Sat, Jan 20, 2018 page3

• Reporter’s Notebook: Looking for the cause of Chiang Ching-kuo nostalgia

  • By Chen Wei-han / Staff reporter
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  “A group of kids and I were playing with firecrackers on the rooftop and we accidentally shot one of them into the backyard of [former president] Chiang Ching-kuo’s (蔣經國) house,” former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) said on Jan. 10, as he launched a series of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) events to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the death of Chiang.

  To their surprise, Chiang’s security officers rushed to Ma’s house, but left without a complaint after realizing that it was innocent child’s play, Ma said, using a type of rhetoric that is too often invoked to worship Chiang, the authoritarian giant whose achievements toward Taiwan’s democratization and economic development — according to KMT mythology — were as great as his amicable attitude toward the people.

  Chiang’s most significant contributions were the 10 Major Construction Projects, the lifting of martial law, his diligence and his love for the people, Ma said, citing the common, if not official, historiography of Chiang’s legacy, which stresses the nation’s economic boom, democratization and his personal charisma.

  Misremembering Chiang as the “father of democracy” because he lifted what was then the world’s longest period of martial law, which helped him and his father cement their rule, is rife not only in KMT mythology, but also among the public.

  A poll released on Friday last week by the Chinese-language China Times found that 53.3 percent of the respondents said Chiang was the president who made the biggest contribution to Taiwan.

  The most gruesome act of commemorating authoritarianism was the launch on Friday last week of former Military Intelligence Bureau director Wang Hsi-ling’s (汪希苓) memoirs, which was attended by Ma, Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) and former Bamboo Union gang leader Chang An-le (張安樂), also known as “the White Wolf.”

  Wang, who in 1984 during Chiang’s presidency allegedly ordered Bamboo Union members to assassinate journalist and writer Henry Liu (劉宜良), also known by his pen name Chiang Nan (江南), said the hit was ordered because Liu was planning to write a biography of Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) wife Soong Mayling (宋美齡) that might defame her.

  At the book-launching event, Ko said that the public should weigh Chiang Ching-kuo’s merits as well as his vices.

  “We have to admit that there is more forgetfulness than memory, more nostalgia than understanding and more ignorance than re-examination of our understanding of the history of Chiang Ching-kuo’s rule in Taiwan,” Ko said.

  An essential question has to be raised: Why has a dictator been commemorated over the years? What lies behind this urge to summon authoritarianism in today’s democratic era?

  The memory politics of commemorating Chiang Ching-kuo and the bygone “good old days” is an emotional outlet for the public in the face of the government’s failure to curb a widening wealth gap, Academia Sinica sociologist Lin Thung-hong (林宗弘) said at a forum held by Taiwan Democracy Watch in Taipei on Sunday.

  The authoritarianism of the past is invoked to deal with today’s economic and class issues, because when the Chiang family ruled Taiwan, it achieved the remarkable average annual GDP growth of more than 9 percent from 1963 to 1996 in what is called the “Taiwan miracle,” Lin said.

  However, as Taiwan shifted from the “miracle paradigm” to a “recession paradigm,” democratization was accompanied by an ever-widening wealth gap and the public experienced 16 long years of wage stagnation, leading to public disappointment with democracy, Lin said.

  While wealth inequality might induce democratization in authoritarian countries, it can also cause the citizens of a democratic country to feel disappointed with democracy, Lin said.

  The economically underprivileged, especially young people, begin to doubt democracy, as it fails to resolve the power imbalance in employment, as is evident from young people’s heated protests against the amendments to the Labor Standards Act (勞動基準法), which aim to create workplace flexibility by relaxing a set of overtime restrictions, Lin said.

  However, invoking the memory of Chiang Ching-kuo and the “miracle paradigm” of the authoritarian era is inappropriate, Lin said.

  The “miracle paradigm,” featuring top-down market intervention, medium and small-sized enterprises, and export growth, could not be replicated in today’s Taiwan, Lin said.

  Authoritarian market intervention is increasingly unfeasible as democratic Taiwan no longer has a big government and the business-government relationship has become more equal, Lin wrote in Unfinished Miracle: Taiwan’s Economy and Society in Transition, a collection of papers published last month by Academia Sinica.

  Today’s Taiwan is not as heavily reliant on medium and small enterprises as it was during the “miracle period,” with power and resources highly concentrated among businesspeople of the baby boomer generation and large conglomerates, resulting in the rise of class and generational conflicts, such as the 2014 Sunflower movement, Lin wrote on the book’s introduction.

  While Chiang Ching-kuo’s export expansion policy helped invigorate Taiwan’s economy, the expansion of cross-strait trade contributed to the nation’s economic recession, as Taiwanese businesses, by totally embedding themselves in the “red supply chain,” have become overly dependent on Chinese the economy and politics, and suffering a large drop in gross profit margin, Lin said.

  However, the nation still has a “miracle mindset,” as is evident from the Cabinet’s Forward-looking Infrastructure Development Program, which is fashioned after the 10 Major Construction Projects, as well as the labor law amendments, Lin said.

  “We still have this authoritarian mindset,” Lin said. “Premier William Lai (賴清德) is expected to be bold and resolute, and has to come to the rescue of medium and small-sized enterprises [with the labor law amendment],” Lin said.

  A possible way out of this mindset and the veneration of Chian Ching-kuo would be to give up the “developmentalist” mindset and build an innovation and welfare-based democracy, transforming the nation’s industrial structure while redistributing wealth, Lin said.

  National Taiwan University professor Huang Chang-ling (黃長玲) said that while Taiwan’s first democratization removed one-party authoritarian rule, it left capitalism totally untouched, resulting in a liberal democracy that maximizes personal freedom, as well as social inequality.

  “The second democratization [Taiwan needs to go through] has to challenge the dominance of capitalism over people’s life and ensure social security and welfare,” Huang said.

  The economy has to be restructured to a knowledge-based and innovative one, instead of allowing the workforce to be exploited for the benefit of businesses, she said.

  To prevent the glorification and even actual recreation of an authoritarian paradigm, Taiwan might need to deepen democracy, not undo it.

  That would mean fighting capitalism and wealth inequality instead of resorting to a “miracle” developmentalist mindset, and dispelling myths about the nation’s past dictatorships instead of indulging in nostalgia.
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