind of democratic literacy.
When someone like Mencius described threatens another, they seek pleasure and do not care if the other person submits willingly.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) never cares about how many “Taiwanese comrades” submit willingly when they send military aircraft across the Taiwan Strait median line.
It also does not care how many Taiwanese would identify with their “motherland” when it passed a law authorizing the death penalty for “diehard Taiwanese independence separatists.”
Chinese officials, media and academics often say that after annexing Taiwan they would “keep the island, but not the people” or “re-educate” Taiwanese, like what they are doing to Uighurs in Xinjiang internment camps.
Do more Taiwanese agree with “reunification” after the CCP made these claims? Those who support unification decreased to 1.5 percent, a recent survey showed.
I always say that “I am not fond of supporting independence, but I am compelled to do it.”
If Taiwan, which scored 94 out of 100 in Freedom House’s Freedom in the World report, were to be annexed by China, which scored 9, it would lose its freedom immediately.
No one wants to unify with China except minions and bootlickers. Taiwanese support for independence is a result of the CCP’s menacing behavior.
The CCP still cannot understand that only democratization can attract talent, while autocracy deters them.
Nazi Germany was such an example. Physicist Albert Einstein, who was born in Germany, went to the US to escape Nazi persecution. After Germany annexed Austria, Sigmund Freud, a renowned psychoanalyst, went to the UK to escape the Nazis. Similarly, Erich Fromm, who was born in Frankfurt, escaped to Switzerland and later to the US to further his academic career, becoming an established psychologist.
There are many more examples, to mention but a few. Autocracy cannot tolerate scientists, philosophers, historians and artists. Running away from tyranny, talent went to the US to seek freedom. It was Nazi Germany that declined.
It has not been long since Nazi Germany’s demise. The CCP might as well count how many talented people they have lost.
Reflecting on Japan’s pre-war militarism, Masao Maruyama, a leading Japanese political theorist, said that when he was young, the whole of Japan was like the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult — it followed a logic that did not make sense outside Japan, but was prevalent throughout the whole country.
The CCP should no longer indulge in nationalism. To make its citizens happy and to attract talent from abroad, the CCP would have to stop living in seclusion and democratize. Otherwise, Taiwan would stay further away.
Lee Hsiao-feng is an honorary professor at National Taipei University of Education.
Translated by Fion Khan
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