Taiwan Independence and Free Lunches
Bevin Chu
August 23, 1999
A standing joke among "Sinologists," or China experts, is that the Taiwan independence movement's leaders are "ready to fight to the last American G.I." The Taiwan independence motto could be summed up as "Give me liberty, or give them death."
Taiwan independence has little to do with genuine independence. Taiwan "independence" is characterized by complete and utter dependency, materially and emotionally, on whomever weilds the most power. A cliche constantly invoked in Taiwan political debates says it all: "Xi gua kao da bian" ("The watermelon tilts toward the big end.")
Materially, the Taiwan independence movement is utterly dependent on America. Every evening reunification proponents warn militant separatists on television debates they are courting disaster, and every evening the separatists argue that America will shield them from the negative consequences of refusing to negotiate in good faith with the Chinese mainland.
So far they have been proven right. Lawrence Eagleburger, Secretary of State to former President George Bush lamented in the wake of President Bill Clinton's kneejerk dispatch of two carrier battle groups to the Taiwan Straits in 1996, "They (Taiwan) have played us like a fiddle."
The Taiwan Relations Act's raison d'etre ended with Chairman Mao's death and his replacement by the man Mao denounced as the "Number Two Capitalist Roader," Deng Xiaoping. Whatever purpose it may have once served, it is now merely a blank check signed by Uncle Sam and made out to the Taiwan separatist leadership, to be cashed at their convenience. The amount is yet to be determined, but sooner or later it will be inked in with the blood of American G.I.s.
The east Asian financial crisis was an textbook case of what economists refer to as "moral hazard." International Monetary Fund guarantees amounted to an artificial incentive for wealthy investors to indulge in high-risk speculation, knowing the IMF would pull their chestnuts out of the fire if they underestimated how hot it would get.
The Taiwan Relations Act is the political and military analog of IMF bailout guarantees, amounting to an artificial incentive for "stealth separatists" like Lee Teng-hui to deliberately adopt non-starter negotiating positions and engage in reckless brinksmanship. They know the US Seventh Fleet will come steaming to their rescue if they overplay their hand and Beijing calls their bluff.
The moral hazard of IMF intervention resulted in east Asia bleeding oceans of red ink. The moral hazard of well-intentioned but wrong-headed assurances of American military intervention in the Taiwan Straits will bleed oceans of something far more precious.
American military leaders who may be required to send Americans into combat are painfully aware of the implications of Lee Teng-hui's shenanigans. As Admiral Dennis Blair, America's top military commander in the Pacific testified before Congress, Taiwan was crapping in the "punch bowl" of US-China relations.
ROC President Lee Teng-hui watched with delight as the US Air Force served as the air wing of the Kosovo Liberation Army. The timing of Lee's "two nations" provocation was hardly coincidental, coming as it did on the heels of Nato's Chinese Embassy bombing fiasco. Lee interpreted the event as his cue to stoop over the punchbowl and take yet another dump.
Fifty-eight thousand Americans ordered to Vietnam by ungrateful civilian REMFs came home in bodybags. A black granite monument on the National Mall inscribed with their names serves as a solemn reminder of that tragic waste of American lives.
If our Beltway Bombardiers have failed to learn the lessons of Vietnam, as it appears they have, and pointlessly dispatch young Americans halfway around the world to intervene in a Chinese Civil War that is none of our business, how many will return in bodybags from the Taiwan Straits? After it is all over, win, lose or draw, what would they have died for?
Are American values what the Taiwan separatists hold sacred and expect American fighing men and women to die for? If that were the case, American intervention on the separatists' behalf might be slightly less absurd. But as we shall see, American values are not what the Taiwan independence movement is all about.
Ignore the scripted, feel-good speeches high-powered American PR firms like Cassidy and Associates have carefully coached Lee Teng-hui to spoonfeed our congress and mainstream media. Ignore especially his 1996 "Always in my Heart" class reunion speech at Cornell, where he really laid it on with a trowel.
Instead find someone fluent in Chinese or better yet, Japanese, to translate what Lee and other Taiwanese separatists have written for the consumption of separatist militants in Taiwan and neo-fascist fellow travellers in Japan. Americans may be shocked to discover the Taiwanese separatists' bottom line objection to eventual reunification with China has little to do with professed admiration for American concepts of individualism, liberty, republican government, and everything to do with nostalgia for authoritarian Japanese colonial rule.
Lee Teng-hui's book "Taiwan's Proposal," published shortly before his "two nations" declaration, is Lee's manifesto for Taiwan's future. It was ghost-written by an anonymous Japanese author from a right wing Japanese perspective. The first edition was in written in Japanese and printed in Japan. Only later was it translated into Chinese and printed in Taiwan. In it Lee praises Japanese culture as being incomparably superior to American culture. Lee boasts publicly that he is more thoroughly steeped in Japanese culture than even the average Japanese.
In case that went by too fast, let me repeat it. A manifesto by the President of the Republic of China, purporting to represent the interests of the people of Taiwan, is actually penned by a neofascist Japanese author in Japan, published in Japan, and only gets translated into Chinese afterwards?
Hello?
During a 1995 interview with visiting Japanese author Ryotaro Shiba, President Lee Teng-hui ordered his cabinet and bodyguards out of his office, and speaking in Japanese to a long lost countryman, gushed that he still considered himself Japanese until a young adult, wept when he heard Japan had surrended to the Allies and was returning Taiwan to China, and that his grief upon hearing Emperor Hirohito had died was more profound than that of Japanese in Japan. The conversation was ostensibly confidential, but Shiba, being a journalist first and Lee's confidant only in Lee's fevered imagination, promptly published their little tete a tete verbatim the minute he got back to Japan, where Japanese neo-fascists applauded it enthusiastically.
Far from being freedom fighters, Taiwanese "independence" leaders fell over each other to collaborate with Japanese colonial administrators for personal advantage.
Lee Teng-hui's father collaborated by serving as a deputy in the colonial Japanese police force, actively oppressing his own people. In return, his family received comfortable housing, quality rations, and educational opportunities. Lee Teng-hui himself attended the Universty of Kyoto, a singular "honor" doled out only to those deemed "politically reliable."
Lee's chief negotiator in cross-Straits negotiations with Beijing is crony capitalist Koo Chen-fu. An historian at Taiwan's Academia Sineca recently exposed Koo and the Koo family business empire as WWII era profiteers engaged in the selling of Taiwanese women into sexual slavery.
Younger Taiwan independence leaders born too late to have been collaborators routinely offer elaborate rationalizations for WWII era Japanese war crimes on local talk shows.
When China was refused an apology in writing from Japanese Prime Minister Obuchi for WWII war crimes, which included years of gang rape of Taiwanese "comfort women" and Joseph Mengele style Unit 731 "medical experiments" performed on American POWs in Manchuria, Lee Teng-hui huffily proclaimed that "Japan has apologized enough. Any further apologizing will only harm Japan's dignity!"
Just before Lee threw his"two nations" gauntlet at Beijing's feet, he told Taiwan's media he detected early storm clouds of "kamikaze" ("divine wind") gathering over the island of Taiwan. The media was baffled by his cryptic remark, but his intention soon became clear. Time is running out for Lee, just as it ran out for Japan's kamikaze squadrons approaching V-J Day. Lee is hoping his"two nations" proclamation will provoke war. As Dr Alex Kao, an expert on Chinese military strategy sees it, Lee is gambling that the mainland "will launch a premature war now which 15 years from now Taiwan would have no chance of winning."
Emotionally the Taiwan "independence" elite is dependent on their former colonial master, Japan, into whose arms they will fling themselves if their divorce from China becomes a reality. Taiwan "independence" is merely a way station en route their final destination, Tokyo. Even their proposed "Republic of Taiwan" flag is a fascimile of the Japanese Emperor's "Chrysanthemum Flag." Taiwan separatists would be jubilant if upon achieving "independence" they are promptly re-colonized by Japan.
Taiwan independence is a movement which if genuinely understood would evoke scant sympathy from Americans, certainly not from American POWs who survived the Bataan Death March, and the Taiwan independence leaders know it. So instead they recite the catechism they know patriotic Americans want to hear: Freedom, democracy, anti-communism.
In a sense we shouldn't blame the Taiwan "independence" parasites, who are really no different from sundry homegrown parasites. The parasites know perfectly well they're getting a free lunch at American taxpayers' expense, but as long as their generous Uncle Sammy insists on picking up the tab, they'd be crazy to pass up a free meal.
A few million in strategically distributed political contributions by the immensely wealthy Taiwan Lobby, and presto, highly trained military personnel and trillions in advanced weaponry belonging to the World's Only Remaining Superpower are placed at their disposal. Americans who enlisted in our armed forces on the understanding their duty was to defend American territory from foreign invaders find themselves job-shopped as mercenaries to would be founders of a would be "Republic of Taiwan." The Taiwan tail winds up wagging the American dog. The Taiwan mouse roars, and the proud American eagle crosses the Pacific to do the mouse's bidding.
A pretty shrewd bargain for the Taiwan "independence" movement. But what kind of a deal is it for Americans? We owe it to ourselves to consider long and hard whether Taiwan independence is something American taxpayers want to pay for with our sweat and American fighting men and women want to pay for with their blood.
What will happen to 22 million ordinary Taiwanese if America repeals the Taiwan Relations Act and informs the obdurate separatist Lee Teng-hui "You want independence? Lots of luck. You're on your own."
The answer is: Not a damned thing.
Instead the Taiwan independence movement's Japanophile elite will be forced to listen, for a change, to the 80% majority of Taiwan people who oppose Taiwan independence and are perfectly content with defacto autonomy. If they don't, the people will elect a more rational president, one who will drive a hard bargain and negotiate a high degree of regional autonomy under a "One Country, Two Systems" formula. Later, as the mainland liberalizes to a degree deemed satisfactory by Taiwan, the two sides will reunify peacefully along the lines of East and West Germany.
Both America and China will win. Heavily armed Taiwan will get an even better deal than Hongkong, which to the chagrin of China-haters has remained utterly unmolested since its restoration to China, despite being completely unarmed.
Only the Taiwanese separatist fanatics will lose. Without America's credit card on the dinner table they will have to stare at the prices on the menu before ordering. Without American carte blanche, Lee Teng-hui and his Taiwan "independence" elite will have to ask themselves whether their dream of becoming a satellite of Japan is worth risking their own miserable hides, rather than the lives of American servicemen and women.
But, as the libertarian battle cry coined by the late, great libertarian science fiction master Robert Heinlein goes, "Tanstaafl!" or "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch!"
Monday, August 23, 1999
Wednesday, August 18, 1999
Gerald Segal, learn Chinese History before teaching It
Gerald Segal, learn Chinese History before teaching It
Bevin Chu
August 18, 1999
Letters Editor
Straits Times
Dear Sir/Madam,
Gerald Segal, in "Forgo blood politics or get left behind" asserts that "in the China-Taiwan dispute, the appeal from one side is that unity is imperative because of blood ties."
This will come as news to 1.2 billion pro-reunification Chinese on both sides of the Taiwan Straits who demand eventual reunification not on the basis of "blood lines," but on the basis of territorial sovereignty.
China has never claimed, for example, that predominantly ethnic Chinese Singapore is part of China's territory. China recognizes that Chinese-Singaporeans emigrated to a foreign country. The same is true of Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines. Nor have ethnic Chinese in these foreign countries ever been anything but "model minorities." They have certainly never demanded anything resembling the Austrian "anschluss." China does maintain however, correctly, that Taiwan and predominantly Tibetan-Chinese Tibet are integral parts of a multiethnic China.
Segal suggests "societies that stick closely to blood and ethnicity will now lose out in the globalised competition for ideas and talent." I for one agree with this 100%. But what does this have to do with rejecting Taiwan independence?
Even the most technologically advanced "borderless" Information Age nations refuse to tolerate the loss of sovereign territory without a struggle. If Mr. Segal doubts this, let him loudly demand that the United States, the home of the internet, allow Alaska, Hawaii, and Texas, each with an independence movement, to secede, and brace himself for the furious outpouring from American patriots.
Mr. Segal would do well to learn a little Chinese history before presuming to lecture others about it. His entire article confirms that "those who are unaware of their ignorance, will only be misled by their knowledge."
Segal seems blissfully unaware that several millennia of what Ku Klux Klansmen and neo-Nazis denounce as "mongrelization of the races" is the reason modern China looks so ethnically homogenous, not outmoded German or Japanese "blood-based instincts of identity."
Jews who centuries ago emigrated to Kaifeng are so thoroughly assimilated they are indistinguishable from "native" Chinese. By contrast Jews in Europe and even America remain physically distinct due to incomplete assimilation.
Yet it is China which Segal, writing from white Anglo-Saxon Britain condemns, and the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, four white Anglo-Saxon dominated former British colonies still plagued with anti-Semitism, which Segal lavishes with praise!
Chinese traditionally did not even think of China as a "nation" but simply as "Tien Xia" ("Under Heaven"). The very term "China" is a western neologism. China's universalist vision merged Hans, Manchus, Mongols, Moslems, Tibetans and 51 other ethnic groups, each at one time independent warring foreign nations, into an integrated multiethnic China. Ancient China was the original borderless economy, limited only by the era's primitive transportation.
If Mr. Segal wants to denounce "blood politics" in China, let him denounce Tenzing Gyatso, aka the Dalai Lama, who rejects his identity as a Tibetan-Chinese and instead demands Tibetan racial purity along the lines of his Nazi mentor, SS Captain Heinrich Harrer.
Segal's obsession with "dividing and conquering" China, well known to those familiar with his scribblings, merely reveal his own "dangerous and increasingly antiquated" Kiplingesque way of seeing the Chinese not as fellow human beings, but as an insidious "Yellow Peril" to be nipped in the bud. And Mr. Segal wonders why "solutions are hard to find."
Sincerely,
Bevin Chu
Taipei, Taiwan, China
Appendix:
Observations on the history of Jews in China
by Ling-Chi Wang
Associate Professor Emeritus
Ethnic Studies Department, UC Berkeley
Jewish people have a history of about one thousand years in China, dating back to the 10th century and ending in early 20th century when they, excluding the newly arrived Jews in Harbin and Shanghai respectively in first two decades from Russia and from Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, disappeared completely due to their total absorption through generations of inter -marriages with the Chinese. Down the centuries, the religious, economic, and cultural center of Jews in China was at Kaifeng, Henan. Unfortunately, nothing is left of the Jewish community due to assimilation and frequent disastrous flooding in Kaifeng. No doubt religious and racial persecution reinforced Jewish identity and solidarity over time in virtually every country Jews settled into. In China, Jews encountered no such persecution and they eventually were absorbed by the Chinese. This is the Chinese exceptionalism for which all Chinese can justifiably be proud of. What we know of the Jewish community during the one thousand years in China comes mostly from written records in Chinese and some bits and pieces of Jewish documents in Chinese, Hebrew, and Aramaic seen through old photographs.
Several years ago, the S.F. Jewish Museum borrowed an exhibit on the History of Jews in China from the Ha'aretz Museum in Israel. I had the honor of being the keynote speaker at the official opening of the exhibit, not so much because of my knowledge of Jews in China which was scanty and thin at best, but of my academic interests in Old Testament studies and the intellectual history of Jewish sages. It was quite an experience for a Chinese American to address a standing-room only Jewish audience.
Incidentally, a team of Jewish documentary film makers is now making a film on the history of Jews in San Francisco and I am helping the team understand the Chinese experience in S.F. and the relations between Jews and Chinese in the city, which had their ups and downs, as you can well imagine. Levi-Strauss, as you know, was founded during the Gold Rush by a Jew by that name and became famous for making the blue denim jeans. Like all garment manufacturing companies, it hired Chinese, hundreds of them in 1870s in order to compete with garments imported from East coast factories. Under pressure from the Workingmen's Party, it lay-off all Chinese except one. The one was retained because his skill was needed in the plant. Also, Rep. Julius Kahn was among the politicians who wrote the Chinese exclusion law enacted by Congress in 1902 which extended and expanded on the already punitive Geary Act of 1892, by including the exclusion of Chinese from the newly colonized Philippines and Hawaii and a narrowly defined exempt class of Chinese eligible to come to the U.S. as visitors. Unlike the east and midwest, Jews in the west coast experienced less intense anti-Semitism and were given opportunities to succeed and excel. The price of their success was joining the white racists in the oppression of Chinese.
Appendix:
Comments on America's Chinese Exclusion Law
by Edward Liu
Attorney at Law
San Francisco, California
My late father, Liu Chi Tien, was one of many adversely impacted by America's Chinese Exclusion Law, which was extended and applied to the Philippines after the U.S. annexed the islands in 1898, as spoils of the Spanish-American War.
The "yellow journalism" of Randolph Hearst incited public hysteria over the sinking of the USS Maine. It unleashed a public clamor for McKinley to declare war against Spain over the sinking in a Cuban harbor, then a Spanish colony.
When America declared war on Spain in 1898, Spain was seriously weakened and a failing colonial power.
America and Americans, the "Johnny Come Lately" to the game of Western Imperialism and Colonialism, suddenly became obsessed with selling "oil for the lamps of China."
The Philippines was then Spain's colony. When the war was won, Spain was vanquished and compelled to cede the Philippines to America, McKinley did not know what to do with America's new role as a colonizer the Philippine colony and Cuban colony.
The historical literature are full of stories about how the American government looked at the Philippines and Filipinos as "savages."
The pacification of the Philippines, by American troops, after the Filipino indigenous rebel patriots, led by a peasant Andres Bonifacio, was one of the most atrocious and brutal.
Americans are amnesic when it comes to their racism, brutalities, and atrocities committed against colored people in their colonial history and imperialist history.
My father, born in the Chinese village in Taishan, of an ethnic Chinese overseas father, named Lao Shing, was a child born when my overseas paternal grandfather went back on one of his trips from the Philippines back to his native village.
In 1905, when my father was born, the village had become a U.S. colony, and the Chinese Exclusion Law was already in force and extended to the Philippines, my father, even though born to a Philippines Chinese called Lao Shing, was barred from immigrating to join my grandfather.
Guess how my grandfather circumvented the Chinese Exclusion Act applied t the Philippines?
Ingenious!
Just like the Chinese in San Francisco, my father went in as a "paper son." A member of the Loong Kong Family Association, for all surnamed Liu (Lao), Kwan (Guan), Cheung (Chang), Chiu (Zhao) had a Philippine-born son who died. His name was Chong Hin.
My grandfather took his birth certificate, then called a Filipino cedula, went back to China, and claimed that my father was born in the Philippines, as "Chong Hin", as the son of a Loong Kong Family Association member.
For many years, my father, although surnamed Liu or Lau (in Cantonese) was using the name Chong Hin in his papers.
It mystified me. It was only later that I learned that he was a "paper son."
Representative Julius Kahn then and Senator Charles Schumer now embody this very racism and "yellow peril" paranoia.
But for that, my father would not have had such a difficult time joining his own birth father in the Philippines.
This aspect of the "dark side" of Jewish history, apart from the good side, needs to be underscored.
There are good Jews and there are bad Jews.
