My Opinion: Taiwan Workers - Reject Kuomintang/Chinese Collaboration and Corporate American Influence.

With activists and students still barricaded in the legislature in Taiwan, either the fascist Kuomintang (KMT) rears its head and calls in the S.W.A.T. team or the crowd swells into a nationwide anti-Chinese economic approach movement.

 Most common people in Taiwan are alarmed at what will happen to their companies and jobs if China business people and workers are given full access to the market here but what they refuse to understand is that the ruling classes (the Dutch, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese and then the Kuomintang Chinese under the auspices of the United States) have been calling the shots and oppressing Taiwanese and indigenous workers for hundreds of years, in earnest since 1895. 

Taiwanese were treated as second class citizens under the imperial Japan, then intellectually massacred on Feb. 28, 1947 by the Kuomintang Chinese with United States cover. The farmers and working people endured 38 years of Marshall Law, then abruptly, a switch to a more palatable two-party neo-liberalism system and a veneer of democracy. There was never a peoples' revolution in Taiwan. There has never been real democracy in Taiwan. 

The ruling class and anti-unionism have prevailed in Taiwan for the benefit of corporate American sweatshop production; American business came to Taiwan with the military-industrial complex to supply South Korea and Vietnam war machines and then American consumers with clothing and goods made with underpaid, under-aged, overworked, endangered, cheap, union-free labor. The Kuomintang, and their neo-liberal partners, the Democratic Progressive Party, have learned well how to franchise poor working conditions through the service industry. The income level in Taiwan is the same as it was sixteen years ago. There is major under-employment and a ban on unionizing work places with under thirty workers. Unions must be recognized by the ruling class. Suffice to say, The Industrial Workers of the World is not an approved union in Taiwan.

By rejecting Chinese trade pacts and closer economic ties with China, the people of Taiwan are, in effect, merely supporting corporate American and local ruling class domination of the Taiwan market and workplace. The Kuomintang has more to fear from China than it does from America. Their grip on power here would be doomed without a favorable agreement with China's rulers. That being said, The People’s Republic of China doesn’t have a history of supporting almost every undemocratic fascist state of the twentieth century as the U.S. has; the United States continues to support fascism in the world (see Ukraine) and destabilize socialism (see Venezuela) for the sake of world economic imperialism. 

Yes, Taiwan workers should reject Kuomintang/Chinese collaboration but they should also reject Corporate American influence. Allow unionism to flourish in Taiwan, demand a living wage for all workers, compensation for overtime work, and, ultimately, eradicate the wage system. For One Big Union.

Solidarity Forever,

X437367