A Friday Threesome

Looking forward to summer and an end to this crappy weather...

MEDIA: Reuters writes of China' Taiwan Affairs Office head speaking in Washington DC....

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, a former head of China's Taiwan Affairs Office, said Tsai's election was a normal political process that did not come as too big a surprise."We do not care that much who is in power in the Taiwan region of China," Wang said at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington on Thursday, without directly using Tsai's name. His comments were carried on the center's website.

"What we care about is, once someone has come into power, how he or she handles the cross-strait relationship, whether he or she will maintain the peaceful development of cross-strait relations, whether he or she will recommit to the political foundation of cross-strait relations, the one China principle," he said.

Wang said he hoped that, before Tsai assumes power in May, she would indicate that she wants to pursue the peaceful development of ties and accept the provision in Taiwan's own constitution that the mainland and Taiwan belong to one China.

Ha! We don't care who is in power in Taiwan -- now there's a slap at the KMT. But of course it's nonsense -- they are quite concerned about the DPP.

The laziness of international media "reporting" is on display here. Reuters simply acts as Wang's stenographer. None of his claims is nuanced, questioned, or even explored. Does the ROC Constitution (not "Taiwan constitution") clearly state that Taiwan is part of the ROC and China? Surely Reuters -- surely reporters, and not stenographers -- might have raised the issue (imagine, by contrast, if Wang had said something about the Spratlys -- Reuters might have included some reference to claims by other nations). But Reuters is too spineless to even do that.

Why O why can't we have a better media?

FocusTaiwan news quoted a DPP legislator who observed that if Wang thinks Taiwan has a Constitution, he is recognizing it is a country. LOL! Note also the desperate try of the KMT news organ to find a claim to Taiwan in the Constitution.

TOURISM: Some news went around in the outside world claiming that China had reduced tourists to Taiwan....

Since the opposition's victory, mainland Chinese authorities have placed quotas on outbound tourists. Before the new rules, an average of 8,000 Chinese tourists visited Taiwan daily, but that number is now down by 40 percent, to about 5,000, Taiwan media reported.

An estimated 80 percent of tour packages on offer in the mainland have been suspended, and popular tourist attractions have seen a significant reduction in visitors, posing a major setback for Taiwan's travel industry that has enjoyed a boom since free travel was permitted in 2012.

...has it? Depends who you ask. The article appeared to be based on reporting originally in the pro-KMT China Times which filtered through the pro-DPP Liberty Times, with the numbers as above. But a Chinese spokesman in Xinhua attributed the drop -- note that he admits there's a drop -- to "the market".

The KMT news organization said that the Tourism Bureau had indeed found a drop in Chinese tourists...

Chiu Lo-feng, chairwoman of the International Tourist Hotels Association of Taipei (臺北市觀光旅館商業同業公會), stated that the number of Mainland tourists staying in Taipei hotels would decline by 10% in March, and the total number of Mainland tourists would decline by 20% to 25%. Chiu pointed out that even the number of individual Mainland tourists visiting Taiwan would decline.

According to an investigation conducted by the Tourism Bureau, the Mainland would reduce the number of Mainland tour groups visiting Taiwan per day by one-third to two-thirds, namely, 1,600 to 3,300 tourists per day, impacting airlines, hotels, restaurants, shops, and tour buses.

Alex Lu (魯孝亞), chairman of the Taipei Tour Bus Association, stated that judging from the reservations for tour buses in February, it was expected that at least 600 tour buses would be left idle, and the situation in April and May was not likely to improve. Lu went on to say that there were 16,000 tour buses in Taiwan, 4,000 of which were used to transport Mainland tourists around the island.

Up to you, dear reader, to decide whether China is being coy about cutting tourists or whether it is the natural result of market forces (Chinese tourists booming elsewhere, I saw zillions in Dubai).

DOWN WITH SUN YAT-SEN PORTRAITS!: Portraits of Sun Yat-sen, the ROC's "founding father", brood over public buildings across the nation. DPP legislators want to put a stop to this. J Michael Cole describes....

The proposal, initiated by DPP Legislator Gao Jyh-peng (高志鵬), wants the requirement that Sun’s portraits be installed in every public building be dropped and for Sun to no longer be referred to as the nation’s “founding father.”

.....

Despite the validity of Gao’s proposal (and similar ones were made before), the timing isn’t ideal. Much more pressing matters that will directly affect the wellbeing of the people in Taiwan ought to be addressed in the new legislature. Whether Sun continues to stare down at government officials or remains the object of Nazi-style salutes isn’t one of those. Moreover, by making it this so soon after the DPP victory in the January elections, the proposal smacks of triumphalism. Not only does this go against what president-elect Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) has sought to prioritize, it empowers the more radical elements within the KMT who will seize every opportunity to attack the DPP, while weakening the more moderate voices in the party.

Actually, the argument at the bottom was going around the net today, with many people noting publicly and privately that this was the goal of the move: to energize the Bitter Enders in the KMT so that they all go out to vote for reactionary Chair candidate Hung Hsiu-chu instead of her rival Huang Min-hui, a Taiwanese faction politician from Chiayi, in the KMT Chairmanship election next month. Aware of this, both Hung and Huang blasted the proposal. Whether or not that was the real goal of the factions pushing this move, it is likely to have that effect, which means that it is a very good thing.

Why? In a few months as presidential candidate, Hung had the Taiwanese wing of the KMT leaving in droves. Imagine the effect she could have as the Chairman until the end of next summer. Gao is making the right move, politically. Getting rid of the symbols of authoritarian power and personality cults is a good thing for democracy in Taiwan, but just as important is detaching the Taiwanese compradore politicians from the KMT.

