Still your father's KMT

Above is a poster from the Facebook of KMT Chairman Hung Hsiu-chu. She's flooded her Facebook with similar images. This one shows her as an anime character, and she's asking in Chinese: "Young people, let me ask! Why do you hate the KMT?"

The answer, of course, lies within the KMT itself. The TT reported on the continued retrograde motion of the KMT under the guidance of Chairman Hung:

Some Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) members yesterday voiced dissent after KMT Chairwoman Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱) on Tuesday said that the party leadership has drafted amendments to the party’s policy platform, which is to be discussed at the party’s national congress on Sunday, to align its efforts to strengthen the so-called “1992 consensus” and explore the potential for a “peace agreement” with Beijing.

The KMT's top down leadership style on display -- once again, no reform in sight under Hung:

“Major policy proposals should be bottom-up discussions. I do not understand why the party leadership is rushing this,” KMT Legislator Lai Shih-bao (賴士葆) told the United Daily News. “At the very least, the party’s rank-and-file members should have been consulted, and the KMT Central Standing Committee should have voted on the issue before it was submitted to the national congress.”

Remember this from 2005 if you are tempted to imagine the KMT will reform:

Members of Super KMT II, which takes its name from SKII, a kind of cosmetic which claims to help maintain an appearance of youthfulness, vowed to become key reformers in the quest to bring young people back to the KMT. Jul 8, 2005

No young people? Complaints about that for more than a decade now, though apparently the KMT has the superior infrastructure. Brian Hioe noted the other day:

However, the KMT still maintains a sizable and active youth section. Interestingly enough, despite the fact that the DPP absorbed many young people drawn from post-Sunflower civil society for the Tsai campaign, the DPP has never been able to build a comparable youth section to either the KMT or TSU.

And it is that in the KMT’s moment of crisis, young people within the KMT are calling for internal party reform in order to rescue the party—with some surprisingly sympathetic responses from post-Sunflower youth activists. The Grassroots Alliance (草協聯盟) and leading figure Hsu Hsiao-Chin (徐巧芯) have been much discussed in Taiwanese civil society as of late.

Hoie sharply notes that KMT young are much-discussed and sympathized with by outsiders, who recognize that they have grown up in what I call the Church of the KMT -- in its ideological bubble."This may be another sign that Taiwan’s current young may have moved beyond ethnic identity politics in the post-Sunflower political paradigm," he notes. But he goes on...

And it is that members of the Grassroots Alliance has been targeted most often not by their peers on the other side of the political aisle, but by older members of the KMT. The Grassroots Alliance and its key figures have been attacked from the beginning through claims that members have been brainwashed by the DPP or are “light green.” One imagines that, given the absolute loyalty of young members of the Grassroots Alliance to the party as a matter of personal identity, it is not exactly pleasant for members of the Grassroots Alliance to come under attack by the party when their calls for reform seem rather earnest in nature and done with the best interests of the KMT in mind. If this is the way the KMT treats their young, perhaps we can see why efforts at reform have been stymied, and why the KMT has such difficulty grooming young leaders and advancing them to positions in which they could take power as the next generation of the party—meaning possible extinction as a party when there is nobody left to carry on the party torch.

Indeed, in the TT article at the beginning of this piece quotes KMT Chair Hung criticizing the young:

Hung criticized Tsai’s comments about Taiwan’s “naturally independence-leaning” younger generations, saying: “It is an artificial pro-independence sentiment ... [that was] manipulated by politicians who made young people forget about the Republic of China’s history and cross-strait ties to “cut the umbilical cord” between Taiwan and China.”

When you are viewing things through the lens of ideology, opposition is always explained in terms of conspiracy...

And then there is this...

"Meetings held by the KMT Central Standing Committee consist of one person laying down the law. There's no democracy at all in the party," Yang said. March 24, 2000

Nothing has changed. The party rank and file are just cannon fodder, the real decisions are made by elites.

Moreover, the policies that Hung is advocating, especially the "peace agreement" which is a non-starter with little support outside the KMT, are old. The idea of "peace agreement" was originally proposed by then-independent and former KMT heavyweight James Soong as he ran for president in the 2000 election.... (TT, March, 2000)

"While the political dispute cannot be settled at once, I would like to use cultural and economic approaches to promote a friendly atmosphere, in the hopes of pushing through a 30- to 50-year peace accord under the auspices of international witnesses," he said.