Rep. Julius Kahn was an [expletive deleted].
Bevin Chu
August 18, 1999
Letters Editor
Straits Times
Dear Sir/Madam,
Gerald Segal, in "Forgo blood politics or get left behind" asserts that "in the China-Taiwan dispute, the appeal from one side is that unity is imperative because of blood ties."
This will come as news to 1.2 billion pro-reunification Chinese on both sides of the Taiwan Straits who demand eventual reunification not on the basis of "blood lines," but on the basis of territorial sovereignty.
China has never claimed, for example, that predominantly ethnic Chinese Singapore is part of China's territory. China recognizes that Chinese-Singaporeans emigrated to a foreign country. The same is true of Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines. Nor have ethnic Chinese in these foreign countries ever been anything but "model minorities." They have certainly never demanded anything resembling the Austrian "anschluss." China does maintain however, correctly, that Taiwan and predominantly Tibetan-Chinese Tibet are integral parts of a multiethnic China.
Segal suggests "societies that stick closely to blood and ethnicity will now lose out in the globalised competition for ideas and talent." I for one agree with this 100%. But what does this have to do with rejecting Taiwan independence?
Even the most technologically advanced "borderless" Information Age nations refuse to tolerate the loss of sovereign territory without a struggle. If Mr. Segal doubts this, let him loudly demand that the United States, the home of the internet, allow Alaska, Hawaii, and Texas, each with an independence movement, to secede, and brace himself for the furious outpouring from American patriots.
Mr. Segal would do well to learn a little Chinese history before presuming to lecture others about it. His entire article confirms that "those who are unaware of their ignorance, will only be misled by their knowledge."
Segal seems blissfully unaware that several millennia of what Ku Klux Klansmen and neo-Nazis denounce as "mongrelization of the races" is the reason modern China looks so ethnically homogenous, not outmoded German or Japanese "blood-based instincts of identity."
Jews who centuries ago emigrated to Kaifeng are so thoroughly assimilated they are indistinguishable from "native" Chinese. By contrast Jews in Europe and even America remain physically distinct due to incomplete assimilation.
Yet it is China which Segal, writing from white Anglo-Saxon Britain condemns, and the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, four white Anglo-Saxon dominated former British colonies still plagued with anti-Semitism, which Segal lavishes with praise!
Chinese traditionally did not even think of China as a "nation" but simply as "Tien Xia" ("Under Heaven"). The very term "China" is a western neologism. China's universalist vision merged Hans, Manchus, Mongols, Moslems, Tibetans and 51 other ethnic groups, each at one time independent warring foreign nations, into an integrated multiethnic China. Ancient China was the original borderless economy, limited only by the era's primitive transportation.
If Mr. Segal wants to denounce "blood politics" in China, let him denounce Tenzing Gyatso, aka the Dalai Lama, who rejects his identity as a Tibetan-Chinese and instead demands Tibetan racial purity along the lines of his Nazi mentor, SS Captain Heinrich Harrer.
Segal's obsession with "dividing and conquering" China, well known to those familiar with his scribblings, merely reveal his own "dangerous and increasingly antiquated" Kiplingesque way of seeing the Chinese not as fellow human beings, but as an insidious "Yellow Peril" to be nipped in the bud. And Mr. Segal wonders why "solutions are hard to find."
Sincerely,
Bevin Chu
Taipei, Taiwan, China
Appendix:
Observations on the history of Jews in China
by Ling-Chi Wang
Associate Professor Emeritus
Ethnic Studies Department, UC Berkeley
Jewish people have a history of about one thousand years in China, dating back to the 10th century and ending in early 20th century when they, excluding the newly arrived Jews in Harbin and Shanghai respectively in first two decades from Russia and from Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, disappeared completely due to their total absorption through generations of inter -marriages with the Chinese. Down the centuries, the religious, economic, and cultural center of Jews in China was at Kaifeng, Henan. Unfortunately, nothing is left of the Jewish community due to assimilation and frequent disastrous flooding in Kaifeng. No doubt religious and racial persecution reinforced Jewish identity and solidarity over time in virtually every country Jews settled into. In China, Jews encountered no such persecution and they eventually were absorbed by the Chinese. This is the Chinese exceptionalism for which all Chinese can justifiably be proud of. What we know of the Jewish community during the one thousand years in China comes mostly from written records in Chinese and some bits and pieces of Jewish documents in Chinese, Hebrew, and Aramaic seen through old photographs.
Several years ago, the S.F. Jewish Museum borrowed an exhibit on the History of Jews in China from the Ha'aretz Museum in Israel. I had the honor of being the keynote speaker at the official opening of the exhibit, not so much because of my knowledge of Jews in China which was scanty and thin at best, but of my academic interests in Old Testament studies and the intellectual history of Jewish sages. It was quite an experience for a Chinese American to address a standing-room only Jewish audience.
Incidentally, a team of Jewish documentary film makers is now making a film on the history of Jews in San Francisco and I am helping the team understand the Chinese experience in S.F. and the relations between Jews and Chinese in the city, which had their ups and downs, as you can well imagine. Levi-Strauss, as you know, was founded during the Gold Rush by a Jew by that name and became famous for making the blue denim jeans. Like all garment manufacturing companies, it hired Chinese, hundreds of them in 1870s in order to compete with garments imported from East coast factories. Under pressure from the Workingmen's Party, it lay-off all Chinese except one. The one was retained because his skill was needed in the plant. Also, Rep. Julius Kahn was among the politicians who wrote the Chinese exclusion law enacted by Congress in 1902 which extended and expanded on the already punitive Geary Act of 1892, by including the exclusion of Chinese from the newly colonized Philippines and Hawaii and a narrowly defined exempt class of Chinese eligible to come to the U.S. as visitors. Unlike the east and midwest, Jews in the west coast experienced less intense anti-Semitism and were given opportunities to succeed and excel. The price of their success was joining the white racists in the oppression of Chinese.
Appendix:
Comments on America's Chinese Exclusion Law
by Edward Liu
Attorney at Law
San Francisco, California
My late father, Liu Chi Tien, was one of many adversely impacted by America's Chinese Exclusion Law, which was extended and applied to the Philippines after the U.S. annexed the islands in 1898, as spoils of the Spanish-American War.
The "yellow journalism" of Randolph Hearst incited public hysteria over the sinking of the USS Maine. It unleashed a public clamor for McKinley to declare war against Spain over the sinking in a Cuban harbor, then a Spanish colony.
When America declared war on Spain in 1898, Spain was seriously weakened and a failing colonial power.
America and Americans, the "Johnny Come Lately" to the game of Western Imperialism and Colonialism, suddenly became obsessed with selling "oil for the lamps of China."
The Philippines was then Spain's colony. When the war was won, Spain was vanquished and compelled to cede the Philippines to America, McKinley did not know what to do with America's new role as a colonizer the Philippine colony and Cuban colony.
The historical literature are full of stories about how the American government looked at the Philippines and Filipinos as "savages."
The pacification of the Philippines, by American troops, after the Filipino indigenous rebel patriots, led by a peasant Andres Bonifacio, was one of the most atrocious and brutal.
Americans are amnesic when it comes to their racism, brutalities, and atrocities committed against colored people in their colonial history and imperialist history.
My father, born in the Chinese village in Taishan, of an ethnic Chinese overseas father, named Lao Shing, was a child born when my overseas paternal grandfather went back on one of his trips from the Philippines back to his native village.
In 1905, when my father was born, the village had become a U.S. colony, and the Chinese Exclusion Law was already in force and extended to the Philippines, my father, even though born to a Philippines Chinese called Lao Shing, was barred from immigrating to join my grandfather.
Guess how my grandfather circumvented the Chinese Exclusion Act applied t the Philippines?
Ingenious!
Just like the Chinese in San Francisco, my father went in as a "paper son." A member of the Loong Kong Family Association, for all surnamed Liu (Lao), Kwan (Guan), Cheung (Chang), Chiu (Zhao) had a Philippine-born son who died. His name was Chong Hin.
My grandfather took his birth certificate, then called a Filipino cedula, went back to China, and claimed that my father was born in the Philippines, as "Chong Hin", as the son of a Loong Kong Family Association member.
For many years, my father, although surnamed Liu or Lau (in Cantonese) was using the name Chong Hin in his papers.
It mystified me. It was only later that I learned that he was a "paper son."
Representative Julius Kahn then and Senator Charles Schumer now embody this very racism and "yellow peril" paranoia.
But for that, my father would not have had such a difficult time joining his own birth father in the Philippines.
This aspect of the "dark side" of Jewish history, apart from the good side, needs to be underscored.
There are good Jews and there are bad Jews.
Rep. Julius Kahn was an [expletive deleted].
Sunday, August 08, 1999
American Values in Dire Straits
American Values in Dire Straits
Bevin Chu
August 08, 1999
High anxiety in the Taiwan Straits following Republic of China President Lee Teng-hui's "two nations" challenge to the People's Republic of China raises the question: How should patriotic Americans respond to the Taipei-Beijing confrontation?
The answer is: Americans who revere our heritage of freedom and independence must have the courage to defy 1990's Political Correctness and uphold core American values -- by politely but firmly refusing to intervene.
As George Washington stated in his Farewell Address of 1796:
"The Great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign Nations is in extending our comercial relations to have with them as little political connection as possible... Tis our true policy to steer clear of permanent Alliances, with any portion of the foreign World."
Condensing Washington's 18th century idioms into bumper sticker-ese:
"trade with either, side with neither."
Meanwhile, the Taiwan Relations Act, which should have gone the way of the Berlin Wall, is exactly the kind of pernicious "permanent Alliance" with a "portion of the foreign World" the Father of our Country urged us to steer clear of.
Washington was hardly alone. His resolute opposition to foreign intervention was shared by all the Founders, none of whom intended any exceptions to be made for Kosovo or Taiwan.
As James Madison put it:
"Indulging no passions which trespass on the rights or the repose of other nations... fulfilling their neutral obligations with... scrupulous impartiality... sincere neutrality toward belligerent nations... [excluding] foreign intrigues and foreign partialities..."
As Thomas Jefferson put it:
"Peace, commerce, and honest friendship, with all nations -- entangling alliances with none... Our first and fundamental maxim should be, never to entangle ourselves in the broils of Europe."
And finally, as John Quincy Adams, author of the Monroe Doctrine put it:
"America... does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own."
Why exactly were the Founding Fathers so unanimously and unambiguously opposed to "proactively" exporting American values beyond our shores? Did they not want liberty to prevail all over the world, not just in America? What was their problem anyway? Were they too myopic or selfish, as the Nomenklatura of the New World Order seem to imply, to see the value of "making the world safe for democracy?"
The answer to all these questions is a resounding "No." The Founding Fathers were cultured cosmopolitans who devoutly hoped that liberty would triumph the world over. And no, their foreign policy prescriptions have not been rendered obsolete by jet travel and the internet, because their soundness was not predicated on specific technologies in fhe first place. Rather their strategic vision was grounded solidly in their grasp of fundamental human nature, which has evolved little since 1796, however we might wish otherwise.
The Founders, powdered wigs and all, were infinitely more "hip" than we give them credit for, and understood something our smug modern politicians do not. They understood that to yield to the powerful temptation to "do good" abroad carries an enormously expensive and hidden price tag: the loss of our own liberty at home.
They understood that "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely," that handing our Political Class the power it demands to impose "benevolent global hegemony" on the rest of the world empowers it to impose a malevolent domestic dictatorship on Americans at home.
They understood, as too many well-intentioned Americans today do not, that once we compromise the safeguards against domestic tyranny written into our own system of law, no matter how compelling the rationale, we will cease being the nation others once considered worth emulating. We would instead soon resemble the very nations we so confidently set out to "reform" and "enlighten."
Chiang Kai-shek's Taiwan, like South Korea and West Germany, demonstrated capitalism's clear superiority to socialism. Democratic reformer Chiang Ching-kuo's Taiwan, which witnessed the repeal of martial law and the enfranchisment of "native" Taiwanese, demonstrated that economic reforms are the harbinger of political reforms. Lee Teng-hui's "New Taiwan" on the other hand, is proof positive that "eternal vigilance is the price of liberty."
China's Founding Father Sun Yat-sen modelled Taiwan's constitution on our own American Constitution. Acutely aware of China's susceptibility to backsliding into defacto monarchy, Sun took the added precaution of dividing the ROC government into five, not three branches. Not that it did any good. Lee Teng-hui, whom Newsweek gullibly anointed "Mr. Democracy," merely nullified all constitutional constraints on his executive powers in four stages over nine years, including the power of impeachment, and now simply does whatever he damned well pleases.
When Lee Teng-hui decided the Taiwan Provincial Government had to go because its mere existence constituted prima facie evidence Taiwan was part of China, the National Assembly stood in his way. What did "Mr. Democracy" do? With the collusion of the separatist Democratic Progressive Party he ordered closed circuit TV cameras installed inside the National Assembly hall to record who voted "the wrong way." He ordered illegal wiretaps of recalcitrant assemblymen, even his own party's. He sicced Taiwan's IRS onto holdouts with guerrilla tax audits. He arranged for triad hoodlums to phone undecided assemblymen to inquire "Do you know where your children are?" He persuaded parents and kin of Assembly members to threaten to disown or shun them. Finally, as a capper, he nullified all village level elections. Thousands of popularly elected officials have since become Lee's presidential appointees.
Lee Teng-hui is an "elective monarch" who finances his personal dream of a "Republic of Taiwan" with hapless Taiwan taxpayers' dollars, even though the government's own surveys show that over 80% of the people oppose Taiwan independence. When Lee made his headline grabbing offer of US$300 million in foreign aid to Kosovo, whom did he consult? No one. Not even his cabinet, let alone the Legislative Yuan, Taiwan's equivalent of our Congress. With the exception of Lee himself, all 22 million Chinese on Taiwan were taken completely by surprise.
All three major broadcast television stations on Taiwan are owned by Lee's KMT party machine, as are the two largest English language papers. Dissidents are relegated to cable TV or "pirate radio," where they survive only by practicing self-censorship. The acidly funny and popular "Dianfu Xinwen" ("Underground News"), a "McLaughlin Group" style panel show was recently forced off the air for making Lee look like a buffoon. .
The Founders adamantly opposed foreign entanglements even when they harbored no doubt whatsoever about the worthiness of sundry foreign lobbyists' causes. Try to imagine the vehemence of their opposition to so-called Taiwan "independence" when the Taiwan separatist leadership's commitment to America's republican ideals is more than just a little suspect?
Americans must summon up the backbone to resist the moral guilt-tripping of the Gauleiters of the New World Order. We must uphold Madison's wise and principled admonition to exclude "foreign intrigues and foreign partialities," by staying the hell out of the ongoing Chinese Civil War in the Taiwan Straits in 1999, just as China refrained from siding with either the Union or the Confederacy during the American Civil War in 1861.
As a first generation naturalized American I am all too aware that my patriotism is presumed suspect by many China-haters in Congress simply by virtue of my race and my national origin. Never mind that I am from Taiwan -- that didn't help Lee Wen-ho -- and that I currently live in Taiwan. Never mind that my parents also live in Taiwan. Never mind that like Joe Sobran and Jude Wanniski I was a Cold Warrior to the right of Richard Nixon. I know by advocating policies which may appear "soft on communism" red flags will go up in the fevered minds of China Threat theorists determined to "go abroad in search of monsters to destroy."
I could keep my mouth shut and my head down. But genuine patriotism demands that Americans defend the ideals of our Founding Fathers, and speak up for what is authentically American, and not meekly acquiesce, like "good Germans" or "good Japanese" in the 1930's, to the mainstream consensus while our nation continues its downward slide into imperial decadence.
America, the "world's only remaining superpower," has troops stationed in 144 foreign nations around the globe. Today the sun never sets on the American Empire. Back home meanwhile, Posse Comitatus is a dead letter, and the smart weapons used against Saddam and Milosevic to "make the world safe for democracy" have been used to incinerate non-conformist parishioners of a rural Texas Protestant sect, including two dozen unarmed children. As John Quincy Adams warned, America has become "the dictatress of the world" but is "no longer... the ruler of her own spirit." Our Founding Fathers' worst fears have come true.
Americans must categorically reject any attempts by foreign lobbyists, fellow travellers, and domestic politicians in the service or on the payroll of either Taipei or Beijing to draw America into what Washington termed "controversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns." We must do so without hesitation and without apology, because contrary to what is Politically Correct in 1999, unyeilding adherence to James Madison's "scrupulous impartiality" and "sincere neutrality" is the fullest and most genuine expression of enduring American values. It is late in the day, but not too late to save our republic.
Bevin Chu
August 08, 1999
High anxiety in the Taiwan Straits following Republic of China President Lee Teng-hui's "two nations" challenge to the People's Republic of China raises the question: How should patriotic Americans respond to the Taipei-Beijing confrontation?
The answer is: Americans who revere our heritage of freedom and independence must have the courage to defy 1990's Political Correctness and uphold core American values -- by politely but firmly refusing to intervene.
As George Washington stated in his Farewell Address of 1796:
"The Great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign Nations is in extending our comercial relations to have with them as little political connection as possible... Tis our true policy to steer clear of permanent Alliances, with any portion of the foreign World."
Condensing Washington's 18th century idioms into bumper sticker-ese:
"trade with either, side with neither."
Meanwhile, the Taiwan Relations Act, which should have gone the way of the Berlin Wall, is exactly the kind of pernicious "permanent Alliance" with a "portion of the foreign World" the Father of our Country urged us to steer clear of.
Washington was hardly alone. His resolute opposition to foreign intervention was shared by all the Founders, none of whom intended any exceptions to be made for Kosovo or Taiwan.
As James Madison put it:
"Indulging no passions which trespass on the rights or the repose of other nations... fulfilling their neutral obligations with... scrupulous impartiality... sincere neutrality toward belligerent nations... [excluding] foreign intrigues and foreign partialities..."
As Thomas Jefferson put it:
"Peace, commerce, and honest friendship, with all nations -- entangling alliances with none... Our first and fundamental maxim should be, never to entangle ourselves in the broils of Europe."
And finally, as John Quincy Adams, author of the Monroe Doctrine put it:
"America... does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own."
Why exactly were the Founding Fathers so unanimously and unambiguously opposed to "proactively" exporting American values beyond our shores? Did they not want liberty to prevail all over the world, not just in America? What was their problem anyway? Were they too myopic or selfish, as the Nomenklatura of the New World Order seem to imply, to see the value of "making the world safe for democracy?"
The answer to all these questions is a resounding "No." The Founding Fathers were cultured cosmopolitans who devoutly hoped that liberty would triumph the world over. And no, their foreign policy prescriptions have not been rendered obsolete by jet travel and the internet, because their soundness was not predicated on specific technologies in fhe first place. Rather their strategic vision was grounded solidly in their grasp of fundamental human nature, which has evolved little since 1796, however we might wish otherwise.
The Founders, powdered wigs and all, were infinitely more "hip" than we give them credit for, and understood something our smug modern politicians do not. They understood that to yield to the powerful temptation to "do good" abroad carries an enormously expensive and hidden price tag: the loss of our own liberty at home.
