Weekend Recall and Budget Not-So-Shorts

We're at a threshold of sorts in Taiwanese politics, so here's a picture of a cool door from Xianse Temple (先嗇宮) in New Taipei. 

There are a variety of issues I want to talk about, all of which deserve a short post. All of them, however, are immediately important in my opinion. So, let's go with one big post. The end goes a little off the rails but there are trash bags and fake Chinese poetry there for you to enjoy.

The KMT is trying to bribe you

The KMT-led legislature, along with their TPP lapdogs, have just passed an NT$10,000 tax rebate for every citizen. It's unclear of foreign spouses and permanent residents will be included -- this is often decided later and, despite being taxpayers, we sometimes are (as with the COVID vouchers and NT$6,000 surplus cash back) and sometimes aren't (as with the 2008 rebate). 

This comes after debate over the proposed national resilience budget and Taipower grant (more on that later). The KMTPP -- Huang Kuo-chang in particular -- have expended a lot of energy screaming about "high taxes" under the DPP (taxes aren't high) and that the DPP budget proposals were bloated (with the legislature initiating deep cuts while calling it "returning money to the people").

The KMTPP's budget cuts were a major catalyst of the recalls that are creating a mini-election season in Taiwan, so of course now they want to add goodies into the budget that bloat it right back up, right after blaming the DPP for over-spending and over-taxation. 

Basically, the KMTPP doesn't know what it wants, except to not be recalled. There is no clear direction or agenda: either the DPP's budget sucks and needs to be cut, or oh no, please don't recall us, here's NT$230 billion extra in the budget so you can all have some money. It's not vote-buying, it's a tax rebate because the DPP is bad, see? We're spending money because they spent too much money, or something!

From Taiwan News: 

The DPP also accused the Kuomintang of using the promise of a tax rebate to try and fend off recall votes targeting 26 of its lawmakers. The opposition defended its addition of the tax rebate to the bill by pointing at the tax surplus of NT$1.87 trillion accumulated over the past four years. 

Cool, so -- um, quick question. More of a comment than a question really. If we have that big a surplus, then why were you so adamant before that the DPP budget needed to be cut?

They give reasons for the rebate, but none of them make much sense. I can't find a linkable source, but apparently one idea was to take it from the national resilience budget. As a friend remarked, "great, that'll pay for two months of jiu-jitsu classes which will be super helpful if I have to fight the PLA in hand-to-hand combat."

Another reason given are the Trump tariffs, saying that these rebates are needed for economic relief. Maybe, but Trump's rhetoric is notoriously unreliable. Shouldn't we have a clearer picture of how tariffs may impact Taiwan before we add NT$230 billion to the budget?

Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌), whom I can't believe we all once thought was a great orator (what?) said this (translation mine): 

If we follow the DPP’s logic, then weren’t Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) and Su Chen-chang (蘇貞昌) also wrong when they said they wanted to issue cash rebates in 2008? The DPP’s current standard is that taxpayers’ money is [their] money. It can only be given out of the DPP says so. If the DPP says it should not be distributed, then it can't be. If this is not dictatorship, then what is?

Excuse me, but...what? First, weren't the 2008 rebates a Ma Ying-jeou thing? Am I missing something here? Since when were they Tsai and Su's idea? How does that equate to tax rebates only being given out when the DPP supports them?

The DPP did give out stimulus vouchers and tax rebates when they were the ruling party because, well, they were the ruling party. Of course they could pass something like that. How is that dictatorship? 

Regardless, those were given out in the midst of a global financial crisis. Does Huang want to remind Taiwanese voters that they get money when the economy sucks, right after the KMT were the ones to insist on deep budget cuts? Does he really think the DPP only opposes the rebate because it wasn't a DPP idea? It's NT$230 billion, when we're not quite in an economic crisis (yet). 

As for what is and isn't a dictatorship, here's a primer: a dictatorship is when the people in power stay in power, and there are no elections to choose or change leadership. If there is a change in leadership, it's done by those already in power, or it's a coup, not an election. Generally speaking there are limits on freedom of speech and other human rights.

Taiwan is about to have a round of voting. Some legislators up for recall will likely survive it, others will have to step down. Then the respective districts who chose to recall their representatives will vote on new ones. Some will likely vote in another KMT candidate, not a DPPer. The legislature might tip green, or it might not. Either way, the people choose.

In 2028, there will be another election. There's a reasonable chance the KMT will win it. 

Through all of this, the KMT and TPP are free to say just about anything they want in speeches, rallies and anti-recall campaign signs. They control the legislature, for now. 

So no, the DPP is not a "dictatorship". I would have thought Huang would have understood the definition of that term as he was once a professor, but it seems not.

Is Huang Kuo-chang even okay? Perhaps he should see a doctor? 


There's enough money for tax rebates, but not for Taipower?

Taipower is perpetually low on funds, and there are questions over how their budget is used. I doubt they run a highly-efficient organization; both they and Taiwan Railway are somewhat notorious for doing quite the opposite. They spend a lot of money as infrastructure ages despite long lists of people on the payroll. 

The KMTPP, however, is adamant on rejecting an NT$100 billion grant for Taipower in the budget. There was some talk of approving it, but as of today, it seems the provision did not make it through. 

I suppose we'll need to get ready for summer blackouts and the KMT, who rejected the funding, blaming the DPP for them.

I'm not sure, however, that denying them funding is going to fix either that, or Taiwan's power grid issues. Utilities in general, including electricity, are quite low-cost for consumers. Perhaps they're too cheap, and higher rates would force more circumspect consumption. There is, however, a floor of how little power one might consume, especially in increasingly hotter weather, and with inflation creeping up and pay not keeping pace, I would imagine many people simply don't feel they can afford to pay more for utilities. 

Because of this, and the fact that Taipower is a government concern, whether or not utility prices should rise is a perpetual political issue. Voters obviously don't want to pay more, so politicians don't want to approve price increases. Nobody thinks it's well-run, but it's difficult to restructure. But then it never quite has enough money, and the party in power gets blamed for strain on or failure of the grid. 

I have no idea how to fix this, and I don't think full privatization would make it much better. Look at the US grid, which is mostly (entirely?) privately-owned. It's falling apart; it's absolute chaos, and there will almost certainly be a tragic large-scale failure at some point. Electricity prices sure are high though!


The KMT's take on the recalls is...a take

The KMT held a press event the other day to discuss their position on the recalls. You'll be shocked to hear that, as their own recall push failed so spectacularly that someone put their own dead mom on the petition, they are unhappy. 

Here are some choice quotes from Thompson Chau's piece in Nikkei: 

At the same briefing, KMT official Tony Lin called the no-confidence votes a "threat" to Taiwan's democratic system. "We're against Lai Ching-te's dictatorship," he said.

So, when you do recalls it's acceptable -- and you've tried twice now -- but when the DPP does it, it's "a dictatorship"?

Oh Tony, do we need to review the definition of "dictatorship" is, like we did with Professor Huang? It usually doesn't include people voting, nor does it include you being free to call the current leader a dictator and openly speak of opposing them. 

You know what can be defined as a dictatorship? The thing your party did from 1945 to 1996 in Taiwan, if we define "elections" as including a presidential election.

Get in touch, Tony. I'll gift you a dictionary. It's on me, seeing as the KMT is such a walking disaster that it probably can't afford its own. I'll even buy two: one for you, and one for Huang Kuo-chang.

