Finding Identity Amidst the Baloney

By Jerome Keating

IF TAIWAN IS to establish its identity, it must begin with the principle that "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts."

From 5,000 years ago, when thriving Aboriginal civilizations quarried jade and did a burgeoning sea-faring trade with Southeast Asia, Taiwan has had its uniqueness. It was later influenced by the Dutch, the Spanish, pirates, Ming loyalists, Qing conquerors, and the Hoklo and Hakka seeking freedom. You name it and Taiwan received it. Each contributed a part, but the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

In the past century, Taiwan had two great colonizers that wanted to make the island conform to their identity. The Japanese -- the first to control the whole island -- imposed their rule and their language and tried to mold Taiwan into a model colony. After Japan, the fleeing Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) came and imposed their rule and their language; they promoted a different dream, the false dream of retaking what the KMT had lost.

The Japanese were a majority imposing their identity on the minority Taiwanese. The KMT were a minority imposing their identity on the majority Taiwanese. Both have been a part of Taiwan's past, but the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Democracy has given Taiwan new life. With democracy, Taiwan now has the freedom to declare its own dream. While some deep blue KMT still want to impose their identity and their lost dream on Taiwan, others in their ranks are beginning to recognize the importance of localization and consider changing the KMT party name to "Taiwanese Nationalist Party." The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Identity is not enough for progress however. The second step after identity is to get past the media bamboozlement and down to the issues.

Henry David Thoreau stated succinctly in Walden: "Most men lead lives of quiet desperation." I would add a corollary to his words: "Most men lead lives of willingly being bamboozled."

This flaw in humanity is what drives companies to hire marketing executives to persuade consumers to buy stuff they don't need. This flaw is what allows the media to get away with providing pap instead of substance. This flaw is what allows politicians to posture and promise and not worry about being held accountable.

Why do people allow themselves to be bamboozled? Perhaps they hope for quick-fix solutions and trust a person's words more than his record. Perhaps they don't want to look beyond the immediacy of a problem to the complexities of its source. Perhaps they would rather trust a media that is interested more in sensationalism than investigative journalism.

Taiwan must insist the media get beyond its pap and sensationalism. Look at what the media focused on before the elections. Taiwan had to endure media overplay of Shih Ming-deh's (施明德) Red Shirts. Their alleged million people protest march was in reality about 500,000 pan-blue members from their Taipei City and County stronghold, an area that holds a KMT voter base of well over 3 million loyalists.

March of the people? March of the KMT loyalists is more like it.

Then the Red Shirts who claimed to be anti-corruption avoided any accurate and specific accounting of the more than US$3 million that Shih's group collected and which disappeared in less than a year with no concrete detailed accounting.

Bamboozled again.

The reality that the media and many in Taiwan do not acknowledge is that Taiwan has inherited governmental systems that foster and condone corruption. These systems are inherited from the one-party state martial law days where all officials could have a share of profits from assigned discretionary funds according to their rank. Thus in true Ambrose Bierce style, corruption becomes defined as accusing others for imitating what you do best. And the media and people, rather than begin the tedious effort of reforming these systems, seek the easy way out. They look for simple scapegoats when it is the system that must be attacked.

Taiwanese can begin by asking who is for Taiwan and who is not and how that loyalty is to be defined. If loyalty to Taiwan means accepting that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, then no politician should favor any other country more than Taiwan no matter how close that country is.

With this loyalty established, people can get to the nitty-gritty of what systems in the country need reform in order to improve Taiwan on all fronts from its democracy to its economy.

The power of Taiwan is in the Legislative Yuan and not the president. It is the past sixth Legislative Yuan that paralyzed the country by continuously refusing its military budget without discussion, by refusing to appoint members to the Control Yuan, the watchdog of the country, by passing the least amount of bills in the legislature's history and by blocking any motions that the KMT should give up its stolen assets.

Did the media focus on this reality? Not on your life -- they let the legislature and its small controlling pan-blue majority get away with it even when it sought to usurp the powers belonging to the executive branch.

The bamboozling has continued with the economy. Everyone complained, yet no one bothered to notice that Taiwan's economy has been better than most countries of the world and its unemployment rate is one of the lowest.

If you walk down Taipei's Zhongxiao E Road, the shoppers are out in full force; entertainment and spending are alive and well in Taiwan. Yet because people are not instant millionaires, they believe the media hype and never check reality.

Are the foreign media any help? The economies of the countries where the foreign media reside are worse off than Taiwan, yet the foreign media would rather report sensationalism over substance in Taiwan than compare it to their own economy.

Bamboozled again, both locally and internationally.

So now when the KMT won an overwhelming and disproportionate victory in last month's Legislative Yuan elections, the KMT members all had somber faces. Some interpreted this as a sham to hide their gloating over how they had bamboozled the public; how with as little as slightly over 50 percent of the vote, they managed to gain more than 75 percent of the seats in the Legislative Yuan.

My own take on it is that by gaining such an overwhelming majority the KMT has now realized that they can no longer hide. They can't blame a slim legislative majority for being unable to pass legislation. They likewise can no longer blame the president; they can no longer blame the economy. There will be no one to blame except themselves and no amount of bamboozling can save them.

One final bamboozle remains, the personal and often pork barrel bamboozle. This bamboozle is self-inflicted, either consciously or unconsciously. There were approximately 17.3 million eligible voters, but only 9.8 million cast votes. While this is not a disreputable percentage by some standards, it still meant that some 7.5 million people did not vote. That total is many more votes than the KMT received (5,010,801) and almost twice as many as the DPP got (3,610,106). As a matter of fact, the number of non-voters combined with independents slightly exceeds the combined total number of votes received by the KMT and DPP.

The actual voting numbers for the KMT and DPP have not changed that much from 2004 with the exception that the KMT consolidated all the pan-blue votes under one roof. These voters followed their traditional patterns. They favored either their ideology or their pork barrel benefits or both. Because of this, both parties need to ask why they did not provide convincing reasons to attract more of the 7.5 million non-voters.

The ultimate question, however, falls on the non-voters. One can sympathize that for many non-voters the senseless bickering in the Legislative Yuan would make anyone want to say "a pox on both of your houses" and not vote.

Likewise, under the old system of one vote, multiple-member districts, little accountability could be leveraged against foolish legislators. However, the Legislative Yuan is the law-making body of the land, and with the new single member districts, voters can now enforce accountability. Non-voters can no longer bamboozle themselves.

No country has 100 percent turnout of voters; but even an 80 percent voter turnout would have provided an extra 4 million votes. Certainly this would easily have tipped the scales for the DPP.

Perhaps if mobilized behind a third party it could have pro-vided a true reckoning force to make all sides work for justice, jobs and what is best for Taiwan. Is this a dream? If these voters continue to refrain from voting they are accepting their own bamboozle and refusing their identity.

Jerome Keating is a writer based in Taiwan.