They understood that "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely," that handing our Political Class the power it demands to impose "benevolent global hegemony" on the rest of the world empowers it to impose a malevolent domestic dictatorship on Americans at home.
They understood, as too many well-intentioned Americans today do not, that once we compromise the safeguards against domestic tyranny written into our own system of law, no matter how compelling the rationale, we will cease being the nation others once considered worth emulating. We would instead soon resemble the very nations we so confidently set out to "reform" and "enlighten."
Chiang Kai-shek's Taiwan, like South Korea and West Germany, demonstrated capitalism's clear superiority to socialism. Democratic reformer Chiang Ching-kuo's Taiwan, which witnessed the repeal of martial law and the enfranchisment of "native" Taiwanese, demonstrated that economic reforms are the harbinger of political reforms. Lee Teng-hui's "New Taiwan" on the other hand, is proof positive that "eternal vigilance is the price of liberty."
China's Founding Father Sun Yat-sen modelled Taiwan's constitution on our own American Constitution. Acutely aware of China's susceptibility to backsliding into defacto monarchy, Sun took the added precaution of dividing the ROC government into five, not three branches. Not that it did any good. Lee Teng-hui, whom Newsweek gullibly anointed "Mr. Democracy," merely nullified all constitutional constraints on his executive powers in four stages over nine years, including the power of impeachment, and now simply does whatever he damned well pleases.
When Lee Teng-hui decided the Taiwan Provincial Government had to go because its mere existence constituted prima facie evidence Taiwan was part of China, the National Assembly stood in his way. What did "Mr. Democracy" do? With the collusion of the separatist Democratic Progressive Party he ordered closed circuit TV cameras installed inside the National Assembly hall to record who voted "the wrong way." He ordered illegal wiretaps of recalcitrant assemblymen, even his own party's. He sicced Taiwan's IRS onto holdouts with guerrilla tax audits. He arranged for triad hoodlums to phone undecided assemblymen to inquire "Do you know where your children are?" He persuaded parents and kin of Assembly members to threaten to disown or shun them. Finally, as a capper, he nullified all village level elections. Thousands of popularly elected officials have since become Lee's presidential appointees.
Lee Teng-hui is an "elective monarch" who finances his personal dream of a "Republic of Taiwan" with hapless Taiwan taxpayers' dollars, even though the government's own surveys show that over 80% of the people oppose Taiwan independence. When Lee made his headline grabbing offer of US$300 million in foreign aid to Kosovo, whom did he consult? No one. Not even his cabinet, let alone the Legislative Yuan, Taiwan's equivalent of our Congress. With the exception of Lee himself, all 22 million Chinese on Taiwan were taken completely by surprise.
All three major broadcast television stations on Taiwan are owned by Lee's KMT party machine, as are the two largest English language papers. Dissidents are relegated to cable TV or "pirate radio," where they survive only by practicing self-censorship. The acidly funny and popular "Dianfu Xinwen" ("Underground News"), a "McLaughlin Group" style panel show was recently forced off the air for making Lee look like a buffoon. .
The Founders adamantly opposed foreign entanglements even when they harbored no doubt whatsoever about the worthiness of sundry foreign lobbyists' causes. Try to imagine the vehemence of their opposition to so-called Taiwan "independence" when the Taiwan separatist leadership's commitment to America's republican ideals is more than just a little suspect?
Americans must summon up the backbone to resist the moral guilt-tripping of the Gauleiters of the New World Order. We must uphold Madison's wise and principled admonition to exclude "foreign intrigues and foreign partialities," by staying the hell out of the ongoing Chinese Civil War in the Taiwan Straits in 1999, just as China refrained from siding with either the Union or the Confederacy during the American Civil War in 1861.
As a first generation naturalized American I am all too aware that my patriotism is presumed suspect by many China-haters in Congress simply by virtue of my race and my national origin. Never mind that I am from Taiwan -- that didn't help Lee Wen-ho -- and that I currently live in Taiwan. Never mind that my parents also live in Taiwan. Never mind that like Joe Sobran and Jude Wanniski I was a Cold Warrior to the right of Richard Nixon. I know by advocating policies which may appear "soft on communism" red flags will go up in the fevered minds of China Threat theorists determined to "go abroad in search of monsters to destroy."
I could keep my mouth shut and my head down. But genuine patriotism demands that Americans defend the ideals of our Founding Fathers, and speak up for what is authentically American, and not meekly acquiesce, like "good Germans" or "good Japanese" in the 1930's, to the mainstream consensus while our nation continues its downward slide into imperial decadence.
America, the "world's only remaining superpower," has troops stationed in 144 foreign nations around the globe. Today the sun never sets on the American Empire. Back home meanwhile, Posse Comitatus is a dead letter, and the smart weapons used against Saddam and Milosevic to "make the world safe for democracy" have been used to incinerate non-conformist parishioners of a rural Texas Protestant sect, including two dozen unarmed children. As John Quincy Adams warned, America has become "the dictatress of the world" but is "no longer... the ruler of her own spirit." Our Founding Fathers' worst fears have come true.
Americans must categorically reject any attempts by foreign lobbyists, fellow travellers, and domestic politicians in the service or on the payroll of either Taipei or Beijing to draw America into what Washington termed "controversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns." We must do so without hesitation and without apology, because contrary to what is Politically Correct in 1999, unyeilding adherence to James Madison's "scrupulous impartiality" and "sincere neutrality" is the fullest and most genuine expression of enduring American values. It is late in the day, but not too late to save our republic.
Wednesday, July 28, 1999
China to US: No Violence Against Confederacy
China to US: No Violence Against Confederacy
Originally posted at Chinese Community Forum (CCF)
Bevin Chu
July 28, 1999
July 16, 1860 PEKING (Routers) - China, drawing its own "line in the sand" on the latest East American crisis, warned the U.S. Thursday it would not tolerate a violent solution to the future of the Confederacy.
``We would consider any effort to determine the future of the Confederacy by other than peaceful means as a threat to the peace and security of the Western Atlantic area and of grave concern to China,'' a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said. ''That's about as strong a statement as one can make.''
The Chinese government's spokesman told a news briefing China believed the problem should be resolved through peaceful means and ``strongly opposed'' any other course of action.
China's Confederate Relations Act, which governs ties between Beijing and Richmond, commits China to ''appropriate action'' in response to threats to the Confederacy.
After the Union threatened the Confederacy, China gave an indication of how that commitment might be interpreted when it sent two groups of warships to America's eastern seaboard. The incident very nearly resulted in military action.
China issued the statement after the U.S. dusted off its threat to retake the Confederacy by force if the South moved toward independence. The South sparked the latest North-South crisis by declaring earlier this week it was abandoning the ``One America'' policy --the foundation of American federalism for decades.
Although China urged both sides to halt the ferment and restore a dialogue, China's Foreign Minister made clear Beijing felt it necessary to respond directly to the U.S.'s volatile rhetoric over the Confederacy.
Chinese military ships have been dispatched to the Atlantic Coast to deal with any tense situations as a result of Richmond's declaration, China's Minister of Defense told reporters.
Richmond has many supporters in China and China has long been under pressure to be more receptive to ideas about Southern secession. Beijing's first reaction this week was to try to contain the controversy by reaffirming it recognized one America ruled from Washington despite Richmond's decision to reject that policy.
The Confederacy's supporters in China backed Confederate President Jefferson Davis for ``stating the obvious'' and said ``America is a divided nation made up of two separate and sovereign states''.
A pro-Confederate sympathizer expressed dismay that the Chinese government, in affirming its one-America policy, sided with America's northern Republicans instead of Democrats in the South. He pressed for a reiteration ``of our legal defense obligations to the Confederacy.''
Washington, which considers the South a rebel force blocking its drive to reunify America, has threatened to invade the South if independence is declared. Government experts have predicted China likely would be drawn into any war between the Union and the Confederacy.
Earlier Stories
China Warns U.S. Not To Use Violence Against Confederacy (July 15)
China Warns U.S. On Confederacy (July 15)
Copyright (c) 1860 Routers Limited. All rights reserved.
Originally posted at Chinese Community Forum (CCF)
Bevin Chu
July 28, 1999
July 16, 1860 PEKING (Routers) - China, drawing its own "line in the sand" on the latest East American crisis, warned the U.S. Thursday it would not tolerate a violent solution to the future of the Confederacy.
``We would consider any effort to determine the future of the Confederacy by other than peaceful means as a threat to the peace and security of the Western Atlantic area and of grave concern to China,'' a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said. ''That's about as strong a statement as one can make.''
The Chinese government's spokesman told a news briefing China believed the problem should be resolved through peaceful means and ``strongly opposed'' any other course of action.
China's Confederate Relations Act, which governs ties between Beijing and Richmond, commits China to ''appropriate action'' in response to threats to the Confederacy.
After the Union threatened the Confederacy, China gave an indication of how that commitment might be interpreted when it sent two groups of warships to America's eastern seaboard. The incident very nearly resulted in military action.
China issued the statement after the U.S. dusted off its threat to retake the Confederacy by force if the South moved toward independence. The South sparked the latest North-South crisis by declaring earlier this week it was abandoning the ``One America'' policy --the foundation of American federalism for decades.
Although China urged both sides to halt the ferment and restore a dialogue, China's Foreign Minister made clear Beijing felt it necessary to respond directly to the U.S.'s volatile rhetoric over the Confederacy.
Chinese military ships have been dispatched to the Atlantic Coast to deal with any tense situations as a result of Richmond's declaration, China's Minister of Defense told reporters.
Richmond has many supporters in China and China has long been under pressure to be more receptive to ideas about Southern secession. Beijing's first reaction this week was to try to contain the controversy by reaffirming it recognized one America ruled from Washington despite Richmond's decision to reject that policy.
The Confederacy's supporters in China backed Confederate President Jefferson Davis for ``stating the obvious'' and said ``America is a divided nation made up of two separate and sovereign states''.
A pro-Confederate sympathizer expressed dismay that the Chinese government, in affirming its one-America policy, sided with America's northern Republicans instead of Democrats in the South. He pressed for a reiteration ``of our legal defense obligations to the Confederacy.''
Washington, which considers the South a rebel force blocking its drive to reunify America, has threatened to invade the South if independence is declared. Government experts have predicted China likely would be drawn into any war between the Union and the Confederacy.
Earlier Stories
China Warns U.S. Not To Use Violence Against Confederacy (July 15)
China Warns U.S. On Confederacy (July 15)
Copyright (c) 1860 Routers Limited. All rights reserved.
Friday, July 09, 1999
The New Party March for Peace Declaration
The New Party March for Peace Declaration
On July 9th, 1999, President Lee Teng-hui proclaimed that 'the two sides of the Taiwan Strait represent a "special state to state relationship."' The manner in which he made this proclamation and the locale chosen deserve critical scrutiny.
Lee's proclamation was a reckless gamble whose outcome remains to be seen. At stake with Lee's casual throw of the dice are the lives of 22 million Chinese on Taiwan. This sort of irresponsible, myopic handling of affairs of state as if they were children's games, has pushed Taiwan to the brink of war. The New Party calls on all Chinese citizens who desire peace and oppose war to take to the streets and voice our opposition to Lee's "two states" formulation.
The New Party 'March for Peace' declares that:
1. President Lee's so-called "special state to state relationship" has absolutely nothing in common with the "two Germanys" or "two Koreas" model. His formulation is deliberately worded in order to deceive the public. The "two Koreas" both claim sovereignty over all of Korea. The "West German Basic Law" central to the "two Germanys" formulation clearly stipulated that it applied to all German citizens, and that the West German government's Office for East German Affairs was subsumed under West Germany's Department of the Interior. Therefore within the framework of the Korean and German models each side enjoys a bona fide "special" relationship and connection to the other. President Lee's "special state to state relationship" formulation on the other hand, bears no resemblance whatsoever to the "two Germans" or "two Koreas" models. The defining characteristic of Lee's "special state to state relationship" is its conspicuous lack of specialness. It is nothing more than the relationship between two foreign nations.
2. President Lee's "two states" formulation constitutes a grave violation of the Republic of China's Constitution and law. Although the Republic of China's administrative jurisdiction does not currently encompass the Chinese mainland, according to the Constitution of the Republic of China, the ROC retains sovereignty over the Chinese mainland. Yet President Lee dared to assert that "As of 1991 the Republic of China's territorial sovereignty was confined to Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen, and Matsu," implying that the ROC's sovereignty had been reduced to the Taiwan region alone. This proposition violates Article Four of the ROC Constitution, which stipulates that "The ROC's territory and preexisting boundaries shall not be altered without the approval of the National Assembly." It violates the ROC's "indivisible territory" clause. It violates the "Article on BI-coastal Civil Relations." It violates the "territory may not be divided" provision of the National Security Act. It violates the Eighth National Unification Committee's ruling that '"One China" shall be defined as the Republic of China as established in 1912, whose territorial sovereignty encompasses the entire mainland, whose administrative jurisdiction encompasses Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen, and Matsu, and that Taiwan and the mainland are all part of China." It even violates the administration's own "one separately administered China" policy. It is an attempt to substitute the real Republic of China with a de facto "Republic of Taiwan" via semantic sleight-of-hand. It is in essence a monumental hoax foisted on an unsuspecting public.
3. The New Party vehemently opposes Beijing exploiting the turmoil precipitated by Lee's "two states" formulation to apply military force against Taiwan, and to trample over the Taiwan public's desire for political democracy and economic freedom. The New Party has consistently maintained that the reunification of both sides of the Taiwan Straits must be implemented peacefully, contingent upon the adoption of democratic rule and the establishment of economic parity. We resolutely oppose the use of military force against Chinese citizens on either side of the Straits. If Beijing liberalizes its politics and economy, this liberalization will draw both sides together and we will proceed down the path toward peaceful reunification. Beijing however must not make the mistake of adopting a superior attitude, slighting the Republic of China's equal stature, cramping the Republic of China's international "living space," inciting public unrest, resorting to military intimidation, thereby undermining the indispensible foundation of mutual trust and goodwill. The New Party hereby declares that the New Party and the Chinese people on Taiwan will resist any acts of military aggression against them with all their might.
Finally, The New Party puts forth the following demands:
1. The New Party hopes the Lee adminstration will see the light, clarify its position, and return to the "constructive ambiguity" of "one China, two viewpoints."
2. The New Party hopes Beijing will respect the Taiwan public's fundamental desire for political democracy and economic freedom, and refrain from exploiting populist sentiment or escalating cross Straits tension.
3. The New Party demands that the Lee administration cease and desist from sending propagandists abroad to promote the "two states" formulation.
4. The New Party resolutely opposes any attempts to pass constitutional amendments in an effort to "legitimize" the "two states" formulation.
5. The New Party urges President Lee to refrain from issuing any further inappropriate remarks or advancing any additional ill-conceived proposals prior to the expiration of his current, and final term.
On July 9th, 1999, President Lee Teng-hui proclaimed that 'the two sides of the Taiwan Strait represent a "special state to state relationship."' The manner in which he made this proclamation and the locale chosen deserve critical scrutiny.
Lee's proclamation was a reckless gamble whose outcome remains to be seen. At stake with Lee's casual throw of the dice are the lives of 22 million Chinese on Taiwan. This sort of irresponsible, myopic handling of affairs of state as if they were children's games, has pushed Taiwan to the brink of war. The New Party calls on all Chinese citizens who desire peace and oppose war to take to the streets and voice our opposition to Lee's "two states" formulation.
The New Party 'March for Peace' declares that:
1. President Lee's so-called "special state to state relationship" has absolutely nothing in common with the "two Germanys" or "two Koreas" model. His formulation is deliberately worded in order to deceive the public. The "two Koreas" both claim sovereignty over all of Korea. The "West German Basic Law" central to the "two Germanys" formulation clearly stipulated that it applied to all German citizens, and that the West German government's Office for East German Affairs was subsumed under West Germany's Department of the Interior. Therefore within the framework of the Korean and German models each side enjoys a bona fide "special" relationship and connection to the other. President Lee's "special state to state relationship" formulation on the other hand, bears no resemblance whatsoever to the "two Germans" or "two Koreas" models. The defining characteristic of Lee's "special state to state relationship" is its conspicuous lack of specialness. It is nothing more than the relationship between two foreign nations.
2. President Lee's "two states" formulation constitutes a grave violation of the Republic of China's Constitution and law. Although the Republic of China's administrative jurisdiction does not currently encompass the Chinese mainland, according to the Constitution of the Republic of China, the ROC retains sovereignty over the Chinese mainland. Yet President Lee dared to assert that "As of 1991 the Republic of China's territorial sovereignty was confined to Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen, and Matsu," implying that the ROC's sovereignty had been reduced to the Taiwan region alone. This proposition violates Article Four of the ROC Constitution, which stipulates that "The ROC's territory and preexisting boundaries shall not be altered without the approval of the National Assembly." It violates the ROC's "indivisible territory" clause. It violates the "Article on BI-coastal Civil Relations." It violates the "territory may not be divided" provision of the National Security Act. It violates the Eighth National Unification Committee's ruling that '"One China" shall be defined as the Republic of China as established in 1912, whose territorial sovereignty encompasses the entire mainland, whose administrative jurisdiction encompasses Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen, and Matsu, and that Taiwan and the mainland are all part of China." It even violates the administration's own "one separately administered China" policy. It is an attempt to substitute the real Republic of China with a de facto "Republic of Taiwan" via semantic sleight-of-hand. It is in essence a monumental hoax foisted on an unsuspecting public.
3. The New Party vehemently opposes Beijing exploiting the turmoil precipitated by Lee's "two states" formulation to apply military force against Taiwan, and to trample over the Taiwan public's desire for political democracy and economic freedom. The New Party has consistently maintained that the reunification of both sides of the Taiwan Straits must be implemented peacefully, contingent upon the adoption of democratic rule and the establishment of economic parity. We resolutely oppose the use of military force against Chinese citizens on either side of the Straits. If Beijing liberalizes its politics and economy, this liberalization will draw both sides together and we will proceed down the path toward peaceful reunification. Beijing however must not make the mistake of adopting a superior attitude, slighting the Republic of China's equal stature, cramping the Republic of China's international "living space," inciting public unrest, resorting to military intimidation, thereby undermining the indispensible foundation of mutual trust and goodwill. The New Party hereby declares that the New Party and the Chinese people on Taiwan will resist any acts of military aggression against them with all their might.
Finally, The New Party puts forth the following demands:
1. The New Party hopes the Lee adminstration will see the light, clarify its position, and return to the "constructive ambiguity" of "one China, two viewpoints."
2. The New Party hopes Beijing will respect the Taiwan public's fundamental desire for political democracy and economic freedom, and refrain from exploiting populist sentiment or escalating cross Straits tension.
3. The New Party demands that the Lee administration cease and desist from sending propagandists abroad to promote the "two states" formulation.
4. The New Party resolutely opposes any attempts to pass constitutional amendments in an effort to "legitimize" the "two states" formulation.