These "peace agreements" are never concretely spelled out because the KMT likely sees them as a way to annex Taiwan to China and to neutralize Taiwan in China's favor in the ongoing hegemonic struggle between the US, Japan, and China. It's hilarious to hear Hung talking about them fifteen years of non-start later, and even more hilarious to read in the media that Tsai does not have a coherent foreign policy given the KMT's current utter lack of a concrete foreign policy (for which the party is never criticized in the foreign media).

Hung did signal that the KMT will engage in independent diplomacy with China, which will likely make Beijing laugh...

Michael Danielson had a piece in the TT today assessing the KMT's first 100 days in opposition. Observing that "the KMT lost China and now it is going to lose Taiwan", Danielson reminds us:

Finally, the KMT continues to promote the “1992 consensus” as the savior of the nation’s economy and its relationship with China. Beijing’s reaction to Tsai has been relatively modest. Retrospectively, the KMT’s obsession with the “1992 consensus” has not given Taiwan more real international space, but rather contributed to the KMT’s downfall through the Sunflower movement and Taiwanese’s negative reaction to an economic integration with China, which they fear would lead to more social inequality.

Since integration with China has driven Taiwan's social inequality, it is not surprising that the public objects to more.

Danielson correctly observes that Beijing did little for Taiwan's international space. The two, social movements and international space, are connected -- J Michael Cole cogently argued last year that China, seeing that Ma was hamstrung by the Sunflowers and domestically weak, had decided to punish Ma by implementing the new flight routes that came dangerously close to Taiwan's. People have already forgotten that the free trade agreements with other nations promised by President Ma if Taiwan signed ECFA never materialized because Beijing blocked them, as the Ma Administration complained.

The truth is that "progress" in cross-strait relations often lauded by commentators either never really existed or else actively harmed Taiwan's interests.
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Have the Strawberries Found Their Voice?

Taipei Times editorializes on the Strawberry Generation:

For those who have long complained about the seemingly apathetic Taiwanese youth on matters of politics, the past two weeks must have had elements of both surprise and relief, with two large student mobilizations taking place in two cities on two different continents: London and Taipei.

The catalyst in both instances was injustice — the removal, following official complaints by China, of the Republic of China (ROC) national flag at a non-Olympic venue in London, and the creation of a pro-China media monster through the acquisition by the Want Want China Times Group of China Network Systems’ (CNS) cable TV services, and the subsequent threat of lawsuits by a Want Want employee against a student.

Hundreds gathered on Regent Street in London, proudly showing the ROC flag, while about 700 protested in front of the CtiTV building in Taipei, calling for freedom of speech to be respected. In stark contrast to the protests organized by the pan-green camp, where the majority of participants are usually above the age of 50, those two events involved students and young professionals who were educated, connected and angry. They were, in essence, the same type of people who took to the streets earlier this year when two houses were flattened in a suburb of Taipei to make way for an urban renewal project; or those who turned up in large numbers to confront police and contractors when farmland was seized to accommodate large-scale industrial projects.

Issues of justice, rather than abstracts of ethnicity or nationality, are what lights the fire in the belly of Taiwanese youth today. For them, the past is in the past and the issue of who they are has already been settled; what they look to is the future and the uncertainties created by injustice. That is why one can hardly find anyone below the age of 30 at protests against, say, the so-called “1992 consensus,” but thousands will roll up their sleeves when someone’s property is threatened by state rapacity.

All of this occurs at a time when policymaking within the Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) administration appears to have been taken over by an old, conservative wing of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), while moderates in the pan-blue camp have grown largely silent.

When I went down south after the Morakot disaster I was struck by the large numbers of young people -- organized by local governments -- who had poured out to help the victims. The Strawberries are not soft, but their causes are not the same as those of their parents.

The TT's claim that Strawberries "know who they are" is entirely correct; the problem is that their identity is incomplete -- as I've noted before, it's a not- identity: "we are not Chinese, we are Taiwanese." But it should be noted that the Strawberry generation maintains harmony amongst its members by avoiding discussion of the Blue-Green divide and papering over those tribal identities with silence. The reason social injustice motivates them is probably fall-out from that general generational decision: social injustice is something everyone across the Blue-Green divide can agree on.

