it seems i picked a good day to start this thread, because i’ve now had the chance to read the editorial in the china post and it’s a doosie.
let’s see. first it picks up as fact the number 275,000 for attendants at last saturday’s march that was first bandied about by Ma Ying-jeou. Never mind how irresponsible it was for Ma to toss out that figure, it also strikes me as horrendously wrong. the point is, the china post is being rather selective on deciding whose numbers to choose. In Washington DC, the park police, which oversees the Mall where most rallies take place, have refused for several years now to comment on numbers of people at rallies and protests because of the political implications of doing so. Maybe Taiwan should consider this as a matter of policy for its police. ok, now i’ll go back to smoking my crack.
anyway, the best part of the editorial was about two thirds of the way down (after the lengthy quote from Xinhua). “if chen’s restraint relfected a retreat from his independence position, it would help greatly in reducing the tension with beijing. but such a step alone will not be enough to break the cross-strait impasse. he needs to go further to embrace the principle of one China, something he has persistently rejected as contradicting his political agenda.”
well, there it is, stated more clearly than in any other editorial i have read in that paper. taiwan’s real problem, apparently is that chen and the dpp refuse to admit their chineseness and are obstinately pursuing a dangerous splittist course.
it then goes on to say that Chen Shui-bian is playing the “democracy and peace cards as a strategy to counter Beijing’s anti-secession law.” I often see English used wrongly in the CP, but somehow I think they intended the use of “playing a card” with all its sinister implications. to me it shows just how much respect these people give democracy – when they’re not the ones employing it, it becomes a political tool. sad. truly sad.
but what can one expect? the cp is run by a bunch of chinese ethno-cultural nationalists and their ideology supercedes principles of democracy and minority self-determination. for them, blood is truly thicker than water, salt water in this case. no wonder they now see eye-to-eye with the CCP and bitch and moan about how, instead of China’s beligerence, it’s actually the DPP and Chen who are inviting calamity upon Taiwan. They’re not about to admit that China’s continued claim to Taiwan is the result of the KMT’s pipe-dream to one day take back “the Motherland” and its history of antagonistic relations with the Communists. (on a side note, ironically, the US, which saved the KMT’s hide in 1950 by declaring Taiwan a quasi-US protectorate, is now villainized by many KMT stalwarts as seeking to obstruct unification and being too helpful to the DPP admin. Strange how events turn.)
some more nauseating reading in today’s cp is columnist frank ching’s sob story about his ancestral family tombs in China being ripped up to make way for a parking lot. the headline on this piece is “Chinese pleased with improved living standards.” Just reading that made me cringe. That is the most ignorant statement one could make about China these days. China is a simmering cess pit of discontent and it’s in part because those who have had their living standards improve, completely ignore those whose living standards haven’t. The people whose lives have improved usually have capital and power and access to media, wherein they write absurdities like “Chinese pleased with improved living standards.” Those types got their comeuppance during and after the revolution and it’s the CCP’s daily task now to prevent it from happening again – this time to them.
