Re: Taiwan, capitalism, socialism, and mass murder

Dear WSN and Mr. Engbarth,

Mr. Engbarth, one camp of analysts suggested that the DPP is a creation of KMT under Li Teng Hui, who is on sick leave in Japan, his self professed second home.

The rest of your article is hard to understand:

1. "Attempts to draw comparisons with Taiwan's "2-28 Incident' and White Terror with Cuba would scored propaganda points for the left during the Cold War period, but that kind of parallel is no longer valid."

Why not? History is never invalid, unless of course it has been altered: so the Nanking Massacre becomes little more than just a simple military exercise. The "2-28 Incident" may be better compared to the Japanese massacre of Nanking or the Nazi's massacre of the Jews. Take your pick.  Both of these are not irrelevant, in any serious study of WS.

2. Chen is a protegee of Li.  Well, need we say more?  Presumably, you are aware of Li's background and his insidious relationship with Chen/DPP.

3.The problem of the KMT is at least understandable.  The members have never declared themselves to be non Chinese.  So they look for reunification of China, of course under their terms, not to break away from China, as some other people do.  In a way, KMT  is much like any minority groups working against, but not to break away from, the majority group and declare independence from the total group.  Chen is sitting on the fence, a good tactic, perhaps to get the US on side for hand-outs and arms.  Lu, on the other hand, is at least honest with herself.  Of course, there is no reason for her to be on side with the KMT, having been victimized by its white terror tactics.  Being Americanized, she is democratized, so to her, the Communist Party is always going to be an enemy.

4. "Taiwan's government is no longer a rabidly ``anti-communist`` regime but is rather more similar in character to the social democratic ``centre-left`` "

Really? Will a leopard ever change its spots?  Ever since the establishment of the Communist Party in China in 1921, the KMT had been deadly against them.  Despite apparent  efforts to work together against the common enemy - the Japanese, the two political parties of China (that is after the KMT officially recognized the Communist Party for self-serving reasons in 1935) had never been able to narrow their  ideological differences.  This is nothing very hard to understand.  Will the Labor Party and the Conservative Party ever be one?  Will the Democrats ever have 'sexual relations' with Republicans? Well, in Clintonian logic, may be, but that does not mean anything.

Since this is not a finger pointing exercise, it may not be necessary to go into mutual destruction of the two parties and point out KMT mass murder of Communists, and vise versa, during the alternating periods of corporation and civil war.

5. Any attempt to understand the political evolution of Taiwan without at least a casual glance at its history of colonial rule would be an exercise in futility.

The earliest written historic record of Taiwan appeared some 2,000 years ago in the Book of Former Han where the name "Tung Ti" was used to refer to Taiwan or parts thereof as we know it today.  During the middle part of the Southern Sung Dynasty some 800 years ago, credible references to Taiwan were first made as "Pinghu Islands" in Lou Yueh's  Kung Kui Anthology.  It is believed that the Han people first visited Pinghu (now Penghu) at the beginning of the 12th Century.  References to the present day Taiwan Island did not appear until the late Ming Dynasty some 400 years ago when Taiwan Island was referred to as "Ta Yuen" among others. During the Ching Dynasty, Pinghu and Taiwan islands were collectively referred to as Taiwan.

The Malay-Polynesians aboriginal are believed to have been the first inhabitants of Taiwan.  While fishermen from Fujian Province had visited Taiwan in the Sung Dynasty, it is recorded that the Han people first inhabited in Taiwan in the late Ming Dynasty in the eve of the Dutch occupation of the island.  European discovery of Taiwan happened in 1557 when Portuguese sailors, passing through the Taiwan Strait by chance, called Taiwan "Ilha Formosa" (beautiful island).   Portuguese and Spanish occupied Taiwan in an attempt to use it as a base to open up China (which, under the Ming Dynasty was very much a closed society).  This ended with the Dutch mercantilists' invasion in 1624. After driving out the 1626 Spanish intrusion, the Dutch Colonist claimed and ruled Taiwan from 1642 for and in the name of the Royal Dutch Empire.  Dutch occupation of Taiwan lasted till 1661 when Cheng Cheng-kung was credited with reclaiming sovereignty over Taiwan for China.

During the Ching Dynasty, Taiwan, being more than 2,500 "li" ( 1,250 km) away, was considered as part of the Wasteland Service area of the Central Kingdom.  Neither defended nor developed by the Ching Government, after a brief occupation by the French during 1884-85, Taiwan was ceded to Japan in 1894.  In 1945, sovereignty of Taiwan reverted back to China after the Japanese surrender.