5. The New Party urges President Lee to refrain from issuing any further inappropriate remarks or advancing any additional ill-conceived proposals prior to the expiration of his current, and final term.
Wednesday, February 17, 1999
The Pot Calling the Kettle Black
The Pot Calling the Kettle Black
Originally posted at Chinese Community Forum (CCF)
Bevin Chu
February 17, 1999
The debate over Taiwan independence has gone off track. Permit me to re-focus on my original point. Namely, how the moral/ethical arguments invoked against China are never applied even-handedly against the China-bashers' own nations and governments. So please, no more cynical and futile efforts to guilt-trip Chinese who oppose Taiwan and Tibetan secession. China is actually on considerably firmer ground morally and ethically than the US when it comes to her territorial sovereignty. If the relentless and tiresome China critics in the US had enough integrity to apply exactly the same arguments against the US that they regularly apply to China, America's territory would have to shrink back to the original 13 colonies, smaller if truth be told.
Those knowledgeable about Chinese history know that China acquired most other territory when more powerful tribes such as Hunnish and Turkic tribes in the north-west, and later the Mongols and Manchus which were at the time alien conquered her, but subsequently intermarried with so-called "Han Chinese", thereby consolidating their territories. The term "Han" of course has never designated or been intended to designate a "pure" race, as the Han, so-called, were already of mixed ethnicity, and proudly so.
Mr. Walsh wants me to swallow the idea that today's US government doesn't selectively target and persecute those it perceives as dangerous or subversive. His astonishing assertion that political movements in the USA are not targeted for their views and function openly, without persecution, will come as a shock to anyone not living in Ozzie and Harriet Land. Mr. Walsh seems to be inhabiting a pre-Watergate "America can do no wrong" mental universe. Has Mr. Walsh never heard of the term "selective enforcement?" How about "DWB" (Driving while Black?) How about recently revealed FBI investigations into the sex life of the non-violent, committed pacifist civil rights leader Martin Luther King? King wasn't even advocating political secession, merely demanding equal rights under the law within a unified, integrated, colour-blind America. Sounds pretty tame to me. Imagine how J. Edgar Hoover would have dealt with him if he had been a Dalai Lama style head of an armed separatist revolt?
Has Mr. Walsh ever heard of the American Indian rights activist Leonard Peltier? Even after the Freedom of Information Act utterly discredited the evidence used in his conviction, and the Justice Department was forced to admit in his second appeal that it had no idea who killed the two FBI agents he was convicted of murdering, Peltier is still serving two life sentences. It can't happen in America, Mr. Walsh? The ugly reality is that Peltier is a political prisoner in a country that sanctimoniously champions political prisoners in other countries. As the ancient American expression goes, the pot is calling the kettle black.
Mr. Walsh pleads that he does "indeed accept the implications of the principle of self-determination in full." Does he really? I have watched with a mixture of amusement and exasperation as he tap-dances around the downside of the logical implications of genuine self-determination. Not just "self-determination" as defined to suit him, but when it impacts on America instead of China.
Mr. Walsh has a touching faith in "democracy." He seems to imagine that if an individual is outnumbered, then justice has been done, and the individual must lump it. After all, we voted on it, didn't we? But the self that has a right to self determination is not a group. Any group. The true self is the sovereign individual. Genuine self-determination is determination of every individual's fate by the individual himself. Not by any group he is supposed to belong to. Anything less is merely quibbling about whose arrangement for frustrating authentic self-determination is proper. This includes the unjust coercion of every sovereign individual by every "democratically elected" government on the planet. Yes, Mr. Walsh, even America!
When Mr. Walsh claims Americans have genuine liberty, he simply hasn't got a clue what he's talking about. Try seceding from the rule of the federal leviathan in Washington, Mr. Walsh. And watch them come down on you like a ton of bricks. I speak from personal knowledge. A former co-worker of mine in Los Angeles went to prison for just such an offence. I paid for some of his legal bills out of my own pocket. No, he did not commit any violent acts. He merely declared himself sovereign and independent in accordance with Common Law and Pro Se Law, dutifully filing all the necessary legal documents in a peaceful manner, declared that he was relinquishing all future claims on Social Security and other government benefits, and then refused to pay the taxes involved. He was arrested, convicted, and imprisoned in Club Fed for close to a year. No, we are not free in the "democratic" west, Mr. Walsh. We are only "free" if we go along with the crowd like sheep.
Mr. Walsh's flippant remark: "Mr. Chu defends the right of "all Chinese" to vote in a Taiwanese referendum and calls this democratic. Does he support the right of all humans to vote on this issue? How about all Asians who speak Chinese?" reveals his lack of seriousness. His remark that "The rational [sic] for allowing the citizens of the Republic of China to vote on its future, and to exclude those who don't live there is clear... Claiming that the proper geographical area is all of China is not convincingly more logical than the claim that Taiwan is the proper geographical area," reveal that Mr. Walsh is as uninformed about Taiwan's legal status as he is flip.
Did Mr. Walsh say "the proper geographical area?" Mr. Walsh seems to think I arbitrarily gerrymandered an improper geographical area when I included the mainland. I'm sorry to disappoint him, but I derived my proper geographical area from the Republic of China's Constitution. The Republic of China's Constitution defines the territory of the Republic of China as comprising the continental provinces and numerous offshore islands, including the island of Taiwan, Hainan island, Quemoy and Matsu. Let me assure Mr. Walsh I did not make up the ROC's Constitution. Notice I said Republic of China, not People's Republic of China. I am merely taking the Republic of China's Constitution seriously, at face value, even if others, most notably the Quisling Lee Teng-hui, don't. Isn't a Constitution supposed to mean what it says, Mr. Walsh? Or is it just a piece of paper?
Mr. Walsh would do well to read the ROC Constitution before inflicting his uninformed opinion on others. It is of course, written in Chinese. This is because the Chinese people living in the province of Taiwan are Chinese citizens. So they speak, read and write Chinese. I assume Mr. Walsh can read Chinese. Since Mr. Walsh professes such a deep and abiding respect for the laws of democratic governments, then why does he sweep the ROC's Constitution, the ROC's most fundamental law, which explicitly defines the ROC's territorial boundaries as including the Chinese mainland under the rug? Is it simple ignorance? Is it unfair to conclude that the real answer is that it doesn't serve his arbitrary, subjective, ad hoc political purposes?
Mr. Walsh complains that the PRC doesn't permit the 1.2 billion Chinese who happen to have fallen, via the fortunes of China's ongoing Civil War, under their area of control, to vote at the polls. But when I suggest that the ROC ought to do things differently, being nominally democratic after all, setting a better moral example, he objects that that doesn't yield the end result he wants -- Taiwan secession. In short, he wants to rig the game in defiance of the Constitutions of both the ROC and PRC. We now have an ample demonstration of just how much he respects the Rule of Law.
A lot of peculiar and bogus reasoning has been run up the flagpole by TI'ers regarding Taiwan's geography. Taiwan is separated from the Chinese mainland by 100 miles of water. This to TI'ers makes it geographically "separate," therefore politically separate.
Who says?
Hainan island off the coast of Guangdong is separated from the mainland by water too. Is Hainan therefore not part of China by virtue of geography? Hawaii is separated from the Continental United States by approximately 2,000 miles of water. Twenty times the distance Taiwan is from mainland China. Is Hawaii on that basis therefore politically not part of America? Guam is so far from America it is actually closer to China than to America. Should Guam be part of China instead? I don't think so. Alaska, although situated on the continent of North America, is not even contiguous with the lower 48. It borders instead on Canada. Should it therefore be part of Canada and not the US? Japan is an archipelago comprised of a handful of large islands and numerous smaller islets. Should each of these be politically independent because they are separated from each other by ocean? The Philippines and Indonesia are each comprised of hundreds or even thousands of islands. Should each of these patches of land separated by ocean be accorded independence on this basis?
For that matter, many islands are politically divided. The eastern end of the island which contains Haiti also contains the Dominican Republic. The northern part of Borneo belongs to Malaysia, the southern part to Indonesia. Actually from a topological perspective the major continents are merely larger "islands." Is every continent automatically supposed to be a single nation?
The mere fact that the Chinese province of Taiwan is surrounded by water means nothing politically. There is no justification for drawing a line around it politically on that basis.
Unless one is prepared to apply these patently absurd justifications to every nation on the globe, then please refrain from applying them to China. Taiwan is part of China by history, tradition, language, culture, international law and any damned basis you care to mention. Let's have no more of this nonsense.
As it happens, the People's Republic of China agrees with the Republic of China that Taiwan is not a nation. Despite widespread semantic shorthand which refers to the Republic of China as "Taiwan," from an international law perspective there is no nation state in the world known as "Taiwan," just as legally speaking, there never were two political entities known as East Germany and West Germany.
There is of course a province known as Taiwan, but it is not a nation, it is merely one of two dozen provinces of the Republic of China -- or the People's Republic of China -- depending on which of the two rival Chinese political parties (the CCP and the KMT) one happens to support. The government which resides in Taipei and physically controls the island of Taiwan and portions of the mainland province of Fujian, is the Republic of China. The government which resides in Beijing, and controls the rest of the mainland is the People's Republic of China. Both regimes are part of a temporarily divided China. Just as the Union and Confederacy were temporarily divided during the American Civil War.
Even Lee Teng-hui (inadvertently) admitted recently that this PRC/ROC stalemate is part of a yet unresolved Chinese Civil War. Just as East and West Germany were once divided, and North and South Korea still are. Yes, the stand-off has lasted 50 years, while the American Civil War lasted only four. So what? Show me the statute of limitations on reunification. Germany was divided for almost as long. Korea is still divided. None of which is at all relevant. China is China. She has her own timetable. Anyone who knows anything about Chinese history knows China has been divided far longer than that, again and again and again in its 5000 year history.
Just as American citizens who live 2,000 miles off the California coast, in the offshore state of Hawaii, are Americans, so the 1.2 billion Chinese who happen to live a mere 100 miles on the other side of the Taiwan Straits, in Fujian and 22 other mainland provinces and 5 autonomous regions, are also legally citizens of the Republic of China. No more, but no less than the 21 million citizens of China who happened to be living on an offshore province and were thus by sheer dint of fate spared Chairman Mao's insanity.
That of course was then. This is now. Deng was not Mao. Jiang and Zhu are even less like Mao. Premier Zhu Rongji was a victim twice over of Mao's persecution of pro-free market reformers. Even many western journalists, who are often painfully slow on the uptake about developments in China are finally beginning to see the light. The latest issue of Newsweek for example has a surprisingly fair article describing the astonishing lack of constraints ordinary Chinese in post-Mao, post-Deng China experience in their daily lives, certainly compared to Mao's nightmarish era. The Cold War is over. Time to stop nursing old hatreds. Time for reconciliation and reunification. Time to get over the Cold War mindset and let go of the mental pictures of a "terrifying spectre of global communism" threatening "civilisation as we know it." Germany has already done it. Time for China to do the same.
Mr. Walsh says that the Union's forcible prevention of Southern Secession doesn't count. Because it happened in 1865. Well, who made up that rule? Mr. Walsh? Why should anyone else accept his timetable? What will he do if some one else disagrees? Use force? Let's look at Mr. Walsh's nonsensical logic for a minute. Suppose anti-secessionist forces prevent Taiwan independence next year, in Y2K. In 2130 AD a unified China will be able to look back and say exactly the same thing Mr. Walsh did. It doesn't count. It happened in 2000. Ancient history. Is Mr. Walsh's ad hoc excuse-making supposed to represent some sort of moral and intellectual integrity?
Actually this entire debate, both Mr. Walsh's arguments and mine, could be dismissed as mere intellectual masturbation. In the real world these matters are decided the way American Indian territorial sovereignty, Mexican territorial sovereignty, Hawaiian territorial sovereignty, Alaskan Inuit and Eskimo territorial sovereignty were decided. By the sheer military might and brute force of the US Cavalry. By Gatling guns mowing down the aboriginal peoples, until there were not enough left surviving to constitute a coherent pro-independence political force. This of course is the real reason American Indians cannot get their lands back. Is the ever more centralised federal leviathan in Washington prepared to undo any of these unjust territorial acquisitions? Are you kidding? We all know this. Why pretend? This holier-than-thou hypocrisy offends the rest of the world, Mr Walsh. People are not fools. Don't piss on their heads and tell them it's raining. They won't buy it. The bitter irony is that if China had actually committed the genocidal atrocities that America has, and the Dalai Lama and his Hollywood acolytes accuse her of, China would not be pestered with the separatist headaches she is experiencing today.
The just-ended ordeal by public humiliation of William Jefferson Clinton is an object lesson. Or should be. The Democrats were the ones who demanded the creation of the Office of the Independent Counsel during Watergate, when they wanted to get Nixon. They demanded its continuation during Iran-Contra to get Reagan. They demanded its further perpetuation to get Reagan's VP George Bush, for guilt by association. Finally it backfired and almost got their guy, so now of course, they want it abolished. Ideas have consequences, Mr. Walsh.
The Afghan Mujahadin "freedom fighters" funded and supplied with Stinger missiles by the CIA during the Cold War years, have miraculously metamorphosed, like Jekyll into Hyde, into the virulently anti-America Taliban threatening Jihad (holy war) against hapless American civilians today. Does anyone really know what political repercussions sleazy CIA support for the pro-Taiwan independence DPP and the Dalai Lama's reactionary theocrats in Tibet will reap some day?
Those self-appointed Global Policemen who would deliberately weaken China by Balkanising her territorially, invoking the insincere rhetoric of "self-determination," had better understand that the ideas they endorse today may contribute to the political disintegration of the World's Only Remaining Superpower tomorrow. So be careful what you wish for Mr. Walsh. You just might get it.
Originally posted at Chinese Community Forum (CCF)
Bevin Chu
February 17, 1999
The debate over Taiwan independence has gone off track. Permit me to re-focus on my original point. Namely, how the moral/ethical arguments invoked against China are never applied even-handedly against the China-bashers' own nations and governments. So please, no more cynical and futile efforts to guilt-trip Chinese who oppose Taiwan and Tibetan secession. China is actually on considerably firmer ground morally and ethically than the US when it comes to her territorial sovereignty. If the relentless and tiresome China critics in the US had enough integrity to apply exactly the same arguments against the US that they regularly apply to China, America's territory would have to shrink back to the original 13 colonies, smaller if truth be told.
Those knowledgeable about Chinese history know that China acquired most other territory when more powerful tribes such as Hunnish and Turkic tribes in the north-west, and later the Mongols and Manchus which were at the time alien conquered her, but subsequently intermarried with so-called "Han Chinese", thereby consolidating their territories. The term "Han" of course has never designated or been intended to designate a "pure" race, as the Han, so-called, were already of mixed ethnicity, and proudly so.
Mr. Walsh wants me to swallow the idea that today's US government doesn't selectively target and persecute those it perceives as dangerous or subversive. His astonishing assertion that political movements in the USA are not targeted for their views and function openly, without persecution, will come as a shock to anyone not living in Ozzie and Harriet Land. Mr. Walsh seems to be inhabiting a pre-Watergate "America can do no wrong" mental universe. Has Mr. Walsh never heard of the term "selective enforcement?" How about "DWB" (Driving while Black?) How about recently revealed FBI investigations into the sex life of the non-violent, committed pacifist civil rights leader Martin Luther King? King wasn't even advocating political secession, merely demanding equal rights under the law within a unified, integrated, colour-blind America. Sounds pretty tame to me. Imagine how J. Edgar Hoover would have dealt with him if he had been a Dalai Lama style head of an armed separatist revolt?
Has Mr. Walsh ever heard of the American Indian rights activist Leonard Peltier? Even after the Freedom of Information Act utterly discredited the evidence used in his conviction, and the Justice Department was forced to admit in his second appeal that it had no idea who killed the two FBI agents he was convicted of murdering, Peltier is still serving two life sentences. It can't happen in America, Mr. Walsh? The ugly reality is that Peltier is a political prisoner in a country that sanctimoniously champions political prisoners in other countries. As the ancient American expression goes, the pot is calling the kettle black.
Mr. Walsh pleads that he does "indeed accept the implications of the principle of self-determination in full." Does he really? I have watched with a mixture of amusement and exasperation as he tap-dances around the downside of the logical implications of genuine self-determination. Not just "self-determination" as defined to suit him, but when it impacts on America instead of China.
Mr. Walsh has a touching faith in "democracy." He seems to imagine that if an individual is outnumbered, then justice has been done, and the individual must lump it. After all, we voted on it, didn't we? But the self that has a right to self determination is not a group. Any group. The true self is the sovereign individual. Genuine self-determination is determination of every individual's fate by the individual himself. Not by any group he is supposed to belong to. Anything less is merely quibbling about whose arrangement for frustrating authentic self-determination is proper. This includes the unjust coercion of every sovereign individual by every "democratically elected" government on the planet. Yes, Mr. Walsh, even America!
When Mr. Walsh claims Americans have genuine liberty, he simply hasn't got a clue what he's talking about. Try seceding from the rule of the federal leviathan in Washington, Mr. Walsh. And watch them come down on you like a ton of bricks. I speak from personal knowledge. A former co-worker of mine in Los Angeles went to prison for just such an offence. I paid for some of his legal bills out of my own pocket. No, he did not commit any violent acts. He merely declared himself sovereign and independent in accordance with Common Law and Pro Se Law, dutifully filing all the necessary legal documents in a peaceful manner, declared that he was relinquishing all future claims on Social Security and other government benefits, and then refused to pay the taxes involved. He was arrested, convicted, and imprisoned in Club Fed for close to a year. No, we are not free in the "democratic" west, Mr. Walsh. We are only "free" if we go along with the crowd like sheep.
Mr. Walsh's flippant remark: "Mr. Chu defends the right of "all Chinese" to vote in a Taiwanese referendum and calls this democratic. Does he support the right of all humans to vote on this issue? How about all Asians who speak Chinese?" reveals his lack of seriousness. His remark that "The rational [sic] for allowing the citizens of the Republic of China to vote on its future, and to exclude those who don't live there is clear... Claiming that the proper geographical area is all of China is not convincingly more logical than the claim that Taiwan is the proper geographical area," reveal that Mr. Walsh is as uninformed about Taiwan's legal status as he is flip.
Did Mr. Walsh say "the proper geographical area?" Mr. Walsh seems to think I arbitrarily gerrymandered an improper geographical area when I included the mainland. I'm sorry to disappoint him, but I derived my proper geographical area from the Republic of China's Constitution. The Republic of China's Constitution defines the territory of the Republic of China as comprising the continental provinces and numerous offshore islands, including the island of Taiwan, Hainan island, Quemoy and Matsu. Let me assure Mr. Walsh I did not make up the ROC's Constitution. Notice I said Republic of China, not People's Republic of China. I am merely taking the Republic of China's Constitution seriously, at face value, even if others, most notably the Quisling Lee Teng-hui, don't. Isn't a Constitution supposed to mean what it says, Mr. Walsh? Or is it just a piece of paper?
