UN for Taiwan: The Kaohsiung 915 March

Michael Turton has called for pictures from yesterday's UN for Taiwan march in Kaohsiung, so here are my humble offerings. This was the DPP-organized march in support of the referendum to join the UN in the name of Taiwan. Michael has pictures from the rival KMT event in Taichung over at The View from Taiwan.



We headed down from Taipei on the High Speed Rail leaving at about 1:00pm and arriving just in time for the march to begin from the Formosa MRT station in Kaohsiung.

The march was huge and festive as is usual for pro-Taiwan events. I have no idea how many people were there, and I don't see how anyone could have done a crowd estimate the way we were packed into a a variety of construction-bound space.

A few random observations. I was surprised at how few Kaohsiung foreigners joined the march. With the exception of a German television crew, I saw exactly two other foreigners in about five hours of marching and rallying. And one of those was standing on the side of the road looking like he'd just come out of his Buxiban to see what all the excitement was about. I mention this because there were hundreds of foreigners at the massive Anti Anti-Secession Law rally a couple of years ago in Taipei.

There was no ant-American sentiment whatsoever at the march. Indeed, there was a huge American flag at the rally later in the evening. People came up to me and assured me that while they thought the US government was dead wrong on this, they were positive that the US is the best friend Taiwan has ever had. I sure hope they are right.

Yesterday's event had two distinct segments. The march through the streets of Kaohsiung was the best part. During the march, the focus was very clearly on Taiwan joining the UN. It was a powerful and moving experience to watch the overwhelming working class and rural crowd affirm that they too deserve a seat at the world table. I grasped emotionally what I had intellectually understood already: the KMT must be very, very careful in handling this issue or risk suffering another defeat.

The second part was the rally at a huge field with the thickest, plushest grass I've had the pleasure of sitting on in Taiwan. The field was surrounded by high rise luxury apartments at the foot of which sat hordes of old country people wolfing down their biandangs with the gusto of people who spent an afternoon walking. I wish I knew how to take photos at night because the contrast between those old folks turning on the taps (of course they had tools with them) to wash off and generally yucking it up under those luxury complexes (The Magnficence of Hotel-Style Living for Bosses in Prada-Style Spa Homes) was awesome.

A fair number of tourist buses were picking people up here before they joined the rally. I suspect this had something to do with the wildly varying estimates of the crowd size. Some no doubt were leaving because farmers from places like Chiayi County tucker out around 8:00pm anyway, but others because the rally itself was for the core party faithful and an opportunity for legislators and city councilors to show the folks from home that they know the national leaders by walking across the stage. In other words, the march was to rally the light greens to the cause of getting Taiwan into the UN, and the rally was the first big stop on the presidential election trail.

I sometimes forget that people brainwashed by the Blue media and middle class Taipei sensibilities are unaware of an important fact about both Su Tseng-chang and Frank Hsieh: both of them can really speak. Su has this voice that sounds like it was excavated from a gravel pit on the Jhuoshui River and the energy of a gospel preacher. He also speaks very fluent Hakka that puts the mumbling efforts of Ma Ying-jeou to speak Taiwanese to shame (Full disclosure: my Taiwanese is as almost as bad as Ma's).

Hsieh though is simply the best. Like all great speakers, he begins in a calm, reasonable register in which he sets out his basic themes and then builds into an emotional frenzy before returning to those initial themes in a moving conclusion. The gist of this speech was 'What crime has Taiwan committed to deserve being shut out of the WHO and the UN?' 'And what has Taiwan done that is so wrong that the KMT and Ma Ying-jeou won't give Taiwan a chance to join the UN using its own name?' It was great stuff. Hsieh rocks although he will need resist the temptation to score tempting cheap shots off of Ma when they debate so that he doesn't look like he is bullying Mr. Nice Guy.

If you do sit through all my photos, please excuse the last few that feature weird stuff from unreconstructed Kaohsiung, While I pride myself on living in on of the more down to earth neighborhoods in Taipei on the edge of Wanhua, much of Kaohsiung was a huge nostalgia trip for me because it still filled with all the weird Taiwanese stuff all of Taiwan used to have. Hence my delight in silly signs like the one for the Hag Hair Salon at the end.

Two Views

Two sophisticated, articulate, and opposing takes on the current imbroglio over the UN referendum today belie the claim we here sometimes too hastily make that no one in Washington really gets Taiwan.

The first is an address to the United States-Taiwan Defense Industry Conference by Thomas J. Christensen, US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State. Among other things, Christensen argues that Taiwan's security is predicated on a moderate political approach to relations with China that does not include assertions of independence such as the UN referendum. He calls the UN referendum "ill-conceived and potentially quite harmful" specifically objects to the "in the name of Taiwan" component of the UN referendum rather than a UN referendum per se, and echoes Dennis Wilder's comments from two weeks ago by bluntly stating that "the US does not recognize Taiwanese independence."