The Losheng Leper Sanatorium was probably the first issue for the new generation. Another key moment was the Wild Strawberry movement, which fought for public assembly rights. Although it worked hard to be non-partisan, the government and its servants struck heavily at it by painting it as a pan-Green tool. Assembly rights are overtly political rights.... what's interesting in the WantWant case is that the side supporting a free and open media environment has successfully avoided the charge of being a pan-Green tool, even though WantWant and its CEO are rabidly pro-China. It seems to me that unlike in the Wild Strawberry case pan-Green politicians appear to have maintained a discreet distance. Moreover, the student who was threatened with a lawsuit for posting pictures on the internet is someone that every young person in Taiwan can identity with; they all use the internet as naturally as breathing and they all post pictures on social networks.....
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Daily Links:

• Good WSJ interview with DPP Chair Su Tseng-chang
• Prosecutors bring in sister of accused DPP Chiayi politician
• Video: Xindian River during typhoon Soala
• Global Voices: threat to media from WantWant
• Taiwan ships sent to wrong area during drill, making Japan go on alert.

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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! Delenda est, baby.

Blue think tank poll on Taiwanese Youth & Military says opposite of Pollster's spin

UPDATE: The TT has revised the kicker. The headline is still wrong, but at least a corrective gale blew through the office. I've substantially revised the post.


Youth will not fight for Taiwan: poll

A survey released yesterday showed that 45.8 percent of young people born after 1984 agreed that Taiwan is an independent nation separate from China, while almost 60 percent of the respondents said that people have the right to refuse military conscription in the event of war against China.

The 21st Century Foundation, a local think tank, released the survey to explore the “sense of efficacy” of the generation toward cross-strait peace, attempting to find what they think are the ways to achieve peace and whether it is possible to reconcile cross-strait peace with preservation national sovereignty.

The survey said.....

"The survey found that 57 percent of the respondents agreed that people have the right to refuse to be conscripted into the military if a war breaks out because of Taiwan’s declaration of independence, while 43 percent disagreed.

An analysis of these two questions showed that 31.6 percent of the respondents do not want to be mobilized for military duty and would rather surrender in case of military conflict between Taiwan and China, Chang said."

Read it yourself -- nearly 60% said that others should not be forced to fight, and only 31% said that they do not want to be mobilized for duty. The number of people who said that they would go if mobilized is almost 70%, exactly opposite of what the headline says .

The TT then goes on to accept the spin that the lead researcher puts on the article without any corrective save provision of the numbers...

The survey reflected the “pragmatic attitudes” of young people in Taiwan toward cross-strait issues, he added.

“They do not want to sacrifice their lives for sovereignty,” Chang said of the findings.

The numbers are right there: not only do nearly 70% appear to be willing to be mobilized for duty but according to the survey, 51.7% agreed that Chinese invaders have to be resisted even if the government itself throws in the towel!

Asked whether they think people in Taiwan have to fight against China until the end, even if the government has stopped resisting when China forces Taiwan into unification, 48.3 percent of the respondents disagreed, and 51.7 percent agreed.

Apparently just over half the "strawberries" are bloody-minded bastards who will fight to the bitter end!

The other thing about this amazing presentation that bothered me was the reference to the 21st Century Foundation as "a local think tank." A two second search on Google turned up this collection of slides. Here are the top three people:

You only have to look at the positions and institutional commitments of these three individuals to know that this "thinktank" is a pro-Blue foundation. This probably should have been made clear by the Taipei Times. If you keep reading the slides, the thinktank's agricultural programs appear to be part of a program to transfer Taiwan's ag tech to China.

Finally, how about this research project:

Chang called the research a “pioneering study” because it combined qualitative and quantitative methods of conducting focus group interviews with senior high school and college students. A total of 719 copies of questionnaires were completed either online or through face-to-face interviews, and the respondents had connections to the research team rather than being randomly selected.

The paper's presentation is confusing. The use of "face-to-face" implies one on one interviews but focus groups were used, in which students were interviewed in groups (reflect for a moment on how Taiwanese talk about politics in groups). The idea that combining qualitative and quantitative work is somehow pioneering is laughable; there are a gazillion such studies (I am part of a team that has published one such study myself). I am sure the author knows that, and believe the author wanted to emphasize the pioneering nature of the study stems from its sample size and population, not combo of qual/quan triangulation. If you read the paragraph on how the students define China and Taiwan, it appears that a Blue-skewed population was selected.