Mr. Walsh would do well to read the ROC Constitution before inflicting his uninformed opinion on others. It is of course, written in Chinese. This is because the Chinese people living in the province of Taiwan are Chinese citizens. So they speak, read and write Chinese. I assume Mr. Walsh can read Chinese. Since Mr. Walsh professes such a deep and abiding respect for the laws of democratic governments, then why does he sweep the ROC's Constitution, the ROC's most fundamental law, which explicitly defines the ROC's territorial boundaries as including the Chinese mainland under the rug? Is it simple ignorance? Is it unfair to conclude that the real answer is that it doesn't serve his arbitrary, subjective, ad hoc political purposes?
Mr. Walsh complains that the PRC doesn't permit the 1.2 billion Chinese who happen to have fallen, via the fortunes of China's ongoing Civil War, under their area of control, to vote at the polls. But when I suggest that the ROC ought to do things differently, being nominally democratic after all, setting a better moral example, he objects that that doesn't yield the end result he wants -- Taiwan secession. In short, he wants to rig the game in defiance of the Constitutions of both the ROC and PRC. We now have an ample demonstration of just how much he respects the Rule of Law.
A lot of peculiar and bogus reasoning has been run up the flagpole by TI'ers regarding Taiwan's geography. Taiwan is separated from the Chinese mainland by 100 miles of water. This to TI'ers makes it geographically "separate," therefore politically separate.
Who says?
Hainan island off the coast of Guangdong is separated from the mainland by water too. Is Hainan therefore not part of China by virtue of geography? Hawaii is separated from the Continental United States by approximately 2,000 miles of water. Twenty times the distance Taiwan is from mainland China. Is Hawaii on that basis therefore politically not part of America? Guam is so far from America it is actually closer to China than to America. Should Guam be part of China instead? I don't think so. Alaska, although situated on the continent of North America, is not even contiguous with the lower 48. It borders instead on Canada. Should it therefore be part of Canada and not the US? Japan is an archipelago comprised of a handful of large islands and numerous smaller islets. Should each of these be politically independent because they are separated from each other by ocean? The Philippines and Indonesia are each comprised of hundreds or even thousands of islands. Should each of these patches of land separated by ocean be accorded independence on this basis?
For that matter, many islands are politically divided. The eastern end of the island which contains Haiti also contains the Dominican Republic. The northern part of Borneo belongs to Malaysia, the southern part to Indonesia. Actually from a topological perspective the major continents are merely larger "islands." Is every continent automatically supposed to be a single nation?
The mere fact that the Chinese province of Taiwan is surrounded by water means nothing politically. There is no justification for drawing a line around it politically on that basis.
Unless one is prepared to apply these patently absurd justifications to every nation on the globe, then please refrain from applying them to China. Taiwan is part of China by history, tradition, language, culture, international law and any damned basis you care to mention. Let's have no more of this nonsense.
As it happens, the People's Republic of China agrees with the Republic of China that Taiwan is not a nation. Despite widespread semantic shorthand which refers to the Republic of China as "Taiwan," from an international law perspective there is no nation state in the world known as "Taiwan," just as legally speaking, there never were two political entities known as East Germany and West Germany.
There is of course a province known as Taiwan, but it is not a nation, it is merely one of two dozen provinces of the Republic of China -- or the People's Republic of China -- depending on which of the two rival Chinese political parties (the CCP and the KMT) one happens to support. The government which resides in Taipei and physically controls the island of Taiwan and portions of the mainland province of Fujian, is the Republic of China. The government which resides in Beijing, and controls the rest of the mainland is the People's Republic of China. Both regimes are part of a temporarily divided China. Just as the Union and Confederacy were temporarily divided during the American Civil War.
Even Lee Teng-hui (inadvertently) admitted recently that this PRC/ROC stalemate is part of a yet unresolved Chinese Civil War. Just as East and West Germany were once divided, and North and South Korea still are. Yes, the stand-off has lasted 50 years, while the American Civil War lasted only four. So what? Show me the statute of limitations on reunification. Germany was divided for almost as long. Korea is still divided. None of which is at all relevant. China is China. She has her own timetable. Anyone who knows anything about Chinese history knows China has been divided far longer than that, again and again and again in its 5000 year history.
Just as American citizens who live 2,000 miles off the California coast, in the offshore state of Hawaii, are Americans, so the 1.2 billion Chinese who happen to live a mere 100 miles on the other side of the Taiwan Straits, in Fujian and 22 other mainland provinces and 5 autonomous regions, are also legally citizens of the Republic of China. No more, but no less than the 21 million citizens of China who happened to be living on an offshore province and were thus by sheer dint of fate spared Chairman Mao's insanity.
That of course was then. This is now. Deng was not Mao. Jiang and Zhu are even less like Mao. Premier Zhu Rongji was a victim twice over of Mao's persecution of pro-free market reformers. Even many western journalists, who are often painfully slow on the uptake about developments in China are finally beginning to see the light. The latest issue of Newsweek for example has a surprisingly fair article describing the astonishing lack of constraints ordinary Chinese in post-Mao, post-Deng China experience in their daily lives, certainly compared to Mao's nightmarish era. The Cold War is over. Time to stop nursing old hatreds. Time for reconciliation and reunification. Time to get over the Cold War mindset and let go of the mental pictures of a "terrifying spectre of global communism" threatening "civilisation as we know it." Germany has already done it. Time for China to do the same.
Mr. Walsh says that the Union's forcible prevention of Southern Secession doesn't count. Because it happened in 1865. Well, who made up that rule? Mr. Walsh? Why should anyone else accept his timetable? What will he do if some one else disagrees? Use force? Let's look at Mr. Walsh's nonsensical logic for a minute. Suppose anti-secessionist forces prevent Taiwan independence next year, in Y2K. In 2130 AD a unified China will be able to look back and say exactly the same thing Mr. Walsh did. It doesn't count. It happened in 2000. Ancient history. Is Mr. Walsh's ad hoc excuse-making supposed to represent some sort of moral and intellectual integrity?
Actually this entire debate, both Mr. Walsh's arguments and mine, could be dismissed as mere intellectual masturbation. In the real world these matters are decided the way American Indian territorial sovereignty, Mexican territorial sovereignty, Hawaiian territorial sovereignty, Alaskan Inuit and Eskimo territorial sovereignty were decided. By the sheer military might and brute force of the US Cavalry. By Gatling guns mowing down the aboriginal peoples, until there were not enough left surviving to constitute a coherent pro-independence political force. This of course is the real reason American Indians cannot get their lands back. Is the ever more centralised federal leviathan in Washington prepared to undo any of these unjust territorial acquisitions? Are you kidding? We all know this. Why pretend? This holier-than-thou hypocrisy offends the rest of the world, Mr Walsh. People are not fools. Don't piss on their heads and tell them it's raining. They won't buy it. The bitter irony is that if China had actually committed the genocidal atrocities that America has, and the Dalai Lama and his Hollywood acolytes accuse her of, China would not be pestered with the separatist headaches she is experiencing today.
The just-ended ordeal by public humiliation of William Jefferson Clinton is an object lesson. Or should be. The Democrats were the ones who demanded the creation of the Office of the Independent Counsel during Watergate, when they wanted to get Nixon. They demanded its continuation during Iran-Contra to get Reagan. They demanded its further perpetuation to get Reagan's VP George Bush, for guilt by association. Finally it backfired and almost got their guy, so now of course, they want it abolished. Ideas have consequences, Mr. Walsh.
The Afghan Mujahadin "freedom fighters" funded and supplied with Stinger missiles by the CIA during the Cold War years, have miraculously metamorphosed, like Jekyll into Hyde, into the virulently anti-America Taliban threatening Jihad (holy war) against hapless American civilians today. Does anyone really know what political repercussions sleazy CIA support for the pro-Taiwan independence DPP and the Dalai Lama's reactionary theocrats in Tibet will reap some day?
Those self-appointed Global Policemen who would deliberately weaken China by Balkanising her territorially, invoking the insincere rhetoric of "self-determination," had better understand that the ideas they endorse today may contribute to the political disintegration of the World's Only Remaining Superpower tomorrow. So be careful what you wish for Mr. Walsh. You just might get it.
Wednesday, February 03, 1999
Rebuttal to a Taiwan Independence Fellow Traveler
Rebuttal to a Taiwan Independence Fellow Traveler
Originally posted at Chinese Community Forum (CCF)
Bevin Chu
February 03, 1999
Mr. Walsh's rebuttal is rife with both factual errors and logical contradictions.
First, the factual errors.
Mr. Walsh alleged that "if the people of Quebec vote democratically for independence, they will be granted independence (the unanimous consent of the other provinces is not required)."
What can I say? Except Mr. Walsh is simply wrong.
Canada's Supreme Court ruled in August 1998 that Quebec's separatist government did not have the right to unilaterally declare the province independent.
"Secession of a province 'under the Constitution' could not be achieved unilaterally, that is, without principled negotiation with other participants in Confederation within the existing constitutional framework," the court said in a unanimous decision. "Negotiations would be necessary to address the interests of the federal government, of Quebec and the other provinces, and other participants, as well as the rights of all Canadians both within and outside Quebec... there are linguistic and cultural minorities, including aboriginal peoples, unevenly distributed across the country who look to the Constitution of Canada for the protection of their rights. The court has confirmed that any possible process of independence must proceed in a manner that respects shared values that include federalism, democracy, constitutionalism and the rule of law, and respect for minorities," Chretien said in a statement. "In particular, it has found that the government of Quebec does not have the authority in Canadian law to effect independence unilaterally nor does it have such a right in international law."
Mr. Walsh wrote "What [Bevin Chu] says about ... independence movements in the USA is simply wrong... While it is true that the CCP is not alone in using force against democratic (i.e., non-violent) independence movements, all of the other governments that do so are dictatorships."
Dictatorships? Let me repeat what I wrote before. The United States chose to prosecute an appallingly bloody civil war rather than permit the Confederacy to secede. Mr. Walsh makes no mention of this in his "rebuttal. " Texas and Hawaii were both annexed illegally. The "purchase" of Alaska from Russia was receiving stolen goods. Modern day challenges to federal authority are systematically and ruthlessly suppressed by Federal law enforcement. And we haven't even gotten around to shameful history of genocide and illegal landgrabs from American Indians.
The Texas indendence radicals were probably guilty as hell of the offenses they were charged with. That does not alter the fact that the feds targeted Texas independence radicals not for writing bad checks, but for "plotting secession." No, the feds did not cite sedition or treason as the charge when they rounded them up. They invoked the criminal codes. China bashers, does this ring a bell? It should. The feds did exactly what Beijing does with pesky organizers of opposition political parties, they prosecute them not as subversives but as common criminals.
Now for the logical fallacies.
Mr. Walsh doubts that Taiwan secessionists would deny others in Taiwan the same right of self-determination. He has not witnessed TI legislators physically assault and injure dissenting lawmakers in the Legislative Yuan or thuggish TI taxi drivers attack hapless women passengers who failed to speak the Minnan dialect as "Tai jian" or "traitors to Taiwan." Does Mr. Walsh really believe these humorless fanatics will be content to passively watch the disintegration of their precious "Republic of Taiwan," without "doing something?"
Mr. Walsh defends the TI'ers. My prediction as "only a statement about how any government functions." In other words "Everybody does it. What's the big deal?" But Mr. Walsh contradicts himself. If indeed all governments use force to enforce their laws then how unsubstantiated is my assumption that TI'ers would deny others the right to secede as well?
Mr. Walsh wonders: "Can Mr. Chu really be supporting the principle that the majority cannot determine their own form of government? Mr. Chu doesn't acknowledge it openly, but his words clearly mean support for dictatorship of the few over the many."
Really? China is a nation state whose sovereign territory includes the mainland as well as the offshore islands of Taiwan and Hainan. Both the PRC and the ROC Constitutions agree on this. TI'ers are calling for a "national" referendum in which 1.2 billion fellow citizens outside the TI'ers' unilaterally defined boundary would be prohibited from participating. The TI'ers don't want majority rule. They want their version of majority rule. They want minority rule within an electoral district defined so that they constitute a majority. Perhaps Mr. Walsh can explain to CCF readers just exactly how this is democratic? Since I defend the right of all Chinese citizens to participate in any such referendum, I could argue that I am being much more democratic. The TI'ers, by arbitarily restricting participation in their referendum to only 21 million are being anti-democratic and exclusionary.
Let's not be politically naive. One can achieve a democratic majority on any issue under the sun, provided one gets to set the geographical boundaries of one's electoral district. If one can exclude in advance those who would vote against one's initiative or referendum, then the result is a foregone conclusion. This time-honored process is known as gerrymandering. Gerrymandered electoral districts have nothing to do with democracy. Mr. Walsh merely prefers TI gerrymandered boundaries to China's constitutionally defined (by both the PRC and ROC) national boundaries.
Mr. Walsh infers that "Mr. Chu implicitly acknowledges that a Taiwan secessionist government would have the support of the majority." Hardly. My article was a thought experiment which granted the TI'ers' a hypothetical majority merely to illustrate the invalidity of TI moral/ethical arguments. At no time did I imply that the TI'ers enjoyed a real world majority. In fact, the latest Gallup Poll reveals that the Taiwan public's patience with endless, shrill TI agitation is wearing thin. The DPP's setbacks during the recent Three in One Elections provoked internal bickering over dropping Taiwan independence from the DPP's official charter.
Mr. Walsh hurls the wild accusation that "Mr. Chu, implicitly, supports the right of the unelected government of the PRC to use force against the Chinese people." Mr. Walsh is conflating "government" with "nation." China is a nation. It has been in existence for five thousand years. The Taipei regime is a government. It has been in existence for 87 years. The Beijing regime is another government. It has been in existence for 50 years. Governments come and governments go. Nations, consisting of the land and the people, endure, hopefully. Opposition to national disintegration hardly constitutes endorsement of any particular ephemeral regime. When Hitler violated the cynically drafted Nazi-Soviet Pact and invaded Russia, patriotic Russians fought valiantly at Stalingrad, not for Stalin, whom many of them detested, but for Mother Russia.
The "right to self-determination" is a double-edged sword. If Mr. Walsh wishes to invoke it, he had better be prepared to accept its implications in full. He cannot restrict its application only to regimes he personally approves of. Otherwise he is merely arguing that what's good for the goose is not good for the gander. A principled defense of the right to self-determination would authorize ever smaller political entities to secede from whatever political entity they currently belong to, stopping only at the level of the individual citizen. This means, theoretically at least, every property owner on earth would be legally and morally entitled to hold a "national" referendum, with himself as the sole voter, declare his own private plot of land a sovereign republic, and refuse to pay taxes to the nation, the state or province, the city or county in which he (formerly) resided. Not surprisingly, no government on earth is willing do more than pay hypocritical lip service to the concept.
As a libertarian and borderline anarchist I assure Mr. Walsh I on the other hand, have no objection whatsoever to such a global scenario. If this were what secessionists the world over actually advocated, I would be ecstatic.
But this is not what they want. What they want are merely smaller -- but not freer -- tribalist collectives tailored to suit their personal ethnic prejudices. Woe to any genuine liberty loving individualists unfortunate enough to find themselves trapped in such "independent republics." They can look forward to being treated the way German Jews were treated by the Nazis, or the way ethnic Chinese-Indonesians are treated by rabid Indonesian bigots.
Parting Shot
March 17, 1999
Mr. Walsh alleges that my response "was... clever... but it avoids the question."
CCF readers know better. Actually Mr. Walsh himself knows better. My original piece stuck in his craw precisely because it was impolite enough to draw attention to the widespread hypocritical application of one standard for America and another standard for China. When it comes to demanding respect for "human rights" what was good enough for the American goose is apparently not good for the Chinese gander. Fair-minded readers understood perfectly well that was my original point.
Mr. Walsh gives it one final try when he states: "In Mr. Chu's opinion the PRC should use force to compel the people of the ROC to accept re-unification with the PRC if they refuse to do so voluntarily."
You mean like President Abraham Lincoln's opinion that the USA was right to use force to compel the people of the CSA to accept reunification with the USA when they refused to do so voluntarily, Mr. Walsh? You mean like "A house divided against itself cannot stand" Mr. Walsh?
The fact is that Mr. Walsh, when confronted with his (1) flagrant double-standards and (2) crude verbal sleights of hand, repeatedly pretended that nobody was alert enough to realize what he had done. CCF readers witnessed him do this with (1) huffy demands that China forswear the use of force to prevent national disintegration, even while he made excuses for the Union's refusal to let the South go its own way, merely because it happened before his private Statute of Limitations and (2) the substitution of "PRC" for "China," even after I took pains to remind him of the distinction between governments and countries. Did anyone miss the fact that his motive for conflating "PRC" and "China" was to milk the residue of Cold War paranoia for what it was worth?
Mr. Walsh consistently refused to deal with the issues honestly and frankly. I too, have nothing more to say to him. The old expression "playing a lute to a cow" pretty much sums up my experience with Mr. Walsh.
Originally posted at Chinese Community Forum (CCF)
Bevin Chu
February 03, 1999
Mr. Walsh's rebuttal is rife with both factual errors and logical contradictions.
First, the factual errors.
Mr. Walsh alleged that "if the people of Quebec vote democratically for independence, they will be granted independence (the unanimous consent of the other provinces is not required)."
What can I say? Except Mr. Walsh is simply wrong.
Canada's Supreme Court ruled in August 1998 that Quebec's separatist government did not have the right to unilaterally declare the province independent.
"Secession of a province 'under the Constitution' could not be achieved unilaterally, that is, without principled negotiation with other participants in Confederation within the existing constitutional framework," the court said in a unanimous decision. "Negotiations would be necessary to address the interests of the federal government, of Quebec and the other provinces, and other participants, as well as the rights of all Canadians both within and outside Quebec... there are linguistic and cultural minorities, including aboriginal peoples, unevenly distributed across the country who look to the Constitution of Canada for the protection of their rights. The court has confirmed that any possible process of independence must proceed in a manner that respects shared values that include federalism, democracy, constitutionalism and the rule of law, and respect for minorities," Chretien said in a statement. "In particular, it has found that the government of Quebec does not have the authority in Canadian law to effect independence unilaterally nor does it have such a right in international law."
Mr. Walsh wrote "What [Bevin Chu] says about ... independence movements in the USA is simply wrong... While it is true that the CCP is not alone in using force against democratic (i.e., non-violent) independence movements, all of the other governments that do so are dictatorships."
Dictatorships? Let me repeat what I wrote before. The United States chose to prosecute an appallingly bloody civil war rather than permit the Confederacy to secede. Mr. Walsh makes no mention of this in his "rebuttal. " Texas and Hawaii were both annexed illegally. The "purchase" of Alaska from Russia was receiving stolen goods. Modern day challenges to federal authority are systematically and ruthlessly suppressed by Federal law enforcement. And we haven't even gotten around to shameful history of genocide and illegal landgrabs from American Indians.
The Texas indendence radicals were probably guilty as hell of the offenses they were charged with. That does not alter the fact that the feds targeted Texas independence radicals not for writing bad checks, but for "plotting secession." No, the feds did not cite sedition or treason as the charge when they rounded them up. They invoked the criminal codes. China bashers, does this ring a bell? It should. The feds did exactly what Beijing does with pesky organizers of opposition political parties, they prosecute them not as subversives but as common criminals.
