What President Lee Teng-hui started in a way to help Ma Ying-jeou get elected mayor of Taipei in 1998 is coming back to haunt the latter as the Kuomintang standard bearer in March 2008.
Ma was running against Chen Shui-bian, the popular native-born mayor of the capital city seeking reelection.Lee, who doubled as Kuomintang chairman then, coined a moniker for Ma, the mainlander, in the run-up to the mayoral election.Ma was a new Taiwanese, Lee declared.This gave rise to a New Taiwanese nationalism that was instrumental in Ma’s victory over Chen, who, however, made a comeback to win the presidential election in 2000.Lee’s new nationalism stressed only loyalty and devotion to Taiwan.It doesn’t matter where one was born; one who is loyal and devoted to the island state is a new Taiwanese.
Toward the end of his last term, President Lee had a change of mind – or probably he just conveniently advocated his new Taiwanese nationalism to win Taipei for his Kuomintang – and came up with an “indigenization” or “Taiwanization” scheme.President Chen inherited it in 2000 and has since been trying to turn it into an “ultranationalism.”
Taiwan’s new “ultranationalism” has yet to take shape.It lacks a charismatic leader like Adolf Hitler to usher it in.So far it has remained Hoklo chauvinism: Anybody who doesn’t speak Hoklo or Amoy doesn’t love Taiwan and therefore has no place on the island which was first inhabited by Austronesian indigenous peoples.Underlying this aggressive and irrational belief is the deep fear of Chinese mainlanders whose most condemned symbol currently is President Chiang Kai-shek. Any mainlander Kuomintang leader and his supporters are the enemy of Hoklo chauvinists who have all but purged the ruling Democratic Progressive Party of reformists labeled as “fence-sitters” and are ready to take on Ma Ying-jeou.If developed, the ultranationalism would sweep Ma away into political limbo.
President Chen had a perfect timing for his Hoklo chauvinist campaign.Taiwan is marking the sixtieth anniversary of the February 28 Incident of 1947, in which tens of thousands of innocent native-born islanders were slaughtered by government troops dispatched from China.He said China has 1,000 cruise missiles ready to hit Taiwan. He identified Chiang Kai-shek as the “chief culprit” of the massacre and the “butcher” in the reign of white terror that followed.He renamed a memorial dedicated to Chiang in the heart of Taipei the National Taiwan Democracy Memorial Hall.He told a video conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. a Kuomintang win in 2008 would challenge and test the mutual trust and cooperation he had tried hard to strengthen over the past seven years.He attempted in vain to get Taiwan into the World Health Organization under that name.He will be doing so again when time comes for Taiwan to apply for readmission to the United Nations.The message he wants to get across to the people is that Taiwan has been bullied by China and the Chinese.
Chen’s xenophobia differs from the one shown in Nazi Germany and imperial Japan.The threat is real to Taiwan.It was imaginary to prewar Germany and the land of the rising sun.There is one feature in common: All blamed foreigners as the source of all evils.The Nazis attributed all their woes to the Jews.Japanese ultranationalists had the chauvinistic atmosphere injected into schools and universities: patriotism taught that everything bad came from the West.Hoklo chauvinists insist that all the trouble Taiwan now has was caused by the mainland Chinese here as well as in China.
Like their opposite numbers in Germany and Japan in the 1930s, chauvinists in Taiwan appeal to the self-pity of the native-born islanders to gain ground.Hitler appealed successfully to the Germans defeated in World War I and ill-treated by the victors.The Japanese suffering during and after the Great Depression were convinced without much difficulty that Western democracy caused their fall from grace of their Shinto ancestors, whose representative in the modern world was the living god emperor.
In prewar Japan in particular liberals were the target of ultranationalists.Professor Tatsukichi Minobe, a leading authority on constitutional law and a member of the House of Peers, was attacked strongly in 1934-35 on the grounds that some of his writings described the emperor as an “organ” of the state.They charged him with lese majeste, and as no men dared defend him, he was forced to resign from the Peers and relinquish all his honors, his books were banned, and early in 1936 he narrowly escaped assassination. In incidents like this Japanese nationalism became hysterical. In others it was little short of nonsense.Thus the wording of the Kellogg Pact, stating that the signatories accepted it “in the name of their respective peoples,” brought quite serious – and successful – objections that this was disrespectful to the emperor.Foreign visitors were accused of spying on the flimsiest pretexts.There were arguments about the use of foreign words and whether signboards at railway stations should read from right to left (Japanese style) or left to right (Western style).And in 1935 the foreign ministry tried to substitute “Nippon” and “East Asia” for the older, Eurocentric terms “Japan” and the “Far East.”
In Chen Shui-bian’s Taiwan, Frank Hsieh came under merciless fire for advocating a “symbiosis” with the Kuomintang and China.He was compelled to moderate his stand to get the Democratic Progressive Party’s nomination for president.Hsieh has to concede further to toe Chen’s Hoklo chauvinistic line, if he doesn’t want to follow in Minobe’s footsteps.Aren’t the authorities in Taipei doing what their Japanese counterparts did in the 1930s?
Hard as he may try, President Chen can’t set ultranationalism in motion.Lee Teng-hui, a more charismatic leader, is too old to pick up where Chen has to leave off.Besides, while ultranationalists in Germany and Japan were against “foreigners,” Hoklo chauvinists are pitted against a sizable minority of Taiwan’s citizenry.Ultranationalism won’t come into being in Taiwan, unless China wreaks havoc on the island, but Hoklo chauvinism may yet doom Ma Ying-jeou’s chance to become president of the Republic of China.
（本文刊載於96.06.04 China Post第4版，本文代表作者個人意見）