However, if you read the paper's description, it says that participants were non-randomly selected. Yes, that's right, the sample population consists of non-random internet users and students familiar to the research team. Representativeness is thus a serious issue. Since the pro-China political commitments of the Foundation are painfully obvious, what we are really looking at is a study from a pro-KMT source that nevertheless says that Taiwanese students are majority bitter enders.

Now that's news the paper should have promoted.
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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! Delenda est, baby.

Leninist Organization in Action: the Ad

Several months go I wrote about the formation of these "student groups." Very slick, eh? Obviously a lot of money behind this.
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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! Delenda est, baby.

New Zogby Poll on Independence

Zogby has a new poll on Taiwan independence beliefs among the Taiwanese. The press release says:

Zogby Poll: 85% in Taiwan Support Petitioning U.N. for Membership

Survey finds most view themselves as Taiwanese and believe Taiwan is an independent nation, not a part of China

The vast majority of adults in Taiwan – 85% – believe the government of Taiwan should petition the United Nations for membership and 89% believe Taiwan should be offered membership in the U.N., a new Zogby International poll shows.

As Taiwan prepares to hold a referendum March 22 on whether to seek U.N. membership, 89% of respondents believe the United States should support Taiwan in its effort to gain recognition by the U.N. Nearly as many (80%) agree the U.S. should openly oppose China’s position against Taiwan’s membership in the U.N. and help Taiwan establish U.N. membership. While 75% rate the relationship between the U.S. and Taiwan as favorable, just 30% say the same about Taiwan’s relationship with China, which claims sovereignty over the self-ruled island that sits off the shore of Asia between the East and South China seas.

Since the early 1990s, Taiwan has applied for membership but has never won it because of opposition from Beijing, which, as a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council, holds veto power over such applications.

The vast majority (97%) said they agree that when deciding whether or not to offer membership, the United Nations should treat all countries equally and without discrimination and 96% believe that on the issue of U.N. participation, the U.S. should respect every country’s right to membership based on the principles of democracy and self-determination. Zogby International conducted a telephone survey of 1,072 adults in Taiwan from Feb. 19 to Feb. 21, 2008, which carries a margin of error of +/- 3.1 percentage points. The survey was commissioned by Professor Fu-Tong Hsu, Ph.D, and former chairman of the Taiwan Renaissance Foundation.

Nearly two-thirds (63%) said they view the current status of Taiwan as a sovereign and independent country, while 31% said they view Taiwan’s sovereignty as undetermined – just 5% believe China’s sovereignty extends over Taiwan. When specifically asked whether they agree that Taiwan is a sovereign and independent nation, 89% agreed.

Three in four of those surveyed – 79% – said they support using the name “Taiwan” to refer to what they consider to be an independent and sovereign country. Seventy-seven percent said they support the government’s policy of using the name “Taiwan” when applying for U.N. membership, while nearly as many (64%) said they would be supportive of the government using the name “Republic of China” in when applying for membership.

Most of those surveyed (71%) said they would describe themselves as Taiwanese when speaking with someone from another country, such as an American or European – just 5% said they would say they were Chinese and 21% said they would identify themselves as being both Chinese and Taiwanese.

The survey also finds that more than half (53%) believe Japan is Taiwan’s closest ally in the region, with 82% who rate the relationship between Taiwan and Japan favorably.

For a full look at the methodology, see this page at the Zogby site. The report was commissioned by the head of the Taiwan National Congress, an umbrella organization of about 20 pro-independence groups (Taipei Times article from 2007 on them), Dr. Hsu Fu-tong.

A separate data file I obtained observed that only 53% in the 18-29 group believe Taiwan is independent, while in the 50-59 group, 72% do. Instead, the 18-29 group is more likely to believe that Taiwan's status is undetermined (42%). China is lowest in favorability among the four nations that Zogby asked about. Of the 68% who answered NO when asked if Taiwan was part of China, in a follow-up question aimed at that group, 77% of the NO-s agreed that Taiwan was part of some looser conception of China.

Zogby's findings on the young go a long way to explain some of their apparently contradictory positions in politics. Precisely because they see themselves as Taiwanese, they feel comfortable voting for whatever party. They also show that Taiwanese have a number of different responses to the issues of Taiwan's sovereignty, and are quite nuanced in how they view the relationship between Taiwan's cultural debt to China and whether that cultural debt translates into PRC sovereignty.

[Taiwan]