Now for the logical fallacies.
Mr. Walsh doubts that Taiwan secessionists would deny others in Taiwan the same right of self-determination. He has not witnessed TI legislators physically assault and injure dissenting lawmakers in the Legislative Yuan or thuggish TI taxi drivers attack hapless women passengers who failed to speak the Minnan dialect as "Tai jian" or "traitors to Taiwan." Does Mr. Walsh really believe these humorless fanatics will be content to passively watch the disintegration of their precious "Republic of Taiwan," without "doing something?"
Mr. Walsh defends the TI'ers. My prediction as "only a statement about how any government functions." In other words "Everybody does it. What's the big deal?" But Mr. Walsh contradicts himself. If indeed all governments use force to enforce their laws then how unsubstantiated is my assumption that TI'ers would deny others the right to secede as well?
Mr. Walsh wonders: "Can Mr. Chu really be supporting the principle that the majority cannot determine their own form of government? Mr. Chu doesn't acknowledge it openly, but his words clearly mean support for dictatorship of the few over the many."
Really? China is a nation state whose sovereign territory includes the mainland as well as the offshore islands of Taiwan and Hainan. Both the PRC and the ROC Constitutions agree on this. TI'ers are calling for a "national" referendum in which 1.2 billion fellow citizens outside the TI'ers' unilaterally defined boundary would be prohibited from participating. The TI'ers don't want majority rule. They want their version of majority rule. They want minority rule within an electoral district defined so that they constitute a majority. Perhaps Mr. Walsh can explain to CCF readers just exactly how this is democratic? Since I defend the right of all Chinese citizens to participate in any such referendum, I could argue that I am being much more democratic. The TI'ers, by arbitarily restricting participation in their referendum to only 21 million are being anti-democratic and exclusionary.
Let's not be politically naive. One can achieve a democratic majority on any issue under the sun, provided one gets to set the geographical boundaries of one's electoral district. If one can exclude in advance those who would vote against one's initiative or referendum, then the result is a foregone conclusion. This time-honored process is known as gerrymandering. Gerrymandered electoral districts have nothing to do with democracy. Mr. Walsh merely prefers TI gerrymandered boundaries to China's constitutionally defined (by both the PRC and ROC) national boundaries.
Mr. Walsh infers that "Mr. Chu implicitly acknowledges that a Taiwan secessionist government would have the support of the majority." Hardly. My article was a thought experiment which granted the TI'ers' a hypothetical majority merely to illustrate the invalidity of TI moral/ethical arguments. At no time did I imply that the TI'ers enjoyed a real world majority. In fact, the latest Gallup Poll reveals that the Taiwan public's patience with endless, shrill TI agitation is wearing thin. The DPP's setbacks during the recent Three in One Elections provoked internal bickering over dropping Taiwan independence from the DPP's official charter.
Mr. Walsh hurls the wild accusation that "Mr. Chu, implicitly, supports the right of the unelected government of the PRC to use force against the Chinese people." Mr. Walsh is conflating "government" with "nation." China is a nation. It has been in existence for five thousand years. The Taipei regime is a government. It has been in existence for 87 years. The Beijing regime is another government. It has been in existence for 50 years. Governments come and governments go. Nations, consisting of the land and the people, endure, hopefully. Opposition to national disintegration hardly constitutes endorsement of any particular ephemeral regime. When Hitler violated the cynically drafted Nazi-Soviet Pact and invaded Russia, patriotic Russians fought valiantly at Stalingrad, not for Stalin, whom many of them detested, but for Mother Russia.
The "right to self-determination" is a double-edged sword. If Mr. Walsh wishes to invoke it, he had better be prepared to accept its implications in full. He cannot restrict its application only to regimes he personally approves of. Otherwise he is merely arguing that what's good for the goose is not good for the gander. A principled defense of the right to self-determination would authorize ever smaller political entities to secede from whatever political entity they currently belong to, stopping only at the level of the individual citizen. This means, theoretically at least, every property owner on earth would be legally and morally entitled to hold a "national" referendum, with himself as the sole voter, declare his own private plot of land a sovereign republic, and refuse to pay taxes to the nation, the state or province, the city or county in which he (formerly) resided. Not surprisingly, no government on earth is willing do more than pay hypocritical lip service to the concept.
As a libertarian and borderline anarchist I assure Mr. Walsh I on the other hand, have no objection whatsoever to such a global scenario. If this were what secessionists the world over actually advocated, I would be ecstatic.
But this is not what they want. What they want are merely smaller -- but not freer -- tribalist collectives tailored to suit their personal ethnic prejudices. Woe to any genuine liberty loving individualists unfortunate enough to find themselves trapped in such "independent republics." They can look forward to being treated the way German Jews were treated by the Nazis, or the way ethnic Chinese-Indonesians are treated by rabid Indonesian bigots.
Parting Shot
March 17, 1999
Mr. Walsh alleges that my response "was... clever... but it avoids the question."
CCF readers know better. Actually Mr. Walsh himself knows better. My original piece stuck in his craw precisely because it was impolite enough to draw attention to the widespread hypocritical application of one standard for America and another standard for China. When it comes to demanding respect for "human rights" what was good enough for the American goose is apparently not good for the Chinese gander. Fair-minded readers understood perfectly well that was my original point.
Mr. Walsh gives it one final try when he states: "In Mr. Chu's opinion the PRC should use force to compel the people of the ROC to accept re-unification with the PRC if they refuse to do so voluntarily."
You mean like President Abraham Lincoln's opinion that the USA was right to use force to compel the people of the CSA to accept reunification with the USA when they refused to do so voluntarily, Mr. Walsh? You mean like "A house divided against itself cannot stand" Mr. Walsh?
The fact is that Mr. Walsh, when confronted with his (1) flagrant double-standards and (2) crude verbal sleights of hand, repeatedly pretended that nobody was alert enough to realize what he had done. CCF readers witnessed him do this with (1) huffy demands that China forswear the use of force to prevent national disintegration, even while he made excuses for the Union's refusal to let the South go its own way, merely because it happened before his private Statute of Limitations and (2) the substitution of "PRC" for "China," even after I took pains to remind him of the distinction between governments and countries. Did anyone miss the fact that his motive for conflating "PRC" and "China" was to milk the residue of Cold War paranoia for what it was worth?
Mr. Walsh consistently refused to deal with the issues honestly and frankly. I too, have nothing more to say to him. The old expression "playing a lute to a cow" pretty much sums up my experience with Mr. Walsh.
Wednesday, January 20, 1999
Taiwan Independence, Objection Sustained
Taiwan Independence, Objection Sustained
Originally posted at Chinese Community Forum (CCF)
Bevin Chu
January 20, 1999
You think you are Chinese, or not, born that way? Think about it again. Whether Mongolian Chinese and Tibetan Chinese are Chinese, you may argue with Luo Ning. But, some Taiwan Chinese or Minnan Chinese have been trying to be not Chinese. What's in Taiwan indepedence? Bevin Chu tells you what he foresees.
-- CCF Editors
Diehard Taiwan independence activists have recently stepped up pressure for a national referendum on Taiwan independence. They have cited a wide range of untenable legal arguments to justify their shrill demands. International and constitutional law experts have rebutted these elsewhere, so I will not belabor them here.
Above all they have claimed that their cause is nothing less than the natural expression of the Will of the People and therefore occupies the moral high ground.
The gist of their argument is that the inhabitants of any given geographical region on the earth have the incontrovertible right to self-rule, specifically to establish their own national governments. How, they protest, can any enlightened person who professes respect for human rights and democracy argue with this obvious truth?
Confronted with this sort of rhetoric, some defenders of Chinese national unity have fallen silent.
This is a mistake.
The fact is the Taiwan secessionists have never fully considered the logical implications of their simplistic pro-independence rationale. Their case is far shakier than it might initially seem.
Taiwan secessionists would draw a boundary line through the territory of an existing nation, China, defining the territory to be unilaterally declared independent, the offshore island of Taiwan.
Taiwan secessionists would call for a "national referendum," not a referendum open to the nation, but one in which citizens outside their arbitrarily drawn boundary would be prohibited from participating.
Having secured their independence, Taiwan secessionists would compel any unwilling minority within the boundary which voted against independence to accept the pro-independence outcome, by force if necessary.
Consider the following hypothetical string of events.
One: Beijing finds itself temporarily distracted by a crisis in Xinjiang or Xizhang. Taiwan independence elements seize the opportunity to establish a "Republic of Taiwan."
Two: Loyalist elements in northern Taiwan counter the Taiwan independence move by holding an identical "national referendum," open only to those inside a new boundary line they have drawn up around metropolitan Taipei, where opposition to Taiwan independence is most heavily concentrated.
Three: They successfully establish a loyalist "Chinese Republic," an unhappy minority of pro-Taiwan independence voters inside this new "Chinese Republic" is outvoted.
Four: Elements of the Hakka minority and the Nine Aboriginal Tribes, formerly content to be part of a tolerant, multicultural China, are now wary of a Minnan-dominated "Republic of Taiwan." Each establishes its own nation, carving up this offshore island of China into ten more "sovereign republics."
Five: Initially triumphant but now stymied Taiwan independence plotters, having finally realized their cherished "Taiwan Dream" after four decades of scheming, have two ways to respond.
Response A: They recognize the right of the eleven new republics to do exactly what they themselves just did. They sit by and watch idly as their newly founded "Republic of Taiwan" breaks apart before their very eyes.
Response B: They invade Taipei to prevent "splittism," Beijing's term for separatism. They do exactly what they condemn Beijing for threatening to do if Taiwan declares independence, resort to military force to preserve national unity.
What do they do?
No one familiar with the mindset of militant DPP and TAIP secessionists can have any illusions about what their response would be. It is not as if they haven't made their unalloyed fanaticism perfectly clear in public debates on Taiwan television talk shows. It should be clear now that Taiwan independence advocates have no right to complain when Beijing adopts the very same policies they would if the unity of a "Republic of Taiwan" were threatened by secessionist movements.
Not one of the modern world's large nations permits portions of their country to secede unilaterally in this manner.
Quebec independence, for example, requires the unanimous consent of Canada's other provinces.
The United States, possibly still the freest nation in the world, certainly has no right to object to Beijing's explicit intention to invade if Taiwan declares independence. It chose to prosecute an appallingly bloody civil war rather than permit the Confederacy to secede. China did not then dispatch warships to America's Atlantic coast to side with the Confederacy.
As recently as last year federal law enforcement agents besieged and captured a tiny band of Texans for plotting Texas independence. Refusing to relinquish the military option of nipping independence movements in the bud is hardly a policy exclusive to Beijing.
Thoughtful defenders of liberty must resist the temptation to assume that any and all independence movements are necessarily "freedom fighters." As one Cold War joke wryly noted, a freedom fighter is "someone who fights freedom."
Defenders of China's national unity need offer no apologies for opposing Taiwan independence, a petty tribalist secession movement motivated by ethnic bigotry. Taiwan independence rhetoric collapses under close scrutiny.
Originally posted at Chinese Community Forum (CCF)
Bevin Chu
January 20, 1999
You think you are Chinese, or not, born that way? Think about it again. Whether Mongolian Chinese and Tibetan Chinese are Chinese, you may argue with Luo Ning. But, some Taiwan Chinese or Minnan Chinese have been trying to be not Chinese. What's in Taiwan indepedence? Bevin Chu tells you what he foresees.
-- CCF Editors
Diehard Taiwan independence activists have recently stepped up pressure for a national referendum on Taiwan independence. They have cited a wide range of untenable legal arguments to justify their shrill demands. International and constitutional law experts have rebutted these elsewhere, so I will not belabor them here.
Above all they have claimed that their cause is nothing less than the natural expression of the Will of the People and therefore occupies the moral high ground.
The gist of their argument is that the inhabitants of any given geographical region on the earth have the incontrovertible right to self-rule, specifically to establish their own national governments. How, they protest, can any enlightened person who professes respect for human rights and democracy argue with this obvious truth?
Confronted with this sort of rhetoric, some defenders of Chinese national unity have fallen silent.
This is a mistake.
The fact is the Taiwan secessionists have never fully considered the logical implications of their simplistic pro-independence rationale. Their case is far shakier than it might initially seem.
Taiwan secessionists would draw a boundary line through the territory of an existing nation, China, defining the territory to be unilaterally declared independent, the offshore island of Taiwan.
Taiwan secessionists would call for a "national referendum," not a referendum open to the nation, but one in which citizens outside their arbitrarily drawn boundary would be prohibited from participating.
Having secured their independence, Taiwan secessionists would compel any unwilling minority within the boundary which voted against independence to accept the pro-independence outcome, by force if necessary.
Consider the following hypothetical string of events.
One: Beijing finds itself temporarily distracted by a crisis in Xinjiang or Xizhang. Taiwan independence elements seize the opportunity to establish a "Republic of Taiwan."
Two: Loyalist elements in northern Taiwan counter the Taiwan independence move by holding an identical "national referendum," open only to those inside a new boundary line they have drawn up around metropolitan Taipei, where opposition to Taiwan independence is most heavily concentrated.
Three: They successfully establish a loyalist "Chinese Republic," an unhappy minority of pro-Taiwan independence voters inside this new "Chinese Republic" is outvoted.
Four: Elements of the Hakka minority and the Nine Aboriginal Tribes, formerly content to be part of a tolerant, multicultural China, are now wary of a Minnan-dominated "Republic of Taiwan." Each establishes its own nation, carving up this offshore island of China into ten more "sovereign republics."
Five: Initially triumphant but now stymied Taiwan independence plotters, having finally realized their cherished "Taiwan Dream" after four decades of scheming, have two ways to respond.
Response A: They recognize the right of the eleven new republics to do exactly what they themselves just did. They sit by and watch idly as their newly founded "Republic of Taiwan" breaks apart before their very eyes.
Response B: They invade Taipei to prevent "splittism," Beijing's term for separatism. They do exactly what they condemn Beijing for threatening to do if Taiwan declares independence, resort to military force to preserve national unity.
What do they do?
No one familiar with the mindset of militant DPP and TAIP secessionists can have any illusions about what their response would be. It is not as if they haven't made their unalloyed fanaticism perfectly clear in public debates on Taiwan television talk shows. It should be clear now that Taiwan independence advocates have no right to complain when Beijing adopts the very same policies they would if the unity of a "Republic of Taiwan" were threatened by secessionist movements.
Not one of the modern world's large nations permits portions of their country to secede unilaterally in this manner.
Quebec independence, for example, requires the unanimous consent of Canada's other provinces.
The United States, possibly still the freest nation in the world, certainly has no right to object to Beijing's explicit intention to invade if Taiwan declares independence. It chose to prosecute an appallingly bloody civil war rather than permit the Confederacy to secede. China did not then dispatch warships to America's Atlantic coast to side with the Confederacy.
As recently as last year federal law enforcement agents besieged and captured a tiny band of Texans for plotting Texas independence. Refusing to relinquish the military option of nipping independence movements in the bud is hardly a policy exclusive to Beijing.
Thoughtful defenders of liberty must resist the temptation to assume that any and all independence movements are necessarily "freedom fighters." As one Cold War joke wryly noted, a freedom fighter is "someone who fights freedom."
Defenders of China's national unity need offer no apologies for opposing Taiwan independence, a petty tribalist secession movement motivated by ethnic bigotry. Taiwan independence rhetoric collapses under close scrutiny.
Wednesday, March 04, 1998
The Yellow Man and the White Woman
The Yellow Man and the White Woman
Originally posted at Chinese Community Forum (CCF)
Bevin Chu
March 04, 1998
CCF Editors: Bevin Chu's essay on the eternal anti-romance between the yellow man and the white woman leads off the discussion.
I would like to stick in my two cents worth regarding the recently raised (or re-raised) hot-button issue of yellow men and white women, and vice-versa. I hope I won't regret stepping into what could turn into a John Woo bloodbath.
It is impossible for any fair-minded person to take an unflinching look at the evidence and deny the existence of what Mr. Ku talked about regarding the popular media in America, often the most revealing barometer of a culture's implicit value system. Asian-American actors (and actresses) in Hollywood complain about this constantly. I know. I got to know many of them while I was taking acting classes myself in order to learn how to write film dialog. I could add a hundred examples of my own to Mr. Ku's laundry list, but I won't.
Since I am talking about media stereotypes as indicator of statistical cultural norms and not Mr. Meyer's personal life, I hope that he will not take offense. I do not know him and would not presume to question why he and his wife married other than that they love each other. For the record I have long been an enthusiastic champion of mixed marriages. Nothing would make me happier than if everyone who married in the next generation married outside their race, because the resulting children of mixed marriages would go a long way toward bridging cultures and contribute by merely being to the diminution of racial bigotry. This is why I was so gratified by the public's unabashed affection for golfing phenomenon Tiger Woods. He represents the future of mankind.
On the other hand I hope Mr. Meyer can appreciate why Mr. Ku is not entirely unjustified in being outraged at the marked lack of symmetry. This need not imply disapproval of Mr. Meyer's marriage, but merely a desire on the part of Mr. Ku to do exactly the same thing as Mr. Meyer. What's wrong with that? After all, if Mr. Ku really were a bigot, would he even be trying to get dates with white women, possibly marry one and have Amerasian kids? Mr. Ku's kids would then be just like Mr. Meyer's kids, would they not? Surely Mr. Meyer cannot find that objectionable? I am inclined to conclude that Mr. Meyer's lashing out at Mr. Ku's alleged bigotry is not entirely fair.
Just why aren't there an equal number or mixed race couples with the male/female roles reversed? Mr. Ku I feel is on the mark here. Again, this is not a commentary on any specific couple's perfectly reasonable and emotionally sound marital choice, but rather on a society's prevailing cultural norms. I assume none of us are talking about legally coerced "affirmative action" measures but rather a hypothetical social ideal. If there were no bigotry tilting the scales why wouldn't there be a roughly 50/50 mix of Asian male / Caucasian female and Asia female / Caucasian male relationships? This question deserves an answer. It would clearly not be legitimate to demand a reversal of the current arrangement, but is strikes me as entirely legitimate to expect something closer to symmetry. Opposition to a lack of symmetry is not opposition to mixed marriages. This needs to be clarified from the outset.
As a screenwriter who authored two screenplays when I lived in LA, I have done some informal research on the casting of Asian male and Caucasian female leads in film. Nothing rigorous or scholarly mind you, but enough digging around to confirm that Mr. Ku is not terribly far off the mark on this issue. Aside from "Bridge to the Sun," a 1961 film starring James Shigeta and Carroll Baker, very few Hollywood movies in the four decades since have paired Asian leading men with Caucasian leading ladies.
Far more typical, by many orders of magnitude, is the "Sayonara" or "World of Suzie Wong" scenario with a Caucasian male and Asian female. The latter film noteworthy in that Nancy Kwan, who is Eurasian and who portrayed Suzie Wong, is the daughter of a Hongkong Chinese father and English mother. (In case you hadn't figured it out from her last name.) The irony being that she is required in the film to play the opposite situation with 50's hunk William Holden.