KMT Chairman Eric Chu also branded the no-confidence votes "a disgrace to Taiwan's democracy," and accused the president of acting like Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler, remarks that drew backlash from foreign diplomats in Taipei in May.

Oh shit I guess I gotta buy three dictionaries. I'd say you can share but I don't associate the KMT with sharing much of anything.

Again, though, was it not a "disgrace to democracy" when the KMT and their allies did them? The current recall initiative is mostly through civic groups, though of course the DPP is encouraging them and if anything, surprised by the strength of the public's positive reception. Furthermore, the KMT and allies have tried more than once to use the current, perhaps overly lax, recall regulations to take down pan-green legislators. In the latest instance, they broke the law several times trying to go after the DPP. And not just civic groups allied with the KMT -- senior KMT officials themselves have been indicted. 

I guess the KMT thinks it's fine to break the law to get what they want because they spent so many decades as dictators, even though the apparently don't know what the word means.

It gets worse: 

When asked by reporters whether the KMT would reconsider its China policy in light of the recall campaign, Vice Chairman Andrew Hsia said the party would stand by its core position that Taiwan is part of a broader Chinese polity.

"We will be following the constitution -- which is a 'One China' constitution -- and we will be following the 1992 consensus," Hsia said in a briefing, referring to the understanding reached under former President Lee Teng-hui that acknowledged each side's existence.

Okay, so, you hate the recalls, and you hate that the public doesn't seem to like you very much, and you hate that you lost the last presidential election and didn't quite win the legislative one, but you are completely unwilling to re-think the main party platform that has caused you such difficulty with voters? The main reason why they dislike you in roles of national governance? And the main reason why, every time they give you a chance, you fuck it up?

It's almost as though forcing Chinese identity on all Taiwanese is the core reason for the KMT's existence, and if they give it up in favor of a pro-Taiwan approach, they'll lose the only thing that differentiates them from the DPP. Huh.

Chau's a great reporter though. He rebuts the idea that the ROC constitution is "one China": 

The notion that the constitution endorses the "One China" concept is a subject of considerable debate in Taiwan. Professor Hsu Tzong-li, formerly Taiwan's chief justice, has argued that a 1991 constitutional amendment redefined the two sides of the Taiwan Strait as "two Chinas" engaged in "state-to-state relations."

On Wednesday, Hsia reiterated that both sides believe in the "One China" notion. "To Beijing, it's the People's Republic; to Taipei, it's the Republic of China," he said. 

He could have also pointed out that the 1992 Consensus wasn't a consensus at all, but this is still fantastic. His boilerplate is also acceptable: 

China claims Taiwan as part of its territory. 

Succinct and true, and the context of the rest of the article clarifies that Taiwan is sovereign.

It's worth mentioning that regardless of what Hsia insists, every elected president of Taiwan except for one has called Taiwan a "country", and neither president since Ma Ying-jeou has endorsed the notion that the "Republic of China" has a claim on any territories beyond it currently governs.

Hsia is terrible at making a good point: 

Hsia, who served as a senior diplomat and later as minister for China affairs under KMT President Ma Ying-jeou, defended the legacy of his former boss.

For eight years under Ma, Taipei and Beijing had "a stable, peaceful, prosperous cross-strait relationship," Hsia said. He pointed to Taiwan's attendance at international meetings at the time and the signing of trade deals with Singapore and New Zealand as proof of Ma's diplomatic credibility.

Yeah, because Ma was a unificationist and the CCP liked that, so they talked to him. He was actively and intentionally readying Taiwan for unification with China. It wasn't "peaceful" dialogue between two sides, it was capitulation. Besides, the DPP had been perfectly able to hold peaceful dialogue with China, until the KMT collaborated with the CCP to actively undermine them.

And now for some fun recall bits

This building on Minquan East Road is a battleground both for and against the recall of Wang Hung-wei (王鴻薇), who is a word nobody should call a woman, but she is one nonetheless. The top billboards support her recall, while the blue and yellow ones oppose it:

You might disagree with what the cartoonish larger billboard has to say about Wang, though I'm not sure why you would. It's basically calling her a CCP collaborator, which is what she is. It's not even the only thing that makes her a terrible person!

At least that billboard makes a case for recalling her. The smaller ones from her supporters don't say anything at all except "come vote against the recall", "don't agree" and "support Wang Hung-wei" -- which isn't an argument. Can they not otherwise defend her?

In other news, New Taipei legislator Chang Chi-lun (張智倫) apparently handed out trash bags as free gifts to voters. Chang's district is traditionally deep blue, but he's facing recall. 

This is objectively hilarious. Also, Chang doesn't look much like his photo, which is common in Taiwanese politics.

It's such a dumb choice of gift -- practical, but the pink color given that he's an accused CCP collaborator and the fact that it's a trash bag both send the wrong message -- that I actually checked to make sure it was real. 

In honor of Chang's choice putting a smile on my face, I wrote some fake classical Chinese proverbs for you (and had the first one checked by a friend). Let's start with Li Bai: 

全世界最奇怪的

就是垃圾自備垃圾袋

-- 李白

We can't forget Sun Tzu: 

如果你的想法不好，

不管你的樣子看起來什麼樣，

把自己像垃圾袋一樣呈現給世界，

光滑的塑膠面

隱藏裡面的東西。

-- 孫子

Finally, we have Du Fu, although this one hasn't been checked by a native speaker:

時代落日

山河綠

古代皇帝就像

他們帝國的殘骸

黃昏粉紅色光芒

-- 杜甫

Anyway.

Wang and Chang are both in blue districts. I think Chang's is deeper blue, as the DPP regularly runs strong candidates in Wang's, which means they think they can flip it, but it's also never gone green since its inception. Fun fact: one of its former legislators was Taipei mayor Chiang Wan-an's (蔣萬安)'s father, John Chang/Chiang, who is legally considered to be the son of former dictator Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國). 

Anyway, there's a reasonable chance that if they are recalled, another KMTer will be elected in their stead. I think Wang is more likely to be voted out than Chang, because her district seems like more of a battleground, and she's far more public of a shambling mess. I don't know much about Chang, though. 

My main concern with these blue districts is not that a KMTer will take the place of whomever might be recalled. In fact, perhaps it will scare the KMT into better behavior, at least for awhile. 

Instead, I worry that they'll elect someone who seems better-behaved on the surface, more humble, doesn't exude drama and mess, isn't obviously a CCP collaborator...but who totally is, because the KMT has decided to throw its lot in with the CCP, and the CCP is happy to help get collaborators elected. 

It'll be harder to spot, though, because they'll have learned to keep it down. Then we have to fight that, and be called delusional for thinking these new collaborators are doing anything wrong, and around and around it goes.

Book Review: Social Forces in the Re-making of Cross-Strait Relations (or, the KMT is worse than you ever thought possible)

 

This is a bit long, but I've fiddled with it for such a long time that I'm just going to publish it as-is.

Here's an excerpt from a conversation I had with Brendan recently:

Me: So I just finished this Routledge book, Social Forces in the Re-making of Cross-Strait Relations. 

Brendan: Gonna write a review?

Me: Obviously. This one was interesting because it took the evolution of social movements, mostly under Ma Ying-jeou, and analyzed them in a Gramscian framework. 

Brendan: Huh.

