A bad business practice by Taiwan’s biggest bookstore chain

Have you ever seen souvenir items based on images from Adolf Hitler’s life being sold anywhere in the world to commemorate his legacy? I doubt it, because it is simply not right to promote the legacy of the mastermind behind the Holocaust.

But in Taiwan, souvenir items based on images from the lives of dead dictator Chiang Kai-shek and his son Chiang Ching-kuo are being sold across Taiwan at the nation’s biggest bookstore chain (see the video at that link), Eslite Bookstore (誠品書店).

To my dismay, the legacy of Taiwan’s dead dictator, the mastermind behind Taiwan’s 228 massacre in 1947, is being revived!

The great-grandson of Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), Demos Chiang’s design company, the DEM INC., designed some disgusting souvenirs featuring images from the life of dead dictator Chiang and his son, the head of the secret police during Taiwan's White Terror period. The souvenir items include pens, T-shirts, notebooks, post cards, and more.

If Demos Chiang were a businessman who cared about Taiwan’s worsening human rights situation and noticed the recent erosion of justice, these products commemorating dictator Chiang’s life would not have been designed in the first place, not to mention being mass produced for sale in Taiwan’s biggest bookstore chain.

Have you seen Demos Chiang’s blog updated with any words of support for a better Taiwan like what the Wild Strawberries Student Movement has been fighting for? No! And how could he, since he was probably preoccupied by this souvenir design project?!

Identifying himself as a Taiwanese (my note: which I really doubt now), Demos Chiang, previously admitted that his family members had persecuted the Taiwanese people in the past, but it is now quite evident that such remarks were merely a tactic to promote his company and obtain contracts.

Many of Taiwan’s younger businessmen will tell you that they love Taiwan, but deep down they don’t. They love money more than anything else. All they care about is making lots of profits despite unethical business practices and despite the risk of becoming Chinese slaves in the near future. They represent a lost generation who were born to a more democratic Taiwanese society that was already there for them because of the blood shed by their predecessors.

How pathetic!

Reference sources:
From page 8 of the Tuesday, May 29, 2007 Taipei Times, read the editorial Young Chiang shows KMT the way.

For Chinese text of Demos Chiang's admission that his relatives persecuted the Taiwanese, read 蔣友柏:我家人曾迫害台灣人.

See the video which brought attention to Eslite's sales of CKS and CCK souvenirs.