After the defeat of the Nationalist on the Mainland, a large number of its elitist members and military contingent fled to Taiwan and ruled under martial law between 1949 and 1987.  Upon lifting of the martial law in 1987, and death of Chiang Ching Kuo in January of 1988, Lee Teng Hui became President in March 1990 after election at the National Assembly and continued as head of the government in 1996 by popular vote. Universal suffrage, often associated with modernity and western style democracy, did not take place until 1996.

Against this backdrop of colonial history and inattention from the central government during most of the Sung, Ming and Ching dynasties, the politicized development of a Middle class, often a symbol of democratic modernity,  did not take shape until the mid and late 1980's.  Another reason for this late development is the political dichotomy between the Taiwanese and Mainlanders as two distinct political groups particularly before the formation of the Democratic Progressive Party in 1986 and the desire of the Nationalist Party to win over the "locals" in the then impending elections.

While both the 1996 election of Lee Teng Hui and the March 2000 election of Chen Shui Bian as Presidents will have significant implications to the political landscape in Taiwan, a detail analysis is beyond the scope of this discussion.  It is perhaps useful to consider that  any scholastic approach to understanding the Taiwan question in the context of WST should include such a detail analysis.

6."The most explosive issue is Beijing's continued effort to compel Taiwan to "unify" with the PRC regardless of what the people in Taiwan desire".

"Compel" is the key word in trying to understand 'what the people in Taiwan desire".  If you are in agreement to this, then the act of compelling needs further exploration.  Colonist compel those colonized to follow the colonists' rules, not that those colonized had any say inn the matter.  The alternative is, well in modern societies, unthinkable.  Whereas the American Colonist could murder native American Indians in the process of colonization, any such act in modern WS would not be tolerated.  If Beijing's desire for reunification of Taiwan is 'inspiring' (the other possible connotation when one uses the word 'compel'), then you may have a point.  However, it seems that your choice of word is in the context of the former.  If so, we need to examine if your choice of word is adequate.

Certainly you do not mean to say Beijing is going to colonize Taiwan.  Beijing is constantly trying to suggest that Taiwan, as a renegade province, could rejoin the 'motherland' under the proven "One Country Two System" framewor, so that as long as it catches mice, it could be a black cat or a white cat.  Premier Zhu had publicly announced that under that framework, anything is negotiable between Beijing and Taipei.  Taiwan is not, to me, compelled to 'unify' with the PRC.   Nor is it clear, as you have suggested, that Beijing wishes to 'compel' Taiwan to unify regardless of what the people of Taiwan wants.  The lack of clarity is in the very nature of 'what the people of Taiwan wants'?  Do you know? If so, please share your knowledge with the List.

Anyway, this has turned out to be a long discourse perhaps even in tangent to the WST that we are all presumably trying to use as an analytical/theoretical basis for discussions, for that, I apology to the List.
Regards
K.S.Tso

Dennis Engbarth wrote:

dear alan,

Having not seen the BBC documentary to which you refer, it's hard to know how much of the recent history of Taiwan is covered. Your quotation seems to imply - pardon me if my presumption is incorrect - substantive continuity between the actions of the Chiang Kai-shek Kuomintang dictatorship in the suppression of the February 28, 1947 revolt against the KMT (in which over 20,000 Taiwanese were killed) and the White Terror, and 38 years of martial law (from 1949-87) and the current government of Taiwan. Attempts to draw comparisions with Taiwan's "2-28 Incident' and White Terror with Cuba would scored propaganda points for the left during the Cold War period, but that kind of parallel is no longer valid.
    Indeed, the current reality is quite the opposite as Taiwan's current government is rather more similar to a  ``center-left`` or ``third way`` administration .  After decades of struggle for democratization (which induced moves by the KMT to liberalize the political system), the opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) won Taiwan's second direct presidential election in March 2000 under its presidential candidate Chen Shui-bian, thus ousting the KMT. The DPP, whose establishment in September 1986 defied martial law restrictions, is the direct descendent of the grassroots opposition movement against the KMT and represents the victims -- not the executioners - of the white terror. Chen got his start in politics as one of the defense lawyers for eight opposition activists charged with sedition (which carried a possible death sentence)  in the December 1979 "Formosa" case, in which the KMT cracked down on an opposition effort to form an opposition party in substance. He also served several months as a political prisoner in the 1980s. Vice President Annette Lu Hsiu-lien was one of the "Formosa Eight" and served eight years of a 12-year sentence before being released after an international campaign. Taiwan is far from perfect, especially given the difficulty of correcting the political, economic, social and cultural problems left from nearly 55 years of KMT rule, but now has a fully elected government (which, despite the deficiences of bourgeois democracy is a far cry better than a fascist dictatorship), no political prisoners, vibrant environmental and labor movements and probably the freest - indeed licentious - media in East Asia at present. The DPP's victory in March 2000 also had historic significance by ending the rule of the last right-wing regime left from the World War II period.  Despite the links between Washington and the KMT regime during the Cold War period, the polarities have changed - Taiwan's government is no longer a rabidly ``anti-communist`` regime but is rather more similar in character to the social democratic ``centre-left`` governments that emerged in Spain, Portugal and Greece after similar transitions.
    Taiwan's main problems include the continued influence of the KMT, which has a majority in the national legislature (but will probably lose it in the next set of legislative elections in December, which will be the first ever conducted under a completely level playing field), intense pressure from the People's Republic of China (PRC), which is overtly hostile to Taiwan's democraticization and the DPP government and the inability of the world community to officially accept that Taiwan's domestic political development has rendered obsolete the confines of the 1946-49 Chinese civil war  between the Chinese Communist Party and Chiang's KMT, or in other words, that the people of Taiwan ``have recovered`` Taiwan from the exterally imposed KMT regime.   The most explosive issue is Beijing's continued effort to compel Taiwan to "unify" with the PRC regardless of what the people in Taiwan desire. This  pressure has included the direct ``test firing`` of surface-to-surface missiles near Taiwan's two major international ports and over Taiwan in March 1996, shortly before the island's first presidential election. The "Communist" government of the PRC continues to claim that Taiwan is PRC territory, a claim that rests on a very convulted interpretation of  history. Nevertheless, Chen and the DPP have repeatedly affirmed their desire for peaceful and friendly relations with Beijing -- in rather sharp contrast to the KMT's past call for ``to recover the mainland,`` calls that have failed to elict any goodwill in response nor any indication that Beijing will drop its expressed willingness to use force against Taiwan to secure "unification". Those with a sense of history will note the parallels with Czechoslovakia in the 1930s. The issue facing the international left is where its key values lie - on the side of a genuine (and for a rarity, successful) popular struggle against one of the world's longest living authoritarian regimes or on the side of an anti-democratic government whose core values are evidently more feudalist and national chauvinist than anything that could remotely be considered socialist.