Me: Y'know, Gramsci, the guy American right-wingers think taught nursery school kids about critical race theory in the basement of a pizzeria, and that's why now there are transgender people.

Brendan: It was probably pretty hard for him to do that from a jail cell in Fascist Italy a hundred years ago. 

That's what happened while I was reading Social Forces in the Re-making of Cross-Strait Relations. As you might imagine, it starts out very academic: if you need a primer or refresher on Gramsci to better understand the theoretical framework, author André Beckershoff has you covered. If you don't, feel free to jump ahead to the Taiwanese history and analysis.

The SparkNotes paraphrase of Gramsci is that he's most famous for his dissection of cultural hegemony: the process by which a ruling (capitalist) class dominates the culture of a society, including diverse societies, to establish or maintain control of that society's norms, perceptions and expectations in order to legitimize their place at the top. It's not exactly Marxism in the traditional sense, but it is absolutely rooted in Marxist thought. Gramsci's hegemons are the same Boss Class that rule every capitalist society, who then disseminate pro-capital opinions until they become foundational to that society's ethos, thus supporting the continued existence of the Boss Class.

That is, accumulation is always good, we're at the top because we deserve to be there, what we want is what's best for society and therefore should also be what everyone else wants, and what's best for society is oh-so-conveniently exactly what keeps us in power.

Let me also lay out my personal stuff, so that you'll know where I'm coming from in this review.

This may be shocking for some, but I'm not a communist. At best, I'm quasi-anarcho-socialist, to the left of parties like the Democrats and the DPP, but able and willing to find common ground and compromise with many. When it comes to Taiwan, I believe in a pragmatic approach which sometimes necessitates dealing with the worst people on Earth, although I refuse to be a part of it.

I do not believe in a Leninist praxis in which a 'vanguard party' leads a revolution, because I don't like to be told what to do. Not by a billionaire pig, and not by some asshole who insists his dictatorship is 'of the proletariat' when it obviously isn't. In short: yes to mutual aid and community-building, no to sending people to the wall for thought crimes, and no to 'political tutelage', which is just another name for manufacturing consent. An opinion which, of course, would get me sent to the wall for thought crimes.

So I'm the sort of lefty that right-wingers think is turning everyone gay (that'd be awesome, yet is unfortunately untrue), but I'm not-quite-leftist enough such that the purists think I'm just another capitalist. I may not be a communist, but I'm mostly okay with Gramsci.


Gramsci in a Taiwan Context

As such, the theoretical framework of Beckershoff's book makes intuitive sense to me. In the context of Taiwanese history, the process by which the KMT came to Taiwan, set up systems that redirected capital accumulation toward themselves, and used education, "the rule of law" and the media among other tools to consolidate their wealth and power.

The KMT's hegemonic strategy differs, however, in that they didn't just use non-violent 'cultural' means. They also used violent ones: 228, Martial Law, the White Terror. No one serious denies these events happened, but it's telling that the excuse-mongers' only tactic to legitimize them is typically along the lines of "the ROC needed to cement their rule over Taiwan". 

But of course, that begs the question: it assumes the permanent KMT/ROC governance of Taiwan is fundamentally legitimate, and therefore that end justified both violent and non-violent means. That legitimacy is usually tied back to non-binding declarations made by the leaders of other countries, not any sort of political will or choice of the Taiwanese people. Thus, I'd argue, there is no inherent legitimacy to the ROC on Taiwan, so excuses for its actions not meaningful arguments, they're thought-terminating cliches.

That's a slight digression, but these sorts of thought processes are fundamental to the book. It spends some time discussing KMT strategy during the Chen Shui-bian administration, but the greatest focus is on the interplay between the Ma administration that succeeded Chen's, and the social movements that sought to cripple his agenda and mostly (though not entirely) failed, until they succeeded. The Wild Strawberries, Anti-Media Monopoly Movement, various anti-land-expropriation movements and, of course, the Sunflower Movement. The end of the book is where this interplay (I suppose you could call it a dialectic?) comes out most strongly, although the activists of the 2010s were not the first to oppose both pro-China and pro-capital cultural hegemony. 

One excellent reason to read Social Forces in the Remaking of Cross-Strait Relations, therefore, is to consider an analysis of Taiwanese identity and its evolution through a fundamentally leftist lens. It's refreshing to read, as a counterpoint to all the conservative slugs who support (and claim to care about) Taiwan only because it stands in opposition to CCP-ruled China. It's not a simplistic nationalist or anti-communist argument: it looks at the struggle of social movements to define themselves and their country despite unrelenting attempts to undermine the existence of a Taiwanese identity by those with the most money and power.

The intended through-line, made clear right from the introduction, is that the driving force behind the narrative of capitalism being fundamental to Taiwan's identity and that Taiwan and China are (therefore) inextricably linked, is an invention of the bourgeoisie for their own benefit.

This may sound odd, as China claims to be communist, not capitalist, but the point is what benefits capital (that is, what's good for the wealthy) has been sold to Taiwanese society as something natural, inevitable, and decided by society despite having been created instead by the wealthy. The narrative that benefits the wealthy is the pro-trade, pro-China one. It doesn't really matter that the government on the other side claims to adhere to the principles of socialism. It matters that the people who push the narrative make money.


Capital and Politics, or, the KMT sucks

The party most complicit in this is KMT, both under Ma Ying-jeou specifically and in history more generally, positioning unification and Taiwan as culturally and historically Chinese as inevitable, a given. They do this through capital, that is, economic control. Early on, the KMT took control of just about all means of capital accumulation. Of course they did: they wanted all the money as well as all the power.

The importance of capital accumulation was placed alongside this positioning of Chinese cultural and political identity as foundational to the existence of Taiwan -- well, the ROC. Under Ma Ying-jeou, this strategy expanded to include CCP cooperation in manufacturing this narrative and public consent for it.

While they've pretty clearly lost the battle for identity, with most Taiwanese no longer buying into the Chinese nationalist worldview, the same can't be said for the capitalist ethos that's still seen as fundamental to Taiwan's (well, again, the ROC's) identity, if it's questioned at all. This manifests in the admiration society tends to have for wealthy businesspeople and the ineffectual pushback against long hours and low wages (or even defending mistreatment of workers as necessary for the country's economic success). There's also nostalgia for the 'Taiwan Miracle' era despite its political challenges, and most concerning of all, the belief that only increased cooperation with China will ensure Taiwan's economic future. 

This latter narrative has faced some society-wide interrogation in recent years, especially as it's become apparent how strongly Taiwan's business elite, along with the KMT and CCP in tandem, have pushed it as necessary, while condemning opposition to economic integration as foolish or short-sighted.

Beckershoff dives into all of this history in detail, which led me to a conclusion that I'm not entirely sure was intended: however bad readers of Taiwanese history might think the KMT is, the more you learn, the more you realize it's actually worse than whatever you'd previously thought. History never offers the KMT image rehabilitation -- it only makes it look more awful than it already did. 

Upon fleeing to Taiwan, the KMT first sought to consolidate economic control. They did this by stacking state-run enterprises with their own, and giving preferential treatment to large private enterprises, which tended to be run by KMT loyalists. Smaller enterprises, which were more likely to be headed by potentially disloyal local Taiwanese, were forced into the export sector. 

