Who's teaching whom?

An excellent op-ed piece in today's Liberty Times zeroes in precisely on what was wrong with with Ma Ying-jeou's saying he sees aborigines as people. The author Zhou Jing-wen first points out that some residents of the Xizhou Community have been living in Sindian for more than 30 years--longer than many of the mainlanders (xinzhumin) who now live there

So when Ma responded to the the aboriginal woman in the now notorious video by saying 'when you come our city, you have to play by our rules' he is ignoring the fact that the residents of the Xizhou community have been in Sindian for more than 30 years. But even worse, the op-ed piece asks, what right right does any Han Taiwanese, no matter when they came to Taiwan, have the right to start talking to aborigines about who came to whose city, who is going to educate whom, and who is going to treat whom as a person?

The piece concludes by suggesting that Ma's condescending 'Longstay' visits earlier this year can be read in light of his comments about the Xizhou Community.