Rebutting Criticisms of Student Protests

lettersfromtaiwan:

There’s been a lot of commentary and criticism of the student protestors.  Here are my responses:

  • The 2012 Taiwanese Legislative elections gave the KMT an electoral mandate to push through the Government’s agenda - Yes and no. Winning an election on a certain election platform does not give the ruling party the automatic right to expect the public and opposition parties to accept any policy proposal they choose, especially those not explicitly promised in the election campaign, to legislate on.  Furthermore, in Taiwan, legislators are more often than not elected on local issues, and via factional affiliation, rather than on national issues.  That President Ma won re-election as the same time as KMT legislators won a majority of seats does not mean that most pro-KMT voters who elected KMT legislators to their seats did so because they supported Ma’s policy agenda or his pro-China legislative objectives. The practice of electoral democracy is more nuanced than that.  Furthermore, the reason the students occupied the Legislative Yuan in the first place was because they perceived a breakdown in democratic mechanisms in the legislative body because the KMT reneged on a promise to review the Trade Services Pact (CSSTA) clause for clause and then claimed it had passed committee and had been sent to the floor for a vote.  If this was not a blatant and obvious lie, then it was at the very least a cynical and anti-democratic tactic that arguably may have broken Legislative Yuan rules and certainly breached a previous cross-party consensus.  This is what the students are protesting - KMT legislative dirty tricks to bypass the Legislature providing proper screening of the pact. Furthermore, the KMT Legislator’s tactics were endorsed and legitimised by President Ma on the morning of the18th which is why the students feel he is ultimately responsible.  President Ma made passing ECFA and this trade pact a personal political goal and stated it could not be reviewed clause for clause, or not passed, and he acted as KMT Chairman to ‘3-line’whip’ his party’s legislators into making sure the pact was ratified by the Legislative Yuan as soon as possible.  Finally, the Legislative Yuan is the highest deliberative body in the country.  It has the power to determine the legislative agenda and can choose what policies to legislate on.  It also has the power to depose the Prime Minister, who is selected by the President.  The President or the Premier can’t demand that the Legislature do anything.
  • Trying to occupy the Executive Yuan was a major mistake by students - no, this was a necessary escalation after the the Premier’s failed meeting with the students and after the President’s press conference in which he patronised and then blithely ignored the demands of the student protestors on Sunday morning (23/03/2014).  Storming the Executive Yuan was strategically a logical place to expand the protest being as it was so near by and would gain the Government’s immediate attention, which it did.  The crucial strategic mistake of the students on the Sunday night at about between 8.30pm and 9pm was to withdraw from inside of the building.  That allowed Premier Jiang to send in riot police as an effective counter response.  What the students should have done was occupy the entire interior space of the Executive Yuan en masse and block the doors in the same way as the Legislative Yuan - a little force to get in then barricade inside and stage a peaceful sit in, including in the court yard. 
  • The storming of the Executive Yuan lost the students the ‘moral high ground’ and cost them public support - I’ve seen a few commentators suggest this without any evidence of such a result other than perhaps from the reactions in mainstream media, most of which is pro-Government and had been smearing the student protestors from the moment they occupied the Legislative Yuan on the 17th March.  I’ve seen polls indicating that post 3-24, public support, and sympathy, for the students has actually risen rather than fallen.  To see people speculating that the student’s have lost the high ground or public support absent any concrete evidence of this is disappointing and more dangerously only facilitates domestic and international media framing of the students as being utterly isolated in their cause.
  • The Government was entirely right to order police to remove students and they used appropriate force. If this had happened else where the response would have been far harsher - There is an argument for saying that no democratic Government should allow the occupation of its day to day operational premises.  On the other hand, saying that the response from the police was light compared to other places is a derisory argument. Here’s another - in North Korea protesting against the state will get you locked up or executed. Taiwanese students should be lucky the police didn’t kill them all.
  • The Legislature cannot revoke or reverse the passing of the CSSTA through committee - the Legislative Yuan is the highest deliberate body in the country.  It has total control of its own legislative agenda and, as we saw from KMT Speaker Wang, it can choose to send the pact back to committee or kick it from the legislative agenda.  The only thing preventing this is President Ma, Premier Jiang, and the KMT legislative caucus.

Kano, an ode to the “glorious” Japanese rule.

As a person whose country was under Japanese rule–although the general public of the nation, myself included to be honest, prefers to call it “occupation”—watching a newly released Taiwanese film “Kano” wasn’t exactly a pleasant experience.

I’m not saying it was a bad movie. I’d rather say it’s the opposite. It was an entertaining film to watch, and the others at the premiere seemed to have the same opinion of the film. (There was a premiere of the film at a baseball stadium in Kaohsiung today.) The quality of the film has nothing to do with the reason why I find watching it not entirely pleasant. Rather, it was the underlying tone of the movie that appears to be praising the Taiwan under Japanese rule.

Taiwan was ceded to Imperial Japan in 1895 when Qing Dynasty signed the Treaty of Shimonoseki and for the next 50 years was under their rule. After centuries of being practically abandoned by the Qing court ever since they became subjects of the court in the 17th century—except for taxes levied and collected—and, much thanks to that, all prevalent corruption and economic as well as social hardships that they had to endure, Imperial Japan appeared to be more thoughtful and caring Taiwan as they put quite a ‘formidable’ amount of effort into Japanizing Taiwan with heavy infrastructure development, development of an effective sanitation system, and introduction of universal public education. (All of which were to exploit Taiwan as a lucrative colony more effectively and systemically for their benefits, to be perfectly clear.)