Land reform did increase the average income of farming households and limited land as a means of social mobility, but many farmers were unhappy with the government deals through which they acquired land to farm. The KMT then set up Farmers Associations which, under a Gramscian analysis, were used as tools to manufacture passive consent for reforms, and as a means of government control of the agricultural sector. They did this with mandatory membership in many such trade associations -- not so professionals in a trade could protect their own interests, but as a means of maintaining loyalty to the KMT.

Despite some benefits from land reform, that's all pretty bad. However, most of us knew these things already. If you didn't, welcome to the KMT Hater Train. I'll be your conductor -- Chugga Chugga Choo Choo, motherfuckers. 

But wait! There's more! Did you know that during this time, the KMT siphoned off about 50% of all rice production through the use of rice-as-payment for all manner of things, including strategically overpriced fertilizer? I hadn't, but now I do!

Did you know that compensation for expropriated land in the form of stocks and bonds was intentionally spread widely enough to ensure none became major shareholders, thus mitigating the economic power of potential dissenters? Again, I hadn't. But now I do. 

Oh, and did you know that most of that sweet, sweet US aid money (pre-1965) was granted by the KMT dictatorship to KMT loyalists, so that 'waishengren' mostly benefited, all while retaining the right to ban the formation of new companies to protect the interests of existing (waishengren-owned) ones? I could have guessed this, but I hadn't been aware of the details. 

However bad you thought the KMT was, it's actually worse.

I only have one small quibble with this section of the book: while most references to concepts such as "re-taking the Mainland" are properly contextualized in the book, on page 45 there's an unqualified reference to "retrocession". But, of course, this too is a manufactured concept. What is retrocession, exactly, when the ROC hadn't existed when Japan took Taiwan? The primary government on Taiwan between the Qing and the Japanese was the short-lived and beleaguered Republic of Taiwan, and the Qing had, for the most part, treated Taiwan as a colony, Until the last dozen years or so, they didn't bother to map, let alone govern, more than a third of the island. 

So what is 'retrocession'?

It's nonsense, that's what. 

There's more, and Beckershoff goes into detail about the role of capital in Taiwan's eventual transformation from the KMT's vision of a 'model Chinese province' from which to 're-take the Mainland' (barf) to a more liberal economic policy, but I want to jump ahead. 


The KMT is worse than you thought -- but the DPP kinda sucks too

By the mid-2000s, the KMT was already in full traitor mode, although not many people realized it at the time. I wrote about this a few posts ago, quoted below: 

Beckershoff lays out a devastating case for China's intentional smearing of DPP presidents as "the problem", making it seem as though they aren't open to or capable of initiating or engaging in any discussions, let alone peace talks or mutually agreeable rapprochement. 

In fact, the CCP was able to sidestep DPP presidents, making them seem like bigger 'troublemakers' than they have been, by engaging instead with the KMT directly, as though they were the ruling party even when they weren't. Beckershoff says of the Chen years: 

The DPP's limited success, however, was not for lack of initiative: after first overtures beginning with Chen's election in 2000, the government proposed negotiations on a variety of technical issues from 2004 onwards, but as the party-to-party platform between the KMT and CCP emerged in the same time frame, the Chinese government could afford to stall, decline or even ignore the overtures of the Taiwanese government. 

One specific example of this was undermining the Chen administration vis-à-vis tourism: 

The TSTA [Taiwan's Taiwan Strait Tourism Association] and the CTEA [China's Cross-Strait Tourism Exchange Foundation] held a third and fourth round of tourism talks in January 2007, and a fifth round in March. With both organizations having "reached consensus in many aspects", [Joseph] Wu was adamant that negotiations were "entering the final stages", a statement reaffirmed by his successor Chen Ming-tong on 27 April. 

The next day, however, the 3rd KMT-CCP Forum opened in Beijing to discuss the topics of direct flights and cross-Strait tourism. The composition of the delegation reflected the issues on the agenda: in addition to the usual party and business representatives, it comprised delegates from four Taiwanese airlines, several hotel groups as well as a number of associations from the tourism and travel sectors. Three of the forum's six recommendations dealt with issues of cross-Strait links....while the fifth recommendation endorsed the swift realization of a cross-Strait tourism agreement. The unilateral measures announced at the forum facilitated travel for Taiwanese citizens by allowing further cities to issue landing visas, and Taiwanese airlines were permitted to set up offices in China while also benefiting from measures designed to promote cooperation with Chinese airlines...

So, essentially, undercutting the work the elected government had already been doing by taking it up through a backchannel -- something that, if Wu and Chen were to be believed, was wholly unnecessary.

At the closing ceremony, Shao Qiwei, director of China's National Tourism Administration, contrasted the pragmatic and productive negotiations with the Taiwanese opposition parties through the KMT-CCP channel with the disruptive attitude of the Taiwanese government. He stated that the five rounds of negotiations between the TSTA and CTEA had reached a consensus on a large number of tourism related issues, and blamed the stalling of negotiations on the Taiwanese government's unwillingness to recognize cross-Strait tourism as domestic travel.

What 'disruptive attitude'? Not referring to Taiwan as part of the PRC? They patiently engaged in multiple rounds of communications and reached several agreements. How is a statement of fact "disruptive"? "Disruptive" is what you call someone when you know they're right, but you want to discredit them anyway.

The KMT was happy to sell Taiwan out in this regard, however, allowing the CCP to simply ignore the Taiwanese government, even when negotiations were going reasonably well. 

Then, of course, they turned around and campaigned in 2008 on the idea that only the KMT can talk to China, whereas the DPP is hostile or simply inept. But the DPP only failed to negotiate agreements on flights and tourism because the KMT cooperated with the CCP to undermine them.

I had not known these details, though I could have inferred much of it. Learning exactly how it all went down, especially as I was here to watch Ma Ying-jeou campaign on his ability to handle this specific issue, just makes me hate the KMT more. 

Again, however bad you thought the KMT were, they're worse. 

Certainly the KMT could not have done all this without the buy-in of big business -- that's one of the main points of the book, and Beckershoff catalogues in detail the ways that large corporations, or business associations comprised of their heads, worked hand-in-hand with both parties to promote the narrative in society that increased cooperation with China was not only good for Taiwan's economy, it was necessary. Yes, even the DPP, even during the Chen administration, although the KMT continues to successfully convince large sections of the electorate that this isn't the case. 

Neither party has interrogated the assumption that increased trade and other forms of cooperation with China benefits all of Taiwanese society, even when the push for such cooperation comes at the behest of the wealthy, for their own benefit. As a result, much of society hasn't questioned it either.

Do those benefits trickle down? I'm not sure, but they didn't seem to under Ma Ying-jeou. Mostly, it meant that Taiwanese had to look to China for well-paid jobs, while Taiwan itself began hollowing out for all but the ultra-wealthy. 

Following this, negotiations with China were described as economic in nature only, not political. Both parties underwrote this to some extent. The DPP was not innocent in it:

Chen, now under considerable pressure from Taiwan's bourgeoisie, convened the Economic Development Advisory Council (EDAC). This body was established to formulate a national consensus on Taiwan's economic development, with a particular emphasis on the issue of cross-Strait relations. The composition of EDAC suggests that it was not so much an open debate, but rather a vehicle to universalize the interests of Taiwan's bourgeoisie by giving hte appearance of general consensus.

There's a fair amount of detail about this in the book, focused mostly on the construction and packaging of the pro-capitalist narrative, but I'll save something for you to read.