This sort of male / female pairing is by no means a recent phenomenon. It goes back to Puccini's opera "Madama Butterfly" and Leo Delibe's opera "Lakme." The former everyone knows about, and I will spare everyone additional commentary. The latter involves an English officer and an Indian (Hindustan) woman, but in a virtually identical scenario. He throws her away with casual contempt after using her as a convenient sexual diversion. The Chinese-American playwright David Henry Hwang was immensely successful with his long-running hit play "M. Butterfly" in which he pulled no punches exploring this perspective many Caucasian males have regarding Asian females.
John Lone did play an Asian male paired with a Caucasian female in a quirky Alan Rudolph film back in the 80's, the title of which slips my mind at the moment. Rudolph is an exceptionally sensitive director, but alas this particular film merely confirms Mr. Ku's allegation, as Lone was relegated to portraying a nasty character who abused and therefore did not deserve the love of his Caucasian wife.
To the best of my knowledge it has taken just about forty years for any admirable Asian male character to be again paired with a Caucasian female. Jason Scott Lee in "The Jungle Book" is a recent example mentioned by Mr. Ku. Russell Wong in "Vanishing Son," a disappointing made for TV flop, was another. Chow Yun-fat in "The Replacement Killers" in which a dashing Chinese man is paired with voluptuous blonde Amazon (Mira Sorvino) just might possibly be a watershed. We will see. Even here however, the filmmakers soft pedaled this arrangement. The script saw to it that the Chow character was married to a Chinese woman back home and was faithful to her. This spared the filmmakers (including John Woo, one of the producers) the commercial risk of having to show sex between the yellow man and the white woman, thereby alienating many (I want to stress not all) white male action adventure genre ticket buyers. No nude scenes of them in bed together. Only the subtlest implication of sexual tension in some of the dialog between Chow and Sorvino. Sorvino says to Chow at the end something like "I'm going to miss you." We still have a long way to go to true equality, it would seem.
On the other hand, the "Suzie Wong Syndrome" of white leading men treating Asian female characters as disposable sexual playthings remains all too clearly in evidence. This is why so much was made in the promotional interviews of Michelle Yeoh's somewhat more assertive role while paired with Pierce Brosnan in "Tomorrow Never Dies."
The fact is that male sexual power is inextricably linked with power as such, in all its manifestations. Financial wealth, political office, or in its crudest form, military might. Hotshot US Naval aviators stationed in Vietnam and the Philippines during the Vietnam War used to refer to impoverished local women as "little brown fucking machines." This is a well known fact in the military and not something Mr. Ku made up, however Mr. Meyer might be inclined to attribute Mr. Ku's bitterness to personal neurosis. It is simply impossible to deny that a nation's secular power helps imbue the males of its dominant ethnic group with an aura of sexual desirability. One would have to be either naive or dishonest not to see it. When tactfully asked by reporters how it was he managed to date such stunning Hollywood beauties as Jill St. John, portly Henry Kissinger, who knew he was no stud, was remarkably candid and answered bluntly "Power is an aphrodisiac."
As far as Mr. Meyer's remark about "what kind of culture views women as commodities to buy and sell anyway?" The answer, sadly, is every culture. I know of no culture, east or west, ancient or contemporary which does not demean women by treating them as things. It is grossly wrong and tragic, but it is a fact. The president of the United States is currently in hot water for acting on just such assumptions about the subservient role of women. One hardly needs to go to Sichuan to find women being bought and sold. In fact, wasn't this exactly what Mr. Ku was complaining about? That men from nations with greater wealth and power too often get a free ride and abuse this power regarding women from less developed nations.
If by historical accident the situation were reversed, i.e., if brown and yellow nations happened to be technologically more advanced and powerful, and the women of white western nations thereby susceptible to being bought and sold as a consequence of their comparative poverty, would Mr. Meyer be denouncing his own nation with remarks such as "what kind of culture views women as commodities to buy and sell anyway?" or would he be writing letters similar to Mr. Ku's?
Let me reiterate, none of us knows Mr. Meyer, so we are emphatically not commenting on his marriage in particular. He has no reason to take it that way. Unless of course something has struck home. What is being debated is a sociological phenomenon in the abstract. From this perspective one can only conclude that Mr. Meyer's rather intemperate response to Mr. Ku's postings were somewhat excessive. Even if Mr. Meyer feels Mr. Ku was also wrong, two wrongs only compound the error.
Permit me to digress in order to point out that this is one of many reasons why the Dalai Lama does not deserve his inflated public image as some sort of humanist "great soul," an image Hollywood acolytes have seen fit to bestow on him. This man (he is only a man after all, not an angel from heaven) is little more than a petty tribalist preoccupied with the "ethnic purity" of "the Tibetan People." (As if being of mixed Tibetan-Han descent constituted "cultural genocide" of "his" people.) Perhaps SS- Oberscharfurher Heinrich Harrer taught him more about Aryan concepts of "racial purity" than Becky Johnston (the screenwriter of "Seven Years in Tibet") let on. For his information there is no monolithic entity called "the Tibetan People," of which he is "the spiritual and political leader." There are only individual Tibetans with individual rights, plenty of whom he does not speak for. The Dalai Lama does not occupy the moral high ground when he condemns Tibetan-Chinese and Han-Chinese for wanting to remain united in a multi-racial, multi-ethnic Chinese "melting pot." Ethnic separatism is thoroughly contemptible. It is a form of racism. I look forward to the day when all mankind is like Tiger Woods [in ethnic makeup, not personal conduct]. I have no problem with Mr. Meyer's children. I think they are the hope of the future.
Originally posted at Chinese Community Forum (CCF)
Bevin Chu
March 04, 1998
CCF Editors: Bevin Chu's essay on the eternal anti-romance between the yellow man and the white woman leads off the discussion.
I would like to stick in my two cents worth regarding the recently raised (or re-raised) hot-button issue of yellow men and white women, and vice-versa. I hope I won't regret stepping into what could turn into a John Woo bloodbath.
It is impossible for any fair-minded person to take an unflinching look at the evidence and deny the existence of what Mr. Ku talked about regarding the popular media in America, often the most revealing barometer of a culture's implicit value system. Asian-American actors (and actresses) in Hollywood complain about this constantly. I know. I got to know many of them while I was taking acting classes myself in order to learn how to write film dialog. I could add a hundred examples of my own to Mr. Ku's laundry list, but I won't.
Since I am talking about media stereotypes as indicator of statistical cultural norms and not Mr. Meyer's personal life, I hope that he will not take offense. I do not know him and would not presume to question why he and his wife married other than that they love each other. For the record I have long been an enthusiastic champion of mixed marriages. Nothing would make me happier than if everyone who married in the next generation married outside their race, because the resulting children of mixed marriages would go a long way toward bridging cultures and contribute by merely being to the diminution of racial bigotry. This is why I was so gratified by the public's unabashed affection for golfing phenomenon Tiger Woods. He represents the future of mankind.
On the other hand I hope Mr. Meyer can appreciate why Mr. Ku is not entirely unjustified in being outraged at the marked lack of symmetry. This need not imply disapproval of Mr. Meyer's marriage, but merely a desire on the part of Mr. Ku to do exactly the same thing as Mr. Meyer. What's wrong with that? After all, if Mr. Ku really were a bigot, would he even be trying to get dates with white women, possibly marry one and have Amerasian kids? Mr. Ku's kids would then be just like Mr. Meyer's kids, would they not? Surely Mr. Meyer cannot find that objectionable? I am inclined to conclude that Mr. Meyer's lashing out at Mr. Ku's alleged bigotry is not entirely fair.
Just why aren't there an equal number or mixed race couples with the male/female roles reversed? Mr. Ku I feel is on the mark here. Again, this is not a commentary on any specific couple's perfectly reasonable and emotionally sound marital choice, but rather on a society's prevailing cultural norms. I assume none of us are talking about legally coerced "affirmative action" measures but rather a hypothetical social ideal. If there were no bigotry tilting the scales why wouldn't there be a roughly 50/50 mix of Asian male / Caucasian female and Asia female / Caucasian male relationships? This question deserves an answer. It would clearly not be legitimate to demand a reversal of the current arrangement, but is strikes me as entirely legitimate to expect something closer to symmetry. Opposition to a lack of symmetry is not opposition to mixed marriages. This needs to be clarified from the outset.
As a screenwriter who authored two screenplays when I lived in LA, I have done some informal research on the casting of Asian male and Caucasian female leads in film. Nothing rigorous or scholarly mind you, but enough digging around to confirm that Mr. Ku is not terribly far off the mark on this issue. Aside from "Bridge to the Sun," a 1961 film starring James Shigeta and Carroll Baker, very few Hollywood movies in the four decades since have paired Asian leading men with Caucasian leading ladies.
Far more typical, by many orders of magnitude, is the "Sayonara" or "World of Suzie Wong" scenario with a Caucasian male and Asian female. The latter film noteworthy in that Nancy Kwan, who is Eurasian and who portrayed Suzie Wong, is the daughter of a Hongkong Chinese father and English mother. (In case you hadn't figured it out from her last name.) The irony being that she is required in the film to play the opposite situation with 50's hunk William Holden.
This sort of male / female pairing is by no means a recent phenomenon. It goes back to Puccini's opera "Madama Butterfly" and Leo Delibe's opera "Lakme." The former everyone knows about, and I will spare everyone additional commentary. The latter involves an English officer and an Indian (Hindustan) woman, but in a virtually identical scenario. He throws her away with casual contempt after using her as a convenient sexual diversion. The Chinese-American playwright David Henry Hwang was immensely successful with his long-running hit play "M. Butterfly" in which he pulled no punches exploring this perspective many Caucasian males have regarding Asian females.
John Lone did play an Asian male paired with a Caucasian female in a quirky Alan Rudolph film back in the 80's, the title of which slips my mind at the moment. Rudolph is an exceptionally sensitive director, but alas this particular film merely confirms Mr. Ku's allegation, as Lone was relegated to portraying a nasty character who abused and therefore did not deserve the love of his Caucasian wife.
To the best of my knowledge it has taken just about forty years for any admirable Asian male character to be again paired with a Caucasian female. Jason Scott Lee in "The Jungle Book" is a recent example mentioned by Mr. Ku. Russell Wong in "Vanishing Son," a disappointing made for TV flop, was another. Chow Yun-fat in "The Replacement Killers" in which a dashing Chinese man is paired with voluptuous blonde Amazon (Mira Sorvino) just might possibly be a watershed. We will see. Even here however, the filmmakers soft pedaled this arrangement. The script saw to it that the Chow character was married to a Chinese woman back home and was faithful to her. This spared the filmmakers (including John Woo, one of the producers) the commercial risk of having to show sex between the yellow man and the white woman, thereby alienating many (I want to stress not all) white male action adventure genre ticket buyers. No nude scenes of them in bed together. Only the subtlest implication of sexual tension in some of the dialog between Chow and Sorvino. Sorvino says to Chow at the end something like "I'm going to miss you." We still have a long way to go to true equality, it would seem.
On the other hand, the "Suzie Wong Syndrome" of white leading men treating Asian female characters as disposable sexual playthings remains all too clearly in evidence. This is why so much was made in the promotional interviews of Michelle Yeoh's somewhat more assertive role while paired with Pierce Brosnan in "Tomorrow Never Dies."
The fact is that male sexual power is inextricably linked with power as such, in all its manifestations. Financial wealth, political office, or in its crudest form, military might. Hotshot US Naval aviators stationed in Vietnam and the Philippines during the Vietnam War used to refer to impoverished local women as "little brown fucking machines." This is a well known fact in the military and not something Mr. Ku made up, however Mr. Meyer might be inclined to attribute Mr. Ku's bitterness to personal neurosis. It is simply impossible to deny that a nation's secular power helps imbue the males of its dominant ethnic group with an aura of sexual desirability. One would have to be either naive or dishonest not to see it. When tactfully asked by reporters how it was he managed to date such stunning Hollywood beauties as Jill St. John, portly Henry Kissinger, who knew he was no stud, was remarkably candid and answered bluntly "Power is an aphrodisiac."
As far as Mr. Meyer's remark about "what kind of culture views women as commodities to buy and sell anyway?" The answer, sadly, is every culture. I know of no culture, east or west, ancient or contemporary which does not demean women by treating them as things. It is grossly wrong and tragic, but it is a fact. The president of the United States is currently in hot water for acting on just such assumptions about the subservient role of women. One hardly needs to go to Sichuan to find women being bought and sold. In fact, wasn't this exactly what Mr. Ku was complaining about? That men from nations with greater wealth and power too often get a free ride and abuse this power regarding women from less developed nations.
If by historical accident the situation were reversed, i.e., if brown and yellow nations happened to be technologically more advanced and powerful, and the women of white western nations thereby susceptible to being bought and sold as a consequence of their comparative poverty, would Mr. Meyer be denouncing his own nation with remarks such as "what kind of culture views women as commodities to buy and sell anyway?" or would he be writing letters similar to Mr. Ku's?
Let me reiterate, none of us knows Mr. Meyer, so we are emphatically not commenting on his marriage in particular. He has no reason to take it that way. Unless of course something has struck home. What is being debated is a sociological phenomenon in the abstract. From this perspective one can only conclude that Mr. Meyer's rather intemperate response to Mr. Ku's postings were somewhat excessive. Even if Mr. Meyer feels Mr. Ku was also wrong, two wrongs only compound the error.
Permit me to digress in order to point out that this is one of many reasons why the Dalai Lama does not deserve his inflated public image as some sort of humanist "great soul," an image Hollywood acolytes have seen fit to bestow on him. This man (he is only a man after all, not an angel from heaven) is little more than a petty tribalist preoccupied with the "ethnic purity" of "the Tibetan People." (As if being of mixed Tibetan-Han descent constituted "cultural genocide" of "his" people.) Perhaps SS- Oberscharfurher Heinrich Harrer taught him more about Aryan concepts of "racial purity" than Becky Johnston (the screenwriter of "Seven Years in Tibet") let on. For his information there is no monolithic entity called "the Tibetan People," of which he is "the spiritual and political leader." There are only individual Tibetans with individual rights, plenty of whom he does not speak for. The Dalai Lama does not occupy the moral high ground when he condemns Tibetan-Chinese and Han-Chinese for wanting to remain united in a multi-racial, multi-ethnic Chinese "melting pot." Ethnic separatism is thoroughly contemptible. It is a form of racism. I look forward to the day when all mankind is like Tiger Woods [in ethnic makeup, not personal conduct]. I have no problem with Mr. Meyer's children. I think they are the hope of the future.
Sunday, February 22, 1998
Are Capitalism, Democracy linked?
Are Capitalism, Democracy linked?
Bevin Chu
February 21, 1998
Letters Editor
Sraits Times
Dear Sir/Madam,
Re: Steve Lohr, New York Times (Are capitalism, democracy linked?, The Straits Times - Comment and Perspective FEB 20 1998)
An endless procession of pundits have taken it upon themselves to enlighten poor benighted Asians about the cause of their financial woes: "It's the democracy, stupid!" "Your recession is your Asian Values bill come due!"
This self-congratulatory "explanation" may flatter Asia-bashers egos, but it hardly accords with economic history. The worst economic catastrophe in modern times was America's Great Depression. Was America devastated by the Great Depression because her citizens were denied free and fair elections? Was four term president Franklin D. Roosevelt a practitioner of "untenable Asian Values?"
As a passionate advocate of classical liberalism I am confident that pure laissez-faire is the optimal economic system; that any nation which adopts it will enjoy rapid growth and general prosperity.
The problem is free market capitalism is not the preferred economic system of those who typically speak in solemn tones about the sanctity of democracy, universal suffrage, and majority rule. Their preferred economic system is more often than not democratic socialism, and the ballot box their instrument for legalized plunder.
As H.L. Mencken observed "an election is nothing more than an advance auction of stolen goods." "Rule of Law" legal protections afforded private property have historically been shredded by mob "rule of the majority."
Democracy is far more hostile to capitalism than Mr. Lohr and champions of "western values" would have us believe. What the answer is to this dilemma I do not claim to know. But the simplistic formulations I have heard so far are definitely not it.
Sincerely,
Bevin Chu
Taipei, Taiwan, China
Bevin Chu
February 21, 1998
Letters Editor
Sraits Times
Dear Sir/Madam,
Re: Steve Lohr, New York Times (Are capitalism, democracy linked?, The Straits Times - Comment and Perspective FEB 20 1998)
An endless procession of pundits have taken it upon themselves to enlighten poor benighted Asians about the cause of their financial woes: "It's the democracy, stupid!" "Your recession is your Asian Values bill come due!"
This self-congratulatory "explanation" may flatter Asia-bashers egos, but it hardly accords with economic history. The worst economic catastrophe in modern times was America's Great Depression. Was America devastated by the Great Depression because her citizens were denied free and fair elections? Was four term president Franklin D. Roosevelt a practitioner of "untenable Asian Values?"
As a passionate advocate of classical liberalism I am confident that pure laissez-faire is the optimal economic system; that any nation which adopts it will enjoy rapid growth and general prosperity.
The problem is free market capitalism is not the preferred economic system of those who typically speak in solemn tones about the sanctity of democracy, universal suffrage, and majority rule. Their preferred economic system is more often than not democratic socialism, and the ballot box their instrument for legalized plunder.
As H.L. Mencken observed "an election is nothing more than an advance auction of stolen goods." "Rule of Law" legal protections afforded private property have historically been shredded by mob "rule of the majority."
Democracy is far more hostile to capitalism than Mr. Lohr and champions of "western values" would have us believe. What the answer is to this dilemma I do not claim to know. But the simplistic formulations I have heard so far are definitely not it.
Sincerely,
Bevin Chu
Taipei, Taiwan, China
Thursday, March 27, 1997
Washington is not America, Beijing is not China
Washington is not America, Beijing is not China
Originally posted at Chinese Community Forum (CCF)
Bevin Chu
March 26, 1997
Mr. Cornett's thoughtful letter deserves a respectful reply. I hope he will agree that I have made a sincere attempt to provide just that.
To begin with I too am an American. I am Chinese by birth and ethnicity, but 100% American in my political philosophy. I was naturalized under Ronald Reagan, who reminded Americans that the proper role of government was to get the hell out of our way. As Thomas Jefferson put it, "those people are governed best who are governed least."
The American concept of good government is next to no government. A government is not a country. A country is not its government. A nation's life is lived in its private sector, its civil society. The government's role is to be the nighwatchman in the basement, while the real business of the country is conducted in the office suites. America is not Pennsylvania Avenue, it is Main Street and Wall Street. It is 100% American to love one's country while hating one's government. This is what Reagan meant when he spoke to cheering audiences about "getting Big Government off our backs."
Mr. Cornett mentions Lao-tse, to me the greatest Chinese philosopher of all time. Lao-tse originated the concept of minimal government, which he summed up as "wu wei erh zhi" or "administering by doing nothing." If "wu wei erh zhi" sounds astonishingly similar to classical liberal concepts of "laissez faire" and "the Invisible Hand" it merely confirms that Chinese people share this fundamental value with westerners.
