Ethnicity and democracy
Today's Taipei Times editorial was good. The last two paragraphs:
The greatest victim of the exaggeration of the role of ethnic conflict in this country is a president who is sincere in wanting to heal the wounds of the past. But by using anodyne slogans of reconciliation to court professional obstructionists, and thus belaboring an electorate that has already come to terms with the KMT's oppressive past, Chen fails to exploit the fact that ethnic conflict is now almost entirely restricted to the Grand Guignol of party politics."
It is interesting that it talks about ethnic conflict as having run out of currency and the exaggeration of the role of ethnic conflict. What makes it doubly interesting is that it probably is right to do so. The reason I find it so interesting is that democracy in Taiwan has developed along the ethnic divide, and not along economic and other issues as happened in Europe and many other places. Simply speaking, opposition to the mainlanders must have begun already with the killing off of the local intelligentsia in the 228 incident in 1947, an opposition that obviously consisted mostly of local Taiwanese. This conflict between mainlanders and locals of course developed into demands for Taiwanese independence, and then expanded into demands for freedom of speech and other human rights. After Lee Teng-hui came to power, the KMT took some of the edge off the opposition by co-opting many of its issues and implementing them, thereby making the DPP more acceptable (while also slowly preparing Taiwanese for the idea that Taiwan is a country of its own, with its own identity). The fact that ethnic conflict now has outplayed much of its role in driving social and political development seems to me to mean that democracy in Taiwan is maturing, and that people are developing a more complex understanding of what democracy means.
It just struck me that this is also the reason why the DPP's old guard (Shih Ming-teh, Hsu Hsin-liang, Sisi Chen...) have broken with the DPP, claiming that it is no longer true to its roots -- i.e., it no longer makes independence the only issue worth figthting for. The old guard consisted of visionaries fighting for an idealistic goal -- Independence -- and now that there no longer is one simple overall goal to rally around, those firebrands can no longer find their place in the party. They had an important role in bringing the DPP and democracy about, but they, like ethnic conflict, have now played out their role. What I never could understand is why they all of a sudden felt that they had to align themselves with the PFP (Chen when stomping for PFP candidates during last year's presidential election and she, and I think also Hsu, gave several speeches supporting the blue camp during its wild protests after losing the election), or at least with the blue camp in general. That's the same kind of volte face that the KMT and the PFP have done in siding with its death enemy the Communist Party of China. Only I can see the twisted logic behind the latter.
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