Of course, the KMT were lying about cooperation being economic and technocratic only:

[Vincent] Siew developed the abstract framework of "economics first, politics later" into a set of concrete initiatives....the mutual trust engendered by this process wouuld also entail the potential for positive integration, a "step by step integration of politics", and thus pave the way for a "sharing of sovereignty" in the long term.

Siew said this in 2001, almost a decade before the KMT was elected on the artificially-constructed belief that they'd do a better job negotiating with China while safeguarding Taiwan's sovereignty, and people still voted for them. I don't really blame the voters for choosing Ma: Frank Hsieh was not a strong candidate, and Chen Shui-bian's corruption scandals had damaged the DPP a great deal. It's not a surprise that the KMT won in 2008.

Regardless, the DPP were not innocent in this, underscoring the ultimate big bad in Beckershoff's analysis isn't the parties per se: 

After assuming office, Chen demonstrated his willingness to reach out to China, not only suggesting that cross-Strait negotiations should take place in the pragmatic '1992 spirit' that had characterized the first meeting between the SEF [Straits Exchange Foundation] and ARATS [Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait], but even stating that unification would not be excluded as a potential outcome of these negotiations if the Taiwanese people supported it...

Me: "!!!"

It's not that the DPP has changed their rhetoric much since then. It's that I never expected Chen Shui-bian of all people to have said such a thing, which demonstrates just how deep the pre-packaged "KMT Say Right Things To China, DPP Bad At China" is buried in our understanding of Taiwan.

The KMT-CCP Forums were not just a vehicle for undermining the DPP's negotiations with China, they were also part of a concerted effort to promote Chinese culture as a binding agent between Taiwan and China, with associated exchanges, festivals, beneficial business regulations and more. This turn toward promoting a 'shared culture' continued well into the Ma administration:

During this latent phase, the site of struggle shifted towards the realm of culture. A first pebble that would signal the oncoming avalanche was loosened in September 2010 when the acting governor of Shaanxi province led a business delegation consisting of 500 members to Taiwan....First, we can observe a new emphasis on the cultural dimension of cross-Strait relations. In addition to meeting with Taiwan's political and capitalist elites, the delegation also visited universities and schools and attended cultural events that addressed the historical links between Shaanxi and Taiwan.

Me: What historical links?

Second, the visit was accompanied by extensive and favorable coverage in several of Taiwan's major daily newspapers, including a three-page special report n the China Times. As it would later turn out, official Chinese agencies had paid for these reports, which were disguised as news coverage rather than being marked as advertisements. 

Me: That's still a problem.

The rest of the book goes into detail on the social movements that began to contest this pro-China, pro-capitalist narrative under Ma Ying-jeou, covering much of the same ground as an earlier aptly-titled Routledge title, Taiwan's Social Movements Under Ma Ying-jeou, which I read before I began reviewing books. 


And now, the social movements

This is where the first Ma-era bubbles of true contestation of the pro-capitalist, pro-China narrative begin to surface, although Taiwan has of course always had leftists who were not necessarily communists or pro-CCP.

What would soon come to be known as the Wild Strawberry Movement provided a first challenge to the KMT's attempt to portray the negotiations across the Taiwan Strait as a mere technocratic project, the aim for which was to normalize trade relations without jeopardizing Taiwan's political status as a de facto independent country.

I do have an issue with this section of the book, in that it portrays the Wild Strawberries, the Anti-Media Monopoly Movement and the Sunflowers as three different sets of activists, with three different outcomes, the Wild Strawberries appearing the least successful and the Sunflowers the most.

This is not quite true. Many of the college and grad students who would go on to become Sunflowers who helped change Taiwan's political trajectory, had been Wild Strawberries first, and Anti-Media Monopoly activists after that. While some came and went (either joining the movement or getting tired of it, for whatever reason), for the most part a similar cross-pollinated cohort members of civic, political and student associations kept losing until they won. 

Not all of these groups were ideologically on the left, but many were. This leads to an interesting discussion in the book about what the activists themselves wanted their movement to accomplish:

Participating in the struggle against urban renewal in cases such as Wenlin Yuan, Huaguang, Shida and Shaoxing contributed to the conviction that activists were facing a deeper structural problem, exposing the need for more systematic analysis centred around the common denominator of neoliberal developmentalism. 

These movements went through a series of internal discussions, if not outright conflicts, over their long-term goals. Should they lean more toward nationalism (support for Taiwan independence) or radicalism (anti-capitalism)? 

Some activists argued that radicalism and nationalism go hand-in-hand. I tend to agree with this. Both are arguably anti-cultural hegemony, when that cultural hegemony is one of enforced Chinese identity. That said, one is indeed more radical and rooted in systemic change than the other. Arguably, Taiwan would be able to exist as a de jure country as it is now: the name would change, with the worship of wealth accumulation remaining the same. 

And I say that, again, as someone who isn't a communist; my leftist ethos tend more toward anarchy. 

Just so we're clear, however, the KMT is still the big suck here. Remember Huaguang? It was a major site of activism in those years. I thought it was bad enough that the government wanted to tear it down to free up land for the construction-developmentalist state, especially as the people living on that land were not offered compensation. 

It was actually worse than that, though: 

As the occupants of the area had constructed their houses on land owned by the Ministry of Justice, they were categorized as "illegal occupants" in 2006. This meant that the mostly elderly residents wer not entitled to rehousing or compensation and usually were asked to demolish their own houses and pay compensation for having conducted "illegal" business. 

Yeah, systemic indeed. Even if you think neoliberalism is great, free trade is the best thing ever, and negotiating with China can only ever be good, you have to admit this was a pretty filthy move on the part of the Ma administration. Most if not all of the Huaguang residents built their homes on that land because the government couldn't house all the KMT veterans and other refugees. The government tolerated these ramshackle developments, until they didn't feel like it anymore. 

That's gross, and it should make you feel gross. 

Here's another one: 

An insightful example is the case of workers who were laid off when factories, mostly in the textile sector, were relocated to China or Southeast Asia throughout the 1990s and 2000s. In many cases, the employers left owing severance and pension payments ot their former employees. These payments were first covered by the Taiwanese government, whcih lader changed its position and sued the workers for "unpaid loans".

This happened in 2012, so it was an anti-labor action by the Ma administration. Who even does this? It reads like a Reddit AITA about someone's parents sitting them down on their 16th birthday to insist they pay back all the money their parents "loaned" them in having raised them. 

However bad you think the KMT is, it's actually worse. 


Conclusion

I doubt the intended conclusion of Social Forces in the Re-making of Cross-Strait Relations was that the KMT is worse than most people think it is, even the ones who already know it's terrible. To be fair, the book makes a fair case that the bigger bad here is capital: wealthy elites deciding what narratives they want society to buy, and then disseminating them through political systems designed to keep them on top. In that way, every other party, including the DPP, is just as much a tool (or minion) of big business. 

However, I simply couldn't avoid that conclusion, even if I hadn't already been predisposed to it. The system set up to ensure the flow of capital to the already-wealthy? That was the KMT, though they were in many ways copying the Japanese colonial government before them. The patron-client networks that both parties engage in, through which these narratives of Taiwan-as-China and bourgeoisie-are-good are instilled in society? Set up by the KMT. The trade and business associations that push the government into pro-capital, and therefore pro-China. This makes them pro-Chinese identity and pro-moving toward unification, not because many people actually want these things, but because China insists on them as the cost of doing business, and the elite are more interested in making money than defending Taiwan's sovereignty.