Somewhat ironically, what came after Imperial Japan surrendered to the Allies was Chinese mainlanders again, except it was a ‘republic’ this time as Taiwan was returned—or ‘illegally’ handed over as some people might argue—to Kuomintang (KMT). It would have not been too bad if things didn’t go downhill right away and stay there for relatively a long time, the period known as “White Terror”, during which the general standard of living in the island had become much worse comparing to of the one during the Japanese rule. (On a side note, It was forty years later that the KMT finally abandoned the idea of maintaining Taiwan as one-party state and free elections started to be held.)

Thanks to all the historical background, more than a few Neishengren (內省人) Taiwanese people show little to none antipathy towards the Japanese rule. (You’d be surprised to learn how easy it is to find Hinomaru-themed stickers, logos and whatnot in Taiwan. It’s pretty much like running into Nazi Hakenkruezs in Poland, Czech, Slovakia or Hungary.) Bearing these in mind, I couldn’t help but to feel what was underlying the film is this pro-Japanese rule sentiment.

Some people might say that the film is more or less an accurate depiction of the era without any particular bias towards either anti- or pro-Japan, and as proof of that they would mention that there were a few scenes in which Japanese showed discriminatory attitudes towards the Taiwanese aborigines such as calling them savages (蛮人), mocking them by asking aboriginal players if they could speak Japanese and so on. I do agree that the film indeed tried to show the viewers some dark sides of the colonial rule with such scenes, but throughout the film, there was almost no portrayal of oppressions and discriminations against the Taiwanese aborigines as well as the Han Chinese Taiwanese working class by the colonial authorities. (One of the good examples might be the Wushe incident.)

Also, more or less constant appearances of Yoichi Hatta and his brainchild the Chianan canal along with a Japanese agriculturalist named Hamada was pretty much irrelevant to the main storyline and unnecessary. I’m aware that Hatta and his legacy (the entire irrigation system) are well respected until now in Taiwan and Chiayi was/is indeed a farming region—after all, the school the players belonged to was Kaji Agricultural High School—but I still don’t think these facts are relevant enough to the film’s plot to justify and deserve such a lengthy portion of it. All these things considered, I cannot help but to think that the undertone of the film was a bit too overtly pro-Japan, through which—whether intentionally or not—effectively glorified the Japanese rule as a magnanimous, caring and even justifiable regime. (I believe it’s worth noting that the DPP is pretty much in line with this sort of thinking.)

I’m not suggesting that it’s deplorable to form such a point of view towards the Japanese rule or anything, but it begs me a question where the sense of identity as Taiwanese really lies, especially as a once-colonised people themselves by Imperial Japan.

blackinasia:

I’m frankly shocked that people are still reblogging that super problematic Frank Wilderson quote about the Holocaust, given how many issues there are embedded in it, and especially without commentary. 

You know, the commentary where so many people showed their asses as they proceeded to erase the tragedy of the Holocaust and dive down into the depths of oppression olympics. Awful, destructive commentary which prompted this initial response from me followed by an extended one. 

Just… wow. I really wish more people on this site could see the forest of oppression through the trees of their own and really get the intra-POC piece. But oh well. 

“Divide and conquer” still in effect?

(via owning-my-truth-deactivated2022)

Pastor protests 'homophobic' textbooks

“We believe that publishers should be protected of their intellectual freedom when writing textbooks, but we must also consider what’s accepted as the core ethical values of this country. This is a sensitive social issue and we believe it should be expressed (in the books) that there are different opinions about it,”

So, you dumb fuck mean to tell me that one of my own country’s core ethical values is discriminating against minorities because of their sexual orientations in the name of respecting and heeding (one of the most powerful lobby groups) “different opinions”?

“Every country has its own set of laws in evaluating and approving the education material for books. I don’t know if it’s appropriate for a foreigner to judge how we manage our education. You won’t see us commenting how other countries teach at schools.”

Oh, right, now one has to be a national of a given state in order to criticize it when it clearly violates several articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)–to which South Korea is also bound as the UDHR defines the meaning of the words “human rights” and “fundamental freedoms” in the UN Charter, by the way–because its government is afraid of going against powerful religious lobby groups?

You know what? You can all go fuck yourselves.

Trick or Treat: Whose are they?

It doesn’t seem that I’m going to see a lot of Halloween stuff in Taiwan, or at least in Kaohsiung other than at some clubs where non-Taiwanese nationals frequent, but probably there’ll be a lot of events and whatnot celebrating Halloween in Korea this year as well (at least in and around Seoul), which is becoming quite an usual affair recently.

And I get to wonder, have Koreans become Celt en masse? Now we have Scottish or Irish relatives in our families all of a sudden? Granted Halloween is a holiday stemmed from Christianity, which has a huge group of followers in Korea as well, but you barely see any religious context in those events hosted in Korea, if ever.

Well, it’s pretty much a rhetorical question.

40 Must-See Photos From The Past

Isn’t it interesting that among these photos none of them features anything Asian–okay, there’s one from Vietnam. I’ll give you that much–African, Middle Eastern, , or Latin American, and the only photos that feature anything other than European and North American were ones from the Pacific Front and Vietnam?

You gotta love Eurocentric perceptions.

Al-Shabab’s Nairobi Mall Rampage Tied to "Disastrous" U.S. Meddling in Somalia

al-Shabaab, Nairobi, Kenya, Somalia, AU, Ethiopia, and the US.

It’s just /fascinating/ that on almost every conflict that has taken place within the last 70 years, you can find ‘fingerprints’ of the US foreign policy. (But then, the other like Brits, French, Spaniards et all had done them before the US. So, what’s new, right?)