By the way, the suppression of the democratic movement in the PRC at Tiananmen Square witnessed on CNN was merely the tip of that particular iceberg, but that's an issue that those more conversent in PRC affairs should respond to.

Dennis Engbarth
freelance journalist,
Taipei Taiwan

Alan Spector ¼g¹D¡G

Note from Alan Spector:The following excerpt is from a British Broadcasting Company (BBC) project on the history of Taiwan. I found it interesting, because in all the debates over the various repressive measures taken by capitalist and socialist regimes, there is an overwhelming tendency to minimize or completely cover up massacres by capitalist regimes which are labeled "democratic" while roften inflating statistics on the deaths caused by socialist regimes. For example, Cuba is continually referred to as a regime which "violates human rights" and the U.S./British media continues to focus on the deaths of perhaps 1,000 people during the Tienamein Square protests. In the past, we have mentioned obvious incidents, such as the anti-communist repression in El Salvador and Guatemala which killed perhaps 180,000 people, the U.S. organized fascist coup in Chile which killed tens of thousands, and the U.S. organized fascist coup in Indonesia that killed perhaps 500,000!  Here is another story. Considering the relatively small population of Taiwan at the time, a "massacre of perhaps 18,000-30.000 " people makes any discussion of Castro's Cuba, or even gangster Milosevic's Yugoslavia look pale by comparison. But yet the drumbeat goes on about how "capitalism" is "inherently more favorable to human rights.....etc. etc."  I'm sure there are dozens more countries where situations like this happened, in addition, of course to the other unnecessary deaths from things like measles (40,000 in Ethiopia alone), malaria, cholera, AIDS, etc. etc. These situations should be discussed more actively in courses we teach.============================================================================http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/in_depth/asia_pacific/2000/taiwan_elections2000/1945_1949.stmWith the end of World War II Taiwan was handed over to the control of mainland China, under the Kuomintang (nationalist) government of General Chiang Kai-shek. The move brought to an end more than 50 years of Japanese control.

Chiang moved quickly to formalise the island's status as a province of China. On Taiwan itself liberation from Japanese rule was initially welcomed, but many quickly came to resent the corruption of the new government and what was seen as the exploitation of Taiwanese resources for mainland post-war reconstruction. Taiwanese industry, which had been closely tied to Japan, was redirected to supply the needs of the mainland and the island's economy slid into crisis. Unemployment soared and, as protests grew, a brutal crackdown took place in 1947.

In what became known as "the White Terror" an estimated 18,000 - 30,000 members of the island's native-born political and academic elite were executed as Chiang's government asserted its control. For decades afterwards the government insisted the action was a crackdown on communists and gangsters.

As the war with the Japanese came to an end, on the mainland the civil war with Mao Zedong's communist forces resumed more fiercely than ever with the communists increasingly gaining the upper hand. As defeat loomed hundreds of thousands of Chiang's soldiers defected to the communist side. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------