That's the real point of Beckershoff's book, but I truly must reiterate just one more time: however bad you thought the KMT was, it's actually worse than that.

Go see Invisible Nation in Taiwan this week

I'd been hearing about Invisible Nation (看不見的國家) since it came out in 2023, but been unable to see it as it hadn't been released in Taiwan. Then it got a widespread (if short) theatrical release in Taiwan, in a run which ends tomorrow as of writing, though this may be extended if it does well.

Update: I've heard from a few sources that its successful run in Taiwan has ensured that it will stay in theaters longer, so you have more time to see it. I don't know how long, so this weekend is probably the best option.

I saw it with friends and all I can say is: go. It's worth your time. 

This documentary film broadly covering former president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文)'s two terms as president, from 2016-2020, interspersed with contextualizing background. It's engaging throughout, avoiding the issues many documentaries have with getting all the information the creators want to include while keeping a tight pace and clear, coherent focus.

                    

While not a hagiography, the film does tend to look positively on Tsai's presidential tenure. To me, an ardent supporter of Taiwan independence and general admirer of President Tsai, I'd simply call it the truth. As Jon Stewart once famously said, though I paraphrase: the truth leans liberal. In this case, the truth leans toward Tsai Ing-wen having been one of the best presidents Taiwan has ever had, vying for the top spot with only Mr. Democracy himself, Lee Teng-hui. 

Tsai also led Taiwan through a fascinating era of Taiwan's political history. Eight years of an elected KMT president -- the only one since Lee, who by the end was seen as a turncoat or ideological traitor by his own party -- showed Taiwan exactly what it looked like to be governed by a pro-China party, although not everyone had realized yet that Ma wasn't just pro-China, he was (quietly, at the time) pro-unification as well.

What do you do with a country that's just been through a major social movement that turned its president into a lame duck well before his natural obsolescence, but whose biggest and arguably only enemy had invested in quite a lot to get their desired annexationist outcome? Invisible Nation seeks to answer this question, or at least provide the information viewers need to ruminate on it for themselves. 

All of the highlights are covered: the Sunflower Movement that helped usher in a new era of leadership, the fight for marriage equality (though this was handled far too quickly in my opinion; getting it passed was harrowing), dealing with China's threats, Han Kuo-yu's nonsense, the influence of the Hong Kong crackdowns, the pandemic response. 

The interviews with everyone other than Tsai come fast and quick-cut, but each is fascinating in their own right. Some are in Mandarin, some in English, but all are subtitled in both languages. Interviewees included diplomats, journalists, DPP and KMT politicians, analysts and academics. These include DPP political figures Enoch Wu, Audrey Tang, former foreign minister Joseph Wu and now-Vice President Hsiao Bi-khim, politician and black metal star Freddy Lim, former AIT director William Stanton, NCCU visiting professor Michelle Kuo, journalist Chris Horton and more. Having met some of them personally, it's a solid line-up. There are no weak links; everyone's contribution is valuable and on-point. 

Former president Ma Ying-jeou gives an interview as well, and KMT member Jason Hsu also gave the filmmakers some of his time. Nobody can say that the director Vanessa Hope and her team ignored Tsai's political opposition.

In this, Invisible Nation does gather voices from all sides, including widely-available remarks from Chinese leaders: ominous music tends to introduce these, but Xi Jinping does get his say. It's presented as-is -- that is, threatening and awful. The film doesn't say this exactly, but there's no other takeaway. The man is a monster. 

For people who already know Taiwan, there won't be many surprises in Invisible Nation, from the graceful introduction of the past few centuries of Taiwanese history to discussions of historical events. It's still worth your time, though, for the old footage from those eras, some of which I had never seen (childhood pictures of Freddy Lim anyone?) and some of which brought a genuine tear to the eye, such as Chen Chu ruminating on her time as a political prisoner. The film follows her to the Jingmei Human Rights Museum, where she finds what she believes is her old cell, and tells us why it's padded while showing us what all those democracy activists sacrificed during Taiwan's so-called "bloodless" revolution. 

It's only called that because there was no coup, no compact period of slaughter as there had been on 228. Don't let the term fool you, though: people absolutely did die so that Taiwan could not only have democracy, but have the sort of democracy that would elect a woman like Tsai. 

There are also bits of footage I didn't know existed or had perhaps blocked from memory, including Bill Clinton calling Taiwan Chinese (screw you, Bill), Henry Kissinger being the thank-god-he's-dead authoritarian bootlicker he always was, and Jimmy Carter announcing the switch in diplomatic recognition. What happened at the UN around that time was also fascinating, because the UN's exact words upon kicking out Taiwan have been either ignored or willfully misinterpreted in the decades since.

If you want loved ones who don't have that grounding in Taiwanese history to understand what this country went through between the Sunflower Movement and the pandemic, or just to understand the history of Taiwan a bit better, this is a solid recommendation. It doesn't exactly replace a history book, but it can review the basics and fill viewers in on what's happened since the classics like Forbidden Nation and A New Illustrated History of Taiwan were published.

It's also a good film for long-termers in Taiwan to show people who haven't visited what it's been like, politically, to have lived here through these events. It can be streamed, but I'm not entirely sure how. 

If I have any quibbles with the film, it's that it perhaps made the KMT look better than they are. It didn't paint Ma Ying-jeou as the bootlicker unificationist he is. It didn't show the full insanity of Han Kuo-yu. It was very, very kind to the opposition -- perhaps, in the name of seeming fair, too nice. This is a party that still wants to push towards a unificationist future that Taiwanese do not want.

Intense Chinese military build-up and grayzone tactics (such as the fake-news barrage that Taiwan has been under since disinformation on such a scale was possible) were also not given the time I felt they deserved. But, of course, in an hour and a half, you can't include everything.

It touched on Taiwanese considering themselves Taiwanese, but didn't back it up with numbers: there's long-term polling proof that Taiwanese don't generally identify as Chinese, and I'd have liked to have seen that mentioned. It did, however, showcase the clear line from former President Tsai that Taiwan doesn't need to declare independence, because it's already independent. 

For me, one of the most interesting lines in Invisible Nation came toward the end. I don't remember who said it, but to paraphrase, they noted that in the past, China has said they'd use force against Taiwan if it moved towards declaring independence. Now, however, they've changed their rhetoric to say that they'll use force against Taiwan if it doesn't actively move toward unification. 

That should send chills down your spine. As the film reminds us, nobody thought Putin would invade Ukraine because it wasn't in his interest. And it indeed wasn't, but he didn't know that because he's a dictator. 

Invisible Nation ends its run on June 19th, though there's a possibility it may stay in theaters if it does well. The show we went to, on a random Tuesday night, was pretty full, so I hope this happens. 

The Parable of the Night Heron

Sometime around 1916, my great-great grandfather converted to Islam. 

Five generations later, nobody in the family knew about it. It wasn't some diaphanous secret, whispered in the old language that none of the kids spoke, banished over the years to successive coffins. It was considered so trivial a thing that it was unworthy of secrecy; it wasn't discussed at all. 

Stories don't die if somebody, in some language, tells them. In a twisted form perhaps, I would have heard about it. Or something like it. Instead I had to learn it from an old xerox of typed yellow pages, scanned and uploaded to the Zoryan Institute website. So I suppose stories don't ever necessarily die. The possibility of resurrection is eternal. 