Christensen's rhetoric is especially interesting because it echoes Stephen Young's rhetoric last year when Young attempted to appeal directly to the Taiwanese people in a statement of US policy. Christensen's adress is studded with this rhetoric:

I would like to emphasize that we do not like having to express publicly our disagreement with the Chen Administration on this or any other policy. Taiwan is a longstanding U.S. friend, and we do not like there to be gaps between us on important issues. I can assure you that we would not have done so had we not exhausted every private opportunity through consistent, unmistakable, and authoritative messages over an extended period of time. The problem here is not misunderstanding or lack of communications: it is that we believe this initiative is not good for Taiwan or us and that we have found ourselves with no alternative but to express our views directly to the Taiwan people.

The lie in this rhetoric comes out in that last little phrase "the Taiwan people." The Taiwanese are not "the Taiwan people" or "the people of Taiwan" as Christensen calls them earlier. The Taiwanese have long since come to see themselves as a nationality, not as the inhabitants of some island whose political status is unresolved. To refer to them in the hollow and dehumanizing language of DiploSpeech while ostensibly making a direct appeal to a friend intellectually dishonest and ethically corrupt.

He also contradicts himself by on the one hand stressing the importance of symbolism in relations across the Taiwan Strait ("in the world of cross-Strait relations, political symbolism matters, and disagreements over it could be the source of major tensions or even conflict") while later urging the Taiwanese to set aside their silly preoccupation with the formal diplomatic relations or membership in international organizations and content themselves with their substantive integration with the international community.

There is much more of interest in Christensen's speech, but I'll stop here by suggesting that it should be read in the context of his Statement Before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission in 2005 where he argues that:

In my opinion, under certain extreme conditions the mainland would attack Taiwan regardless of the balance of military forces across the Strait or across the Pacific. In other words, there are circumstances in which the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) would rather fight and lose militarily than to remain idle in the face of what they would define as Taiwan’s provocations. This means that, under these circumstances, any strategy of deterrence adopted by the United States and Taiwan, no matter how robust, would simply be ineffective in preventing conflict. For example, I believe the CCP elites would almost certainly use force if Taipei passed a constitutional revision in Taiwan that would create permanent legal independence for the island from the Chinese nation. In my opinion, the deterrence strategies of the U.S. and Taiwan would not likely play a role in preventing a military attack in such a scenario.

The second article is an op-ed piece ( not yet online) entitled "Righting Chiang-kai Shek's Wrongs" in today's Taipei Times by Stephen Yates, former deputy assistant to US Vice President Dick Cheney for national security affairs and president of DC Asia Advisory. Yates makes a strong argument that Taiwan's UN referendum needs to be understood in the context of the development of Taiwan's democratic institutions and that "there is no doubt that plans for a referendum will proceed no matter what Washington says or does. " While Yates in my view overemphasizes the importance of undoing Chinag Kai-shek's poisonous legacy, he does a good job of debunking the notion that Chen is simply poking China in the eye for short-term political gain. It is indeed more complicated than that.

Most commentators, including Christenson and Yates, have overlooked the Chen administration's repeated statements on 'Taiwanese consciousness' (taiwan yishi) and 'Taiwanese subjecthood' (taiwan zhutixing) in part, I suspect, because foreign policy wonks don't do philosophy even if their Straussian mentors do. Taiwans name change is all about getting the Taiwanese people to recognize themselves as their own masters. That act of self-recognition is deeply bound up in being able to say Taiwan's own name to themselves, which is what the UN Referendum is all about. If the Taiwanese do not know who they are--as evidence by their inability to even say who they are, all is lost for the DPP's nation building project. While these considerations may be outside the scope of strategic group think, they are core issues for the DPP and its Long March to create a new national identity for Taiwan.

Is Yates a lobbyist for the Taiwanese government. One suspects that he must be given DC Asia Advisory's creepy characterization of the services it provides:

Leveraging our rich variety of strategic partnerships, DCAA offers valuable insight and access to leaders in government and business across Asia, empowers clients to manage the impact US politics and policy can have on their bottom line.

I can't find Yates or his firm listed as a lobbyist, but I doubt he or Randall Schriver write Taiwan Times op-ed pieces for the generous NT$1.5 per word that the TT pays. How do lobbyist like this manage to get around registration requirements? Inquiring minds want to know.

Yates's bio interestingly notes that Yates spent two years as a 'church volunteer' in southern Taiwan. Is this a euphemism for having been a Mormon missionary? If so, perhaps those missions really are functioning as a sort of informal training ground for future friends of Taiwan. While Yates may or may not be a paid lobbyist, his sympathy and understanding of Taiwan shine clearly through his piece today just as Christensen's patrician distaste for Taiwan is subtly woven into his despite his protestations of friendship.