Now if we could work on that eyesore memorial in central Taipei...
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Daily Links:

• Nippon.com: how to read Taiwan's elections
• Cold weather to linger through Saturday
• CFR paper arguing that China's ailing economic will make it more likely to engage in nationalistic adventuring.
• Ketagalan hosts a review of Stephane Corcuff's new book on Taiwan history and identity.
• Oh, and this excellent personal story of the KMT's pro-China hypocrisy from the Taipei Times

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[Taiwan] Don't miss the comments below! And check out my blog and its sidebars for events, links to previous posts and picture posts, and scores of links to other Taiwan blogs and forums!

US Stamp for Sun

Sun Yat-sen may have been replaced by a plant here in Taiwan, but he's forever commemorated by the US Postal Service. Initechnology informs me that sandwiched right between stamps for F. Remington the artist with the brush and James Naismith the artist with the basketball is a United States stamp for Sun Yat-sen, issued on Oct 10, 1961.

[China]

Shelly Rigger strikes again...

Shelly Rigger, who is often a source for scholarly commentary on Taiwan in the international media, has made some rather strange remarks in recent months. In October of last year she inexplicably told an audience of high school teachers that support for Taiwan independence had already peaked, and that there's no trend toward independence. Huh? On what planet?

Rigger gave another sample of how the Taiwan in her rearview mirror differs from the real Taiwan with a series of comments in a fine piece in the Weekly Standard on the new Taiwan history curriculum:

But aside from their symbolic import, the new textbooks will have a practical effect on Taiwanese students. "The real question is, what do you want the children of Taiwan growing up learning," says John Tkacik, an Asian studies expert at the Heritage Foundation. "Do you want them learning Chinese history and thinking that Taiwan doesn't matter? Because that's what's been going on for the past 50 years."

Indeed, during more than 50 years of control, the KMT revised history textbooks many times, always giving short shrift to Taiwanese history. While the regime never allotted more than a few chapters to Taiwan alone, volumes of "National History" indoctrinated students with the glory of KMT goals. The most recent KMT-sponsored revisions in 1995 included a section on the country's future stating that, "the ultimate goal is to unify China." By contrast, these first DPP-sponsored revisions leave questions of Taiwan's future open-ended.

The most controversial change in the new books is the removal of the honorific "Guo Fu," or "Father of the Country" to describe Sun Yat Sen, a cofounder of the KMT. Sun's political philosophy forms the basis of Taiwan's constitution, but the "Guo Fu's" practical impact on Taiwan varies widely depending on who you ask. "Sun Yat Sen had zero impact on the formation of Taiwan," says Tkacik. But Shelley Rigger, a professor of East Asian politics at Davidson College, believes that downplaying Sun Yat Sen's importance is a "decapitation" of historical facts. She compares the textbook revisions to a U.S. history course that doesn't mention the Framers of the Constitution: "Trying to purge anything that doesn't accord with a particular version of events . . . is a very dangerous way to teach history."

But removing Sun's grandiose title is not the same thing as removing all mention of the man himself, just as distinguishing Chinese history from Taiwan's is not the same thing as striking it from the record. While the timing of the changes is no doubt politically motivated, the content of the changes is less ideologically charged than previous revisions. And it is the content itself, not the recent fracas it has ignited, that will shape the national identity of Taiwan's young people.

Fortunately the writer took the trouble to obtain comments from all sides -- from the KMT liaison office in DC, from the TECRO office, and from the John Tkacik, who knows Taiwan up and down, and is a staunch supporter of the island. It's interesting that the writer thought Rigger would be the antidote for Tkacik, and clear why: the position she holds on this topic is a pro-KMT position completely at odds with reality.

Let's review a little history. The Constitution which she claims is so important was ignored by the KMT throughout most of Taiwan's history and when the chance came, reformed immediately because it is clumsy and ill-suited to the needs of a democratic nation. It doesn't even specify whether the government is Presidential or Parliamentary, a problem that has caused serious political problems throughout its short life. It wasn't adopted by the KMT's handpicked assembly until 1946, long after Sun's death. Sure, eliminating Sun is like eliminating the Founding Fathers, if the Founding Fathers had been handpicked by King George, and had all died twenty years before the US Constitution was adopted.

Further, its effect on the island was profoundly negative, for it was part of a toolkit that legitimated the KMT's claim to own all of China, a China that included Taiwan. The Constitution itself was never more than the candy-coating around an authoritarian dictatorship, and its lines of authority were routinely ignored by the Party-State that vested the real power in the KMT chairman. The Three Principles of the People made fine propaganda, but they were never honored here on Taiwan. Its legitimacy was contested in both Taiwan and China.

The ROC in its current incarnation has little to do with Sun Yat-sen, and much more to do with the machinations of the martial law era, and even more importantly, the numerous reforms during the era of democratization that have helped gain it some legitimacy here in Taiwan. But that evolution has nothing to do with Sun. Perhaps Sun is the father of some country somewhere else, but it isn't Taiwan. Here Sun, as Tkacik rightly observes, has had little impact, being nothing more than a face on a stick worshipped by the KMT as part of its Return to China mythology. None of the democratic reformers here took their cue from Sun. None of his principles are taken as the basis for Taiwan's current democratic development. Nobody spares a thought for Sun, ancient history from another nation's development.

And note, of course, that Sun is not being wiped from the books. His absurd title of "Father of the Country" is being deleted and his role in Taiwan's history is being restored to its proper level. Here Rigger manages to be overwrought, using very unscholarly language (Decapitation?) and delivering an erroneous analysis at the same time.

Decapitation? Hardly. More like restoration. Let's hope next time around Rigger uses more restrained language, and manages to align her opinions more closely to reality.

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