Movses, a canny businessman from a family made rich by silkworms, sat in some filthy Turkish government outpost in Hamah and was handed a choice: your  family becomes Muslim, or they're deported further south to Jerusalem. He and his wife were in their mid-fifties and might not have survived the trip. His youngest childen were growing weaker. His young cousins, named after the fox, had already lost their mother, grandparents and sister to typhus in the death camps, their father presumed dead after being dragged off to some labor brigade (he was). 

He truly believed in the Christian faith, and he had scruples of sort. He might have refused the officials and taken his family's chances on the death march. But he was also rich, and that gave him a third choice: he converted, and then bribed the official to lose the paper. 

I don't really care about religion, so a lie like that means nothing to me -- one god is as fake as another as far as I'm concerned -- but it would have meant the world to him. 

At least one other wealthy family took Muslim names because they thought it would help them in business. The town pastor refused the "offer", was sent to Jerusalem, and survived. As far as I know, Movses took no names and may not have told any family members. If he did, they never spoke of it. For his trouble, he'd lose his youngest son anyway. 

I only learned of it because those two fox cousins survived and one of them told the story to the Zoryan Institute. 

In that moment, Movses was told to either lie for the possibility of saving his wife and children, or insist on truth and likely condemn them. Being a business type, I don't think he ever considered asking the Turkish official to make a more ethical choice. Why, after all, would the official do so?

So what? Well, a few days ago, a friend posted about an old story, a parable about a bird and a wise man. I think it might have been Biblical; it's certainly religion-scented. He has faith, I don't, but that's cool. 

He wrote about how he told this story to his children: a man holds a small bird in his hands and approaches a wise man. To trick the sage, he intends to ask if the bird is alive or dead. The bird is moving and singing; it is clearly alive. If they wise man says so, the trickster will kill the bird. If he says it's dead, however, he'll set it free.

In the story, the sage tells the man "the bird is in your hands." The man asks again if said bird is alive or dead. "The answer is in your hands," the sage replies.

We're supposed to learn from this that our fate is in our own hands, so we should make good choices. His daughter, however, answered that she'd say the bird was dead. Why? Because, she explained, the objective isn't to be right, it's to save the bird. The power -- the ability to make a choice -- remains with the wise man until he decides to abrogate it and ask the trickster to make good choices. 

This is the sort of online story that some would insist never happened, along the lines of three-year-olds who spout implausible wisdom. Like the mom who claimed her kid said "everyone dies, but not words." I know them, though, and I think it did happen. Honestly, I don't care if it didn't. It's not the point. 

So, okay, the objective isn't to be right, it's to save the bird. And that's within the wise man's power until he relinquishes it, unless the trickster grows impatient and kills the bird out of boredom, misplaced rage, or a need to assert dominance. The man with the bird is clearly a bad person. Can we even trust him to release the bird if we lie? 

Movses chose to lie, and his youngest son died of typhus in a death camp in Hamah.

For the longest time, I struggled to reconcile another, modern-day lie with the world I know: that so many people who so clearly support a free and sovereign Taiwan won't take the next logical step and call it a country. In Taiwan, they won't amend the constitution, they won't change the "Republic of China" name. It's a lie, and it can read as undermining the cause.

Though it's debatable whether China has Taiwan in its hands, the sheer scale of military buildup over the past few years is an argument that they do, or that it's their goal. 

Insist that Taiwan is sovereign and has never been part of the 'China' that everyone understands to be China, change the name, change the constitution, be right or die trying -- and maybe you get a war. 

Tell the Chinese government that the bird's fate is in their hands, and you've condemned yourself anyway. You can't trust someone to make good choices as they try to trick the world into either lying, or destroying Taiwan. They're already not making good choices, and they have no motivation to be better people.  You may as well condemn Taiwan to die.

Put off the answer, implying that maybe, just maybe, the lie is acceptable -- the Republic of China isn't the dead name of an ideology and national concept that's little more than a coma patient on life support -- and you might not save the bird, but you retain some of the power and some chance that perhaps it will fly off to some uncapturable state. 

Let's play Bad Pastor -- no, not like that, gross dude -- I mean like clunky metaphors and a bored congregation. Let's make the metaphor plain: 

The US is the self-righteous sage who thinks telling a trickster to make good choices might actually cause them to rethink their path and consider peace. It doesn't even matter who's in power, from Obama to President Rapist to Biden to President Rapist again for some goddamn reason. Not taking a position, committing only to a peaceful resolution of tensions between villain and bird, is telling the bird to watch its neck and not a lot more.

China, the bad guy, desperately wants someone to speak the truth. Saying aloud that the Republic of China is a lifeless shell with no future, but Taiwan is a sovereign and vibrant nation that is culturally and politically distinct from China gives them an excuse to try and kill it. 

The KMT is trying to outright lie -- to say Taiwan is dead so that the ROC may live on as "part of China." Now that they're mostly run by bought-and-paid-for unificationists and overt CCP agents and traitors, they mean that literally as part of the People's Republic. 

But tricksters can't be trusted; this will still be the death of Taiwan. 

The rest of us are just trying to figure out exactly how much we can grease the system. Imply a lie without stating it outright. Keep a dead name, a government system and constitution that's got some ridiculous bits, and our lives for as long as we can. Placate the trickster until we can find a way out.

The objective, after all, is not to be right. It's to save the bird. 

Perhaps it's not exactly the same as converting to a religion you don't believe in but rather than live a lie, bribe someone to lose a paper. It's not incomparable, though. 

It might not work. China might grow irritable or scared enough at any moment and use Taiwan's willingness to imply a lie without confirming it as an excuse to crush its neck. 

But between certain death, another kind of certain death, and asking bad people to be better than they are, it's just about the only path left. 

Taiwan has something going for it, though: China doesn't seem to know what kind of bird it's threatening. It sees Taiwan as a little sparrow, easily captured and held, its bones easily snapped. 

I think Taiwan is a Malayan night heron: hefty in history and culture and uniqueness, strong of bone, with a long, sharp beak and unwavering eyes. (Seriously, those birds will stare you down. They judge you. I swear night herons can see your soul.) They look like they can't fly, but they can. 

I've never heard of a night heron messing up an attacker. They mostly seem to like to hang around and eat tasty things. But it doesn't look easy to kill one with your bare hands. As though if provoked, it would go straight for the face. 

This year's Double Ten design is U-G-L-Y and it ain't got no alibi

 

No, not this. This is actually pretty cool -- it came from here -- and I'm in favor. No, no, the 2024 National Day logo looks exactly like a design for the Republic of China, not Taiwan. It's also an aesthetic monstrosity:

IT UGLY.

If you immediately clocked this as a KMT "Chinese identity" throwback, you're absolutely right. Although I did not actively know that the design committee is organized by the Legislative Yuan and chaired by the speaker, I subconsciously inferred it from this absolute blight on the eyeballs. The legislature is currently controlled by the KMT, so even though the DPP is the "ruling party", this looks like something your crotchety grandpa who shouts that you call yourself Taiwanese because "those 太綠班 brainwashed you kids" would wear on a t-shirt he got for free and wore for the next 17 years.

Maybe it's the subliminal messaging from the giant "H" in the center, that some have already compared to the old Han Kuo-yu bomber jackets. 

