As people grow old, they tend to develop a divided personality. A case in point is ex-President Chiang Kai-shek. After he lost the Chinese Civil War and moved his government from Nanjing to Taipei, he assigned his Kuomintang its third task for the Chinese Revolution.
The first task, of course, was to topple the alien Manchu government in Beijing. The Kuomintang which Dr. Sun Yat-sen founded succeeded in creating the Republic of China in 1912, but China was a divided country with warlords ruling provinces, the most powerful of them trying to reign in Beijing.
Chiang accomplished the second task of the Chinese Revolution by nominally unifying China, ruling the Republic of China that survived the eight-year war of resistance against Japan. Then, in Taipei, he imagined that he was taking on the third task of the KMT for the Chinese Revolution, oblivious to the fact that his government in Nanjing was the one Mao Zedong and company tried to topple in the Chinese Revolution which Dr. Sun had started.
So, Chiang objected mechanically to whatever Mao said or did, showing conspicuous signs of a divided personality. When Mao decreed Chinese could be written from left to right, Chiang condemned him for aping the Western way of writing, and decreed China’s national language had to be written from top to bottom and right to left.
When the simplified style of writing came into being in China, Chiang blasted Mao for trying to destroy Chinese civilization, though the traditional script the benevolent dictator tried to preserve has fortunately been kept in use as a result.
Taiwan’s population is aging fast. But not to the extent that people seem to show signs of a collective divided personality like Chiang Kai-shek did toward the end of his life.
Nonetheless, quite a number of people, Democratic Progressive Party leaders in particular, are showing this division by opposing and condemning President Ma Ying-jeou mechanically or perfunctorily for whatever political decisions he makes.
Let’s look at the issue of U.S. beef imports. The opposition party is up in arms against the lifting of the ban on leanness-enhancing ractopamine additives, which is holding up the resumption of negotiations for the Trade and Investment Framework Agreement, although the party claims to want to get the negotiations under way to improve vital economic and trade relations between Taiwan and the United States.
It’s a typical sign of a significant unresolved tension between the contending attitudes of party leaders who though adjusted well enough to everyday life, have lost a fulfilling sense of meaning and purpose. In other words, they are so deeply absorbed in their collective divided personality that they mechanically obstruct what their ego tells them they should not.
Similarly, they oppose an expansion of trade between Taiwan and China. Their ego is trumped by their psyche, which has made them mechanically do whatever possible to stop or preclude expanded trade between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait.
How about the hiking of fuel prices and power rates? Exactly the same mechanical reaction. The opposition party wants a green Taiwan. That requires development of renewable energy, which is costly.
The government has no option other than to set higher and more reasonable prices and rates to make renewable energy popularly available. It simply can’t continue to subsidize CPC Corp. and the Taiwan Power Co. to keep the prices and rates low. The price hikes are inevitable. Party leaders know it full well, and yet mechanically oppose it.
How is the opposition party reacting to the levying of the stock gains tax? Its platform for this year’s presidential election promised to make Taiwan a fair and just society. But when Finance Minister Christina Liu proposed the stock gains tax, party leaders openly complained, though not openly opposed it, completely forgetting their own conviction that the taxation on stock gains is one of the keys to creating a more equal society. As a matter of fact, most people agree that the rich have to be taxed more heavily to make our society fairer.
In negotiations for the follow-up to the economic cooperation framework agreement (ECFA) between Taiwan and China, the opposition is raising hell over the prospect of making concessions, but its leaders know every pact is the result of “give and take” and concessions are necessary.
Taiwan sometimes has to give in order to take in the negotiations that have to be brought to a successful end as soon as possible now that China, South Korea and Japan appear to be all set to conclude free trade agreements among themselves before the end of the year.
Will our opposition leaders drop their collective divided personality just once to get the ECFA negotiations successfully concluded? Surely no one wants Taiwan to be economically marginalized in Asia.
(The China Post (Taiwan))
(Asia News Network)
