Ma Ying-jeou the presidential candidate was an idol, if not a hero, of millions of voters young and old. But President Ma Ying-jeou seems to have been transformed into a new punching bag for almost all the people, fans and opponents alike. It's unfair.
Everything President Ma does is opposed, panned and jeered at. Any improvement in relations between Taiwan and China which he has engineered is sniped at as a sellout of Taiwan by Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) leaders. Any new initiative to stamp out corruption is criticized as one taken too late and only half-heartedly. Crash projects launched to shield Taiwan against the worldwide financial crisis are laughed at as a sheer waste of money. And a group of noted pro-Ma professors and educators has joined in the abuse-hurling chorus against the president, who will be marking the first anniversary of his inauguration this month.
Taiwan's poet laureate, Yu Kuang-chung, led the new charge of his cultural brigade, claiming Ma is surrendering Taiwan's right to interpret Chinese culture to the People's Republic of China, which is setting up Confucian institutes overseas to get the people the world over to acquire a better understanding of Confucianism, the pillar of the world's oldest continuing civilization. Professors called Ma's first year as president a "soul-less year of education," blasting him for failing to right the wrongs done by the previous DPP administration in the teaching in schools of Chinese and Chinese history. Educators demanded Ma keep his campaign promise to extend compulsory education to 12 years to get all youngsters admitted to high schools without an entrance examination.
Let us be fair. Their criticism and demands are unjust. For one thing, nobody has given Taiwan the "right to interpret Chinese culture." Doesn't China, where Confucius was born and from where all the Han Chinese in Taiwan have come, have at least an equal right to interpret Chinese culture? True, Mao Zedong tried to de-Confucianize China. He failed because he himself was a Confucian like practically everybody else in China and Taiwan is. Confucianism has been resurrected in China.
Former President Chen Shui-bian tried in vain to de-Sinicize Taiwan. He failed because he is Chinese. The wrongs done can be righted, but there is little chance that the younger generation will raise their working command of Chinese or acquire a better understanding of Chinese civilization. All 15-year-olds may be freed from cramming to get into high schools, of course, but the inevitable result is a worse-than-mediocre secondary education. All those cantankerous educators must be reminded of the increasingly poor quality of higher education from allowing practically every applicant to be admitted to one of more than 160 universities in Taiwan with a population of 23 million.
We believe it's time to stop making President Ma a bad boy for everyone.
（本文刊載於98.05.12. China Post，本文代表作者個人意見）