I love America. It is no contradiction to say that I hate the oppressive, arrogant Federal government in Washington. It simultaneously abuses American citizens at home while lecturing other governments abroad for doing the same. Consider recent remarks by State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns:
"I don't think . . . we need to listen to lectures from authoritarian countries about our human rights performance because we are the world's champion of human rights,'' [Those around the world who had their human rights taken away] ``look to us to speak up for them''. [The US government] is ``very confident about our policy and emphasis on human rights and we're not going to be deterred, especially by countries that are major violators of human rights.''
As Tonto reminded the Lone Ranger, "What do you mean we Kemo Sabe?" If Mr. Burns thinks that the victims of Ruby Ridge and Waco identify with the US Federal government as "the world's champion of human rights" he should talk to Timothy McVeigh.
My response: "The violation of rights and liberty by other governments can never justify foreign intervention by the United States government. Today, no government is innocent of violating human rights and liberty, and none can approach the issue with clean hands. In keeping with our goal of peaceful international relations, we call upon the United States government to cease its hypocrisy and its sullying of the good name of human rights. Only private individuals and organizations have any place speaking out on this issue."
This was taken from the Libertarian Party's platform on Human Rights, but I couldn't have said it any better myself.
Today we hear a lot of sermonizing from both American leftists and rightists about the "human rights" concerns of the US government and how these concerns must take precedence over the "mere" commercial interests of private American businesses. Whole forests have died in order that they could denounce the "New China Lobby" (comprised incidentally, of highly knowledgeable China hands from the Nixon, Reagan and Bush administrations) which is accused of being unpatriotic and of selling out American values.
The critics have it backwards. According to traditional American values the moral judgements of public servants, elected or otherwise, does not have priority over the commercial interests of American citizens. To hold such a view is UN-American. In America the government is the servant, not the parole officer/moral guardian of the American citizen. "Linkage" may sound high-minded, but "linkage" itself is a human rights violation. It violates the rights of private citizens to engage in free trade simply because government bureaucrats "don't like it."
Sorry, but it's not their place to like or dislike it. If Madeleine Albright, Jesse Helms or Nancy Pelosi can't get along with their counterparts in Beijing, that's just too damned bad. They should go into counseling and let the CEOs of Boeing, Caterpillar, MacDonalds and Motorola get on with the serious work of building the emerging global economy. The emerging global economy in which Honda builds automobile plants in Ohio and Dell builds computer plants in Japan is unlikely to witness either another Pearl Harbor or Hiroshima. Japanese and Americans are not about to bomb their own factories.
Obviously the same holds true of the US and China. If the business communities (not the governments) of both nations build on an already deepening mutual economic interdependence, the dreaded "Coming Conflict with China" will never happen. The global economy may just turn out to be the unappreciated harbinger of a planetwide civil society which finally makes mankind's yearning for enduring peace more than just an idle dream.
It would be an ironic vindication of laissez-faire economists Adam Smith and Friedrich Bastiat if world peace was finally brought about by aggressive, tough-minded businessmen such as "Chainsaw" Al Dunlap and Bill Gates (the CEOs of Sunbeam and Microsoft) rather than bleeding hearts such as the Dalai Lama and Mother Theresa.
Originally posted at Chinese Community Forum (CCF)
Bevin Chu
March 26, 1997
Mr. Cornett's thoughtful letter deserves a respectful reply. I hope he will agree that I have made a sincere attempt to provide just that.
To begin with I too am an American. I am Chinese by birth and ethnicity, but 100% American in my political philosophy. I was naturalized under Ronald Reagan, who reminded Americans that the proper role of government was to get the hell out of our way. As Thomas Jefferson put it, "those people are governed best who are governed least."
The American concept of good government is next to no government. A government is not a country. A country is not its government. A nation's life is lived in its private sector, its civil society. The government's role is to be the nighwatchman in the basement, while the real business of the country is conducted in the office suites. America is not Pennsylvania Avenue, it is Main Street and Wall Street. It is 100% American to love one's country while hating one's government. This is what Reagan meant when he spoke to cheering audiences about "getting Big Government off our backs."
Mr. Cornett mentions Lao-tse, to me the greatest Chinese philosopher of all time. Lao-tse originated the concept of minimal government, which he summed up as "wu wei erh zhi" or "administering by doing nothing." If "wu wei erh zhi" sounds astonishingly similar to classical liberal concepts of "laissez faire" and "the Invisible Hand" it merely confirms that Chinese people share this fundamental value with westerners.
I love America. It is no contradiction to say that I hate the oppressive, arrogant Federal government in Washington. It simultaneously abuses American citizens at home while lecturing other governments abroad for doing the same. Consider recent remarks by State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns:
"I don't think . . . we need to listen to lectures from authoritarian countries about our human rights performance because we are the world's champion of human rights,'' [Those around the world who had their human rights taken away] ``look to us to speak up for them''. [The US government] is ``very confident about our policy and emphasis on human rights and we're not going to be deterred, especially by countries that are major violators of human rights.''
As Tonto reminded the Lone Ranger, "What do you mean we Kemo Sabe?" If Mr. Burns thinks that the victims of Ruby Ridge and Waco identify with the US Federal government as "the world's champion of human rights" he should talk to Timothy McVeigh.
My response: "The violation of rights and liberty by other governments can never justify foreign intervention by the United States government. Today, no government is innocent of violating human rights and liberty, and none can approach the issue with clean hands. In keeping with our goal of peaceful international relations, we call upon the United States government to cease its hypocrisy and its sullying of the good name of human rights. Only private individuals and organizations have any place speaking out on this issue."
This was taken from the Libertarian Party's platform on Human Rights, but I couldn't have said it any better myself.
Today we hear a lot of sermonizing from both American leftists and rightists about the "human rights" concerns of the US government and how these concerns must take precedence over the "mere" commercial interests of private American businesses. Whole forests have died in order that they could denounce the "New China Lobby" (comprised incidentally, of highly knowledgeable China hands from the Nixon, Reagan and Bush administrations) which is accused of being unpatriotic and of selling out American values.
The critics have it backwards. According to traditional American values the moral judgements of public servants, elected or otherwise, does not have priority over the commercial interests of American citizens. To hold such a view is UN-American. In America the government is the servant, not the parole officer/moral guardian of the American citizen. "Linkage" may sound high-minded, but "linkage" itself is a human rights violation. It violates the rights of private citizens to engage in free trade simply because government bureaucrats "don't like it."
Sorry, but it's not their place to like or dislike it. If Madeleine Albright, Jesse Helms or Nancy Pelosi can't get along with their counterparts in Beijing, that's just too damned bad. They should go into counseling and let the CEOs of Boeing, Caterpillar, MacDonalds and Motorola get on with the serious work of building the emerging global economy. The emerging global economy in which Honda builds automobile plants in Ohio and Dell builds computer plants in Japan is unlikely to witness either another Pearl Harbor or Hiroshima. Japanese and Americans are not about to bomb their own factories.
Obviously the same holds true of the US and China. If the business communities (not the governments) of both nations build on an already deepening mutual economic interdependence, the dreaded "Coming Conflict with China" will never happen. The global economy may just turn out to be the unappreciated harbinger of a planetwide civil society which finally makes mankind's yearning for enduring peace more than just an idle dream.
It would be an ironic vindication of laissez-faire economists Adam Smith and Friedrich Bastiat if world peace was finally brought about by aggressive, tough-minded businessmen such as "Chainsaw" Al Dunlap and Bill Gates (the CEOs of Sunbeam and Microsoft) rather than bleeding hearts such as the Dalai Lama and Mother Theresa.
Thursday, March 06, 1997
Media, Human Rights, and Waco
Media, Human Rights, and Waco
Originally posted at Chinese Community Forum (CCF)
Bevin Chu
March 5, 1997
Response to Da-jiang Liu
I regret that Mr. Liu felt I was having a facile joke at his expense. I see in retrospect how it might have come across that way, but that was not my intention. My purpose was quite serious -- to illustrate the lack of symmetry in the way the US Federal government routinely preaches human rights to the governments of other countries. It habitually drags other countries' domestic transgressions into international trade negotiations, but never seems to notice that hardly any other government presumes to relate to the US government the same way.
Do Helmut Kohl and Jacques Chirac condition trade with America on redress of BATF and FBI violations of human rights at Ruby Ridge and Waco? Some insist that international trade must be linked to human rights. My response: Should Kohl and Chirac prohibit Daimler Benz from exporting Mercedes to eagerly awaiting American car buyers, or Coca-Cola from serving thirsty Frenchmen until Waco and Ruby Ridge are resolved to German and French government satisfaction? Should they demand that American law enforcement agents be called onto the carpet to answer to them? How would Americans react if they did? Would we conclude Europeans were empathizing with our plight and thank them for it, or would we bristle at them as sanctimonious busy bodies?
Premier Li Peng and General Chi Haotien brutalizing Chinese civilians within China is a domestic Chinese issue. President Bill Clinton and Attorney General Janet Reno authorizing the legalized murder of American citizens at Ruby Ridge and Waco is a domestic American issue. For foreigners to presume that Americans can't resolve homegrown abuses of governmental power without foreign intervention insults the American public. For Americans to assume that foreigners can't do the same within their own countries insults foreigners. The role reversal gimmick was merely an attempt to illustrate that point.
To a champion of laissez-faire and minimal government America is not the Federal juggernaut in Washington DC. America is Boeing, Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Motorola, and Proctor & Gamble, ad infinitum, all of whose shareholders' have the right to trade with the Chinese people. As a former Republican president once quipped "The business of America is business." Therefore when the US Federal government (or the PRC Central government) tramples on the rights of American and Chinese citizens to engage in free trade, that is an intolerable human rights violation.
Capitalism and communism are economic systems first, political systems second. Communism's "human rights violations" were violations of economic rights before anything else. Maoism's violation of Chinese peasants' economic rights during the Great Leap Forward alone resulted in the death by starvation of 30 million Chinese. Capitalism's virtue is its defense of people's economic rights. "Human rights champions" who demean economic liberalization as "meaningless" without political liberalization should try living without economic rights. They know nothing about the millions who were reduced to eating grass and bark before dying agonizing deaths.
Today's Federal leviathan has no more moral claim to be a defender of human rights abroad than it does at home. To cast it in the role of a global knight errant is to fall into the trap of worshipping the state as a higher entity than individual human beings. Ironically it is falling prey to the same statism which handed China to Mao. Paradoxically the wise government of the early Founding Fathers, imbued with incomparably greater moral virtue than modern American administrations, never presumed to preach human rights to the rest of the world. Is it too much of a stretch to suggest that those who walk the walk, don't need to talk the talk?
The Federal government which Thomas Jefferson deemed a necessary evil hasn't become any more necessary but it is a hell of a lot more evil. It has metastasized into the cancer of Big Government which former president Ronald Reagan tried valiantly but vainly to get off the backs of Americans. No longer content with infringing the rights of Americans by plundering one third of their hard-earned wealth every April 15th, it now wants to infringe the economic rights of the rest of the world. Canada, Mexico, and the European Union with Helms-Burton. China with Most Favored Nation -- as if refraining from violating the rights of Americans and Chinese to engage in free trade constituted a favor.
I am indeed frustrated with the intellectual mainstream's selective moral conscience. But since when is it narrow minded to expect that moral standards applied to others be applied with equal force to oneself? There is a word for moral/ethical consistency: integrity. And there is a word for its opposite: hypocrisy. Frustrated? You bet!
Response to Chengming Yang
Mr. Yang assumes that others share his low opinion of the parishioners of the Branch Davidian Church, therefore to compare them to the pro-democracy hunger strikers at Tiananmen Square demeans the latter. But many Americans, myself included, do not feel the Davidians did anything wrong, certainly nothing that warranted being starved, gassed and burned to death for. Since I don't feel the Davidians were wrong or evil, I feel the comparison is favorable to both the Tiananmen protestors and to the Davidians.
But even if Mr. Yang feels the Davidians weren't on the same moral plane as the Tiananmen protestors, the question is still irrelevant. The issue doesn't hinge on the moral stature of the victims. The point is that when push comes to shove the US Federal government isn't much more just than the Beijing government is toward its own citizens. FBI Director Louis Freeh had as little patience and respect for American citizens who defied them as General Chi Haotien had for the pro-democracy activists who were asserting their constitutional rights in Tiananmen Square.
The Davidians were merely exercising their Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms, a right guaranteed by the US Constitution, a right the Chinese people ought to enjoy. Chinese civilians, armed to the teeth like the civilian militia in the United States with AK-47s imported, ironically from PRC munitions maker Norinco, could hardly be abused by their own government with the impunity they have been. Personally I find it curious that many of the same US elected officials who advocate gun prohibition are among the loudest voices denouncing the PRC.
Furthermore, those "human rights" advocates in the US who demonize China as "aggressively expansionist" as an pretext to contain it are using the same public relations spin control as the Federal authorities who carefully demonized and thus marginalized the Davidians as "fanatical cultists" so they could get away with gassing and incinerating them without raising too loud a hue and cry from mainstream America.
Those genuinely distressed about human rights abuses must not be naive about the cynical motivations involved and blindly assume that everyone who criticizes the Beijing regime's brutality does so out of solicitude for the fate of ordinary Chinese citizens. I wish it were not so, but far too many people in this world have highly suspect motives for ostensibly noble behavior.
Originally posted at Chinese Community Forum (CCF)
Bevin Chu
March 5, 1997
Response to Da-jiang Liu
I regret that Mr. Liu felt I was having a facile joke at his expense. I see in retrospect how it might have come across that way, but that was not my intention. My purpose was quite serious -- to illustrate the lack of symmetry in the way the US Federal government routinely preaches human rights to the governments of other countries. It habitually drags other countries' domestic transgressions into international trade negotiations, but never seems to notice that hardly any other government presumes to relate to the US government the same way.
Do Helmut Kohl and Jacques Chirac condition trade with America on redress of BATF and FBI violations of human rights at Ruby Ridge and Waco? Some insist that international trade must be linked to human rights. My response: Should Kohl and Chirac prohibit Daimler Benz from exporting Mercedes to eagerly awaiting American car buyers, or Coca-Cola from serving thirsty Frenchmen until Waco and Ruby Ridge are resolved to German and French government satisfaction? Should they demand that American law enforcement agents be called onto the carpet to answer to them? How would Americans react if they did? Would we conclude Europeans were empathizing with our plight and thank them for it, or would we bristle at them as sanctimonious busy bodies?
Premier Li Peng and General Chi Haotien brutalizing Chinese civilians within China is a domestic Chinese issue. President Bill Clinton and Attorney General Janet Reno authorizing the legalized murder of American citizens at Ruby Ridge and Waco is a domestic American issue. For foreigners to presume that Americans can't resolve homegrown abuses of governmental power without foreign intervention insults the American public. For Americans to assume that foreigners can't do the same within their own countries insults foreigners. The role reversal gimmick was merely an attempt to illustrate that point.
To a champion of laissez-faire and minimal government America is not the Federal juggernaut in Washington DC. America is Boeing, Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Motorola, and Proctor & Gamble, ad infinitum, all of whose shareholders' have the right to trade with the Chinese people. As a former Republican president once quipped "The business of America is business." Therefore when the US Federal government (or the PRC Central government) tramples on the rights of American and Chinese citizens to engage in free trade, that is an intolerable human rights violation.
Capitalism and communism are economic systems first, political systems second. Communism's "human rights violations" were violations of economic rights before anything else. Maoism's violation of Chinese peasants' economic rights during the Great Leap Forward alone resulted in the death by starvation of 30 million Chinese. Capitalism's virtue is its defense of people's economic rights. "Human rights champions" who demean economic liberalization as "meaningless" without political liberalization should try living without economic rights. They know nothing about the millions who were reduced to eating grass and bark before dying agonizing deaths.
Today's Federal leviathan has no more moral claim to be a defender of human rights abroad than it does at home. To cast it in the role of a global knight errant is to fall into the trap of worshipping the state as a higher entity than individual human beings. Ironically it is falling prey to the same statism which handed China to Mao. Paradoxically the wise government of the early Founding Fathers, imbued with incomparably greater moral virtue than modern American administrations, never presumed to preach human rights to the rest of the world. Is it too much of a stretch to suggest that those who walk the walk, don't need to talk the talk?
The Federal government which Thomas Jefferson deemed a necessary evil hasn't become any more necessary but it is a hell of a lot more evil. It has metastasized into the cancer of Big Government which former president Ronald Reagan tried valiantly but vainly to get off the backs of Americans. No longer content with infringing the rights of Americans by plundering one third of their hard-earned wealth every April 15th, it now wants to infringe the economic rights of the rest of the world. Canada, Mexico, and the European Union with Helms-Burton. China with Most Favored Nation -- as if refraining from violating the rights of Americans and Chinese to engage in free trade constituted a favor.
I am indeed frustrated with the intellectual mainstream's selective moral conscience. But since when is it narrow minded to expect that moral standards applied to others be applied with equal force to oneself? There is a word for moral/ethical consistency: integrity. And there is a word for its opposite: hypocrisy. Frustrated? You bet!
Response to Chengming Yang
Mr. Yang assumes that others share his low opinion of the parishioners of the Branch Davidian Church, therefore to compare them to the pro-democracy hunger strikers at Tiananmen Square demeans the latter. But many Americans, myself included, do not feel the Davidians did anything wrong, certainly nothing that warranted being starved, gassed and burned to death for. Since I don't feel the Davidians were wrong or evil, I feel the comparison is favorable to both the Tiananmen protestors and to the Davidians.
But even if Mr. Yang feels the Davidians weren't on the same moral plane as the Tiananmen protestors, the question is still irrelevant. The issue doesn't hinge on the moral stature of the victims. The point is that when push comes to shove the US Federal government isn't much more just than the Beijing government is toward its own citizens. FBI Director Louis Freeh had as little patience and respect for American citizens who defied them as General Chi Haotien had for the pro-democracy activists who were asserting their constitutional rights in Tiananmen Square.
The Davidians were merely exercising their Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms, a right guaranteed by the US Constitution, a right the Chinese people ought to enjoy. Chinese civilians, armed to the teeth like the civilian militia in the United States with AK-47s imported, ironically from PRC munitions maker Norinco, could hardly be abused by their own government with the impunity they have been. Personally I find it curious that many of the same US elected officials who advocate gun prohibition are among the loudest voices denouncing the PRC.
Furthermore, those "human rights" advocates in the US who demonize China as "aggressively expansionist" as an pretext to contain it are using the same public relations spin control as the Federal authorities who carefully demonized and thus marginalized the Davidians as "fanatical cultists" so they could get away with gassing and incinerating them without raising too loud a hue and cry from mainstream America.
Those genuinely distressed about human rights abuses must not be naive about the cynical motivations involved and blindly assume that everyone who criticizes the Beijing regime's brutality does so out of solicitude for the fate of ordinary Chinese citizens. I wish it were not so, but far too many people in this world have highly suspect motives for ostensibly noble behavior.
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