Maybe it's the return to the ROC-flag inspired blue and red, or the plum blossom that just doesn't seem to be sitting quite right in the center: I can't quite pinpoint why it looks wrong, but I'll offer a few thoughts on that below. Maybe it's the failure to mention Taiwan in Mandarin, referring to it only in English. 

Just kidding -- it's all of these things. And yes, there's been an obvious design shift based on who runs the committee: 

From here

Seriously, it screams "a government committee designed this", which is exactly what happened. As a commenter below pointed out, it's got big Iron Cross energy, though that's probably unintentional. It's giving "we got super fucked up and watched old Practical Audi-Visual Chinese videos all night". It's giving "Taipei is the capital of Chinese Taipei". It's giving "I fed an AI a steady diet of TVBS for six months and then asked it to design a logo."

Actually, while I didn't feed an AI months of TVBS (not even AI deserves that), I did ask it to generate some designs based on the typical parameters for these logos. Perhaps my prompt engineering could be improved as it kept defaulting to circles, not double tens, but here are a few that made me chortle:

AI seems to show a similar level of commitment to the CCP as the KMT does, but remember, AI isn't sentient. Anyway, I think that thicc-bottomed sun in the bottom left is actually a better logo than the one the government actually unveiled. 

As with the KMT, the AI generator likes big suns and it cannot lie:

Also a fan of the retro zero: 

Artificial intelligence creates even simple characters like 十 about as well as a tattoo artist on one of the seedier Jersey Shore boardwalks who misread the dose on his edible. And yet, it still understands the KMT's secret heart: 

...although I'm not sure why it decided that Double Ten needed to imply beeeewwwwbs.

And this one just looks kind of like a stylized butthole, heh heh:

I'll throw in a few more at the end for your amusement.

My favorite part of this isn't the comment about the giant H or that it looks like the Super Mario warp pipes, it's the defensive commentary from the KMT on a design so many people seem to hate. 

I mean, as a Facebook friend commented, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and perhaps Luftwaffe officers would appreciate the aesthetic. I can think of some dead KMTers with close family ties to the early regime who would love it. But, you know, probably unintentional, right?

Legislative Speaker (barf) Han Kuo-yu called it a "beautiful work" that "carries Taiwan's deepest emotions" -- which is true, if you assume only KMT settlers and their offspring over the age of 60 have emotions.

I also enjoyed this quote: 

Interior Ministry Deputy Minister Wu Tang-an (吳堂安) complimented netizens’ rich imaginations and added that if you look closely, the colors line up with Taiwan’s flag.

He's not wrong exactly, but to see that it imitates the flag, you'd only have to look "closely" if you had glaucoma. 

Wu also said that the theme of 2024's National Day celebrations was "happy birthday to the Republic of China". Okay, but I thought that was the theme every year?

Wu is an absolute comedy machine, by the way. He tied the plum blossom -- a symbol of the KMT, which ran a brutal, deadly suppression campaign for decades under Martial Law -- to "respect for history", and said the blue and red symbolize "different opinions and voices coming together". Sorry dude, but the Republic of China flag that the KMT imposed on Taiwan, which is obvious in the design, isn't known historically for "different opinions and voices". It's known for one voice -- the dictator's -- coming together with his minions and cronies to use the military to disappear, torture and slaughter dissidents. 

According to several sources, the design was created by a team of "passionate young designers". They apparently prefer anonymity, which should surprise no-one. As is common in Taiwan, the committee trotted out "it was designed by a team" to avoid admitting that anyone in particular wasted their parents' money on design school. 

Also, I gotta say, "young designers" created this thing? At some point in my prompt journey I told the AI to make the designs "more retro" and it came up with some ideas that, while very weird, at least looked retro in a cool way. This is the sort of logo you'd see on a mug in your parents' cupboard that you'd immediately donate it to charity. Retro, but it's not a compliment.

Or maybe these designers are indeed "young", if measured on a KMT timescale. You know, the same scale on which Taipei mayor Chiang Wan-an is young (he's 45). 

The thing is, my dislike of the design isn't just because the KMT sucks, the flag is an ugly reminder of a dead dictatorship, and contemporary, democratic Taiwan deserves better than to be forced to swallow a party logo as a national symbol. 

It's also just a bad design. 

I keep looking at that plum blossom, wondering what in the absolute hell is wrong with it. Perhaps the two petals on the bottom and one on top (which is standard) make it look bottom-heavy when it's placed in the middle of that long, slim line. The blue field taken from the ROC flag cutting into the H makes it look off-center, even though I don't think it is. The design lacks balance: this might be the only time I'll ever say that there's too much going on in the left and center, and not enough on the right. 

The whole thing also looks a bit like it's being crushed? Stretching it out on the sides but keepin' it stumpy on the vertical doesn't evoke progress, innovation or the future. It gives "we're trying to expand our influence but are being crushed by the weight of history" -- which I suppose is an apt metaphor for the Republic of China. 

Long 'n Stumpy here also has a certain...je ne sais quoi. Except, oh wait, je very much sais quoi. You could call it Iron Cross, but I'm gonna call call it "I want to take a picture of my junk, but stretch it a bit so it looks normal and less like a chode." 

I'm not sure if the designers wanted the 十十 to look slimmer, or if they were trying to evoke stately columns or...what, but the edges read "serif" and if there's anything that just doesn't work on Chinese characters, even the simplest ones, it's freakin' serifs. 

Personally, although I'm a Century Gothic acolyte, I like a serif in some cases. I enjoy a nice Garamond or Cochin from time to time. I can ride with Baskerville, and if you're looking for something new, Self Modern isn't bad. I don't think they're hopelessly old-fashioned per se. 

But they don't scream "modern and clean graphics" as Wu Tang-an suggests. I see defensive borders, pushing anything new or foreign from the center. Or maybe they're closing ranks, keeping the riff-raff out. A serif is okay in some circumstances, but these absolutely convey the message that the KMT wants you damn kids to get off their lawn. 

That's not even getting into the clunkiness of the design language. It does not evoke. It does not reference. There is no subtle metaphor. It whacks you over the head with a dollar-store baseball bat. It's the difference between the person who references their love of retro sci-fi with hints of chrome and black in their decor, versus the one who hangs a papier-mâché UFO in their living room.

It does not hint at the ROC flag -- there's a literal ROC flag in the motto! Y'know, because the theme is "happy birthday to the Republic of China", which is a totally fresh and innovative theme to have! It's not symbolic of the KMT's Republic of China vision so much as a simple product of it. And I do mean "simple" in the cruelest possible way.

Something about the size, thickness and spacing of the English, compared to the relatively lighter Mandarin is just off. It's too long and fat, which is yet another thing I never thought I'd say. I know that slogans which aren't necessarily sentences sometimes have periods for emphasis, but something about this period feels wrong. Perhaps the phrase is so long that one's brain is tricked into thinking it could be a sentence, but it's not one.

I didn't always love the Double Ten designs created by DPP-led legislative committees. But at the very least they were contemporary. They weren't afraid to look at colors beyond red, white and blue. You could tell someone under the age of 70 had a hand in designing them. With the possible exceptions of 2019 and 2023, if someone gave you a mug featuring one, you might actually keep it. 

That's all I really have to say, so enjoy some more trippy AI designs for "Republic of China National Day". While I like the terrifying birds, the Alien Body Horror Sphere is also rather eye-catching.