This was in the South China Morning Post on Saturday, January 8, 2005. You can only access it by paid subscription.
For cross-strait relations, I find Lung Yingtai to be one of the few sane commentators in a wilderness of zealous nut jobs. I thought some people here might enjoy excerpts from this essay.
[quote]I met a mainland writer in Zurich on a winter’s day in 1996, the time when Beijing was shooting missiles near Taiwan in an effort to influence the local election there. Over a glass of wine we began to compare our biographical sketches and make discoveries.
Born in the same year as I was, he also played in school theatres, taking up the role of the little soldier thrusting bayonets at the enemy, singing patriotic songs and delivering emotional speeches on how to “liberate” Taiwan. However, similarities stopped here. Soon enough we discovered that his heroes were my traitors and his criminals my martyrs. The historical figures condemned as tyrants in my history lessons were lauded in his as great nation-makers.
The great writers enshrined in his museums I had never read, and our respected writers were on his censored list. He had no association whatsoever with the songs of, say, Bob Dylan, who we had embraced under heavy American influences, and I’d never heard of The Night of the Moscow Suburb, a song which would bring tears to his eyes. When he used the term “left” he meant a stubborn conservatism hostile to openness, progressiveness and reform, what we called “right”, or even worse, “fundamentalist”. His “rightist” was my “leftist”.
Thus when we entered a serious discussion, we realised that we were dancing on slippery ice: be it radicalism, liberalism, nationalism; be it revolution, evolution, modernisation; be it democracy, liberty or equality. Words didn’t carry the same nuances of meaning and didn’t generate the same associations or imagery. It was, to use a Taiwanese expression, as if the chickens tried talking with the ducks…
During the time when the Taiwanese election last year captivated the whole Chinese world and the “suspicious” shooting of the president sent the Taiwanese population into agony, I wrote several articles which were published on the same day in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, the US, and the internet in China.
In short, I attacked a weak and incompetent Chen Shui-bian for manipulating ethnic conflicts and pursuing confrontation with the mainland at the cost of national security and international relations, all for the immoral purpose of securing votes.
But, I added, what actually enabled Mr Chen to keep me “hostage” was the threat the Chinese dictatorship posed on the democracy of Taiwan - the policy of military threat as well as international isolation against Taiwan was the real source of oppression that the Taiwanese suffered from.
The series of articles along this vein touched off a storm of debate both in Taiwan and on the mainland. Mainland readers are blocked from the web world outside and most Taiwanese readers are not in the habit of surfing mainland sites; the debates therefore were carried out simultaneously, but were divided like two parallel lines which never meet.
The Taiwanese readers who disagreed with my position tended to stress their “Taiwanese-ness”, which had suffered during the rule of the nationalist Chinese for four decades…
Many readers expressed a distrust of the utopia of independence and an unwillingness to cut the cultural bond to the mainland…
A postcard to me carried a different tone: “Ms Lung, since you love China more than Taiwan, crawl back to China and leave Taiwan to us. You don’t belong here anyway…”
The predominant responses from mainland readers of my articles were passionate calls of nationalism…
The nationalistic frenzy apparently made the Chinese intellectuals uneasy and many of them felt compelled to write in defence of my “Defence of Taiwanese Democracy”…
[…]Today I realise what is dark, sinister, incomprehensible is not that particular mass of land beyond the ocean; it lies deep in the hearts of human beings desiring power over others, any place, any time.
The nationalistic zealots contrast so poignantly with the free spirits of the critical intellectuals on both sides. Thus the “borders” that I am crossing are cut not so much along national or ethnical or religious lines - they are actually demarcation lines of reason.[/quote]