Hong Kong and Taiwan’s Colonial Legacy

        

Li Peng died a few days ago. He was ninety. With the market reforms of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that reigned in the excesses of the Cultural Revolution and opened a new kettle of worms from the west, Li Peng made hard decisions to declare martial law after out-of-control students, not unlike those in Hong Kong now, could not realize how harmful they were to their nation. How are the protests in Hong Kong related to Taiwan's Sunflower youth?
         At Tienanmen Square in 1989, demonstrators would not go back to school and work; the market was free and so were the fancies. The engine of capitalism is infantile satisfaction in materialism. Its propaganda is used for commercial purposes, to make consumers feel inferior to their competition, indoctrinating us to buy the newest gadgets, co-opting our youth in their rebellious stage of development. China is learning how to deal with this subversion. The Hong Kong protest is anti-socialist. The inciters are non-government organizations (NGO) with the goal of destabilizing Hong Kong and keeping it capitalist. Hong Kong may need a new Li Peng and People's Liberation Army to deal with the subversion.

 Second-class Chinese citizens in undemocratic Hong Kong, a British colony, were easily mesmerized by shiny objects in their cradle of capitalist filth. The pride Hong Kongers felt when the British were forced out after 156 years of colonial exploitation has been eroded by fear-mongers alarming the undisciplined about losing privileges. The greater good of being part of a socialist world against racist, anti-worker U.S./NATO led White Angelo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) fascists is lost on them. The People's Republic of China (PRC) leadership is not good at pointing this out, so Hong Kongers who have forgotten the past are destined to repeat it.

“Manifest destiny” of English WASP supremacy makes people of color indebted to their corporate masters’ greed and religious superiority. Li Peng helped Deng Xiao-Ping stop the counter-revolutionary subversion, what would have turned China into a capitalist hell with worker exploitation forever, but who can help the PRC now? Back in 1989, the CCP did the right thing in counter-revolutionary Tienanmen Square protests and they would be justified to put down the riots in Hong Kong now.

Look at what China has achieved in the thirty years since the so-called “democracy movement” that culminated in the showdown at Tienanmen Square. China is on the verge of becoming the largest economy in the world, one that has made great progress in eradicating poverty, as workers in Taiwan, the last U.S. stronghold on Chinese soil, wallow in a neoliberal two-party political circus. Taiwanese workers remain nation-less, unable to gain independence, or reunification, because of U.S. interference, and real wages are stuck at the same rate as twenty years ago, thirty years since the “democracy movement” in China "lost" and “Free China’s” workers “won”. Won what? Taiwanese, in workplaces under thirty employees, have no right to unionize. Women are still oppressed by their male bosses. A legacy of environmental sickness and occupational hazards remains.

In Taiwan, a sham democracy, one party of corrupt politicians, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) kowtows to underworld bosses and steers the election of populist pro-unification clowns while the other party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) keeps Taiwan in the U.S. sphere of influence with media fear-mongering and biased reports of Hong Kong protests. Which party in Taiwan is raising workers out of their doldrums? Neither. A spark for independence in Taiwan existed during Chen Shui-Bian's (陳水扁) presidency. Now Tsai Ying-Wen's (蔡英文) DPP only wants to hold the line for the U.S. at the cost of reunification with China. A populist mayor from Kaohsiung, Han Kuo-Yu (韓國瑜), or arrogant independent from Taipei, Ko Wen-Je (柯文哲) may be the only way to lead the way back. The "Sunflower Movement", anti-Chinese, was promoted and co-opted by the DPP to win their presidential election over the KMT

Read "Sunflower Movement Co-opted by DPP" here

  What Hong Kongers and Taiwanese have in common is a contempt for immigrants and visitors from China "invading" their territory. If you did a demography of the Hong Kong protesters, I bet you would find a majority of them are descendants of long time Hong Kong residents. Their resentment of the new wave is not unlike the European/United Staters contempt for immigrants. They distinguish between the old and new. In the same way, many Taiwanese disliked the influx of Chinese after World War II, being usurped by a interloping ruling class, KMT Chinese replacing Japanese, PRC Chinese replacing British. Rich Chinese have raised the price of housing in Hong Kong while tourists from China are perceived as 'low-class'. Ironically, In Taiwan, Tsai Ying-Wen and the DPP have no problem with an influx of European and United States expats, in fact it is an initiative. Is that the Anglicization of Taiwan  to keep it in the western camp as the anti-extradition protests a smokescreen for the same western tendency? 

          Protesters in Hong Kong have forgotten how lucky they are to be reunited with the mainland, their cultural cohort, and be represented by a government that shields them from U.S. imperialism. Meanwhile Taiwan remains in its colonial past. At least the interlopers that followed Chiang Kai-Shek to Taiwan remember which culture they stem from. Perhaps only a populist from Kaohsiung can rally them back, but China will take whatever it can to end foreign exploitation of its people. Hong Kongers should count their blessings and Taiwanese should see the wolf in sheep’s clothing.

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Copyright © 2019 by David Barry Temple. All rights reserved 

Lin Piao Anachronistic Red Book

The Lin Piao book, The Life and Writings of China's New Ruler, saved from the dustbin of history, is an anachronism. A year after it was published in 1970, Lin Piao was gone. The first half of the book is a gossipy biography with insulting digressions and innuendos. The second half is a selection of Lin Piao's writings. The book itself, bound in clear plastic cover, is massive with classical, uneven, soft pages, a bit moldy but smelling more like the fifty-year-old "U.S. Army" library property hard cover that it is. With The History of the Little Red Book of Mao's Quotations I got a few weeks ago, it's a set. It came so quickly from the owner in France. The Lin Piao book came with a nice note, in French, hoping I enjoy the book.

       I had a series of weird out-of-breath dream lone night triggered by reading in Mao's Little Red Book; A Global History, edited by Alexander C. Cook, how loud speakers played Mao's Quotation in songs in China in the '60's. How firmly the PRC kept out subterfuge from the western powers. But I was disturbed by the thought of hearing loud speaker messages on the streets into homes. The book didn't specify how long the broadcasts were; only that the songs were a few minutes in length and mixed with speeches, local news and weather. Centralized speakers were used instead of shortwave signals to prevent outside subterfuge or clandestine tuning; I guess that was before signals could be jammed. 

     The notion of loud speaker announcements and songs is not strange to China and Taiwan; we still hear temple event announcements, political campaigns, and advertisements blaring from speakers in the street mounted to slow-passing vehicles.

       Lin Piao's Red Book was made into music, not unlike pop music of the west, and spread under everyone's skin. Today the west uses the internet of smartphones with Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, ubiquitous outside China. China doesn't let it in.

     Today, China has its own controlled social media and, we learned,  used as surveillance. We now know Western media, thanks to revelations by Snowden, Manning, and Assage's WikiLeaks, is worse because of it's clandestine nature. China's is up front about theirs. Western propaganda derides China for not letting western propaganda in but doesn't mention not letting Chinese news into the U.S. without twisting it.

    I fell asleep uneasy about mandatory political socialization, but Mao's Quotations disseminated, was necessary to spread revolution against capitalist imperialism. The quotations ring true today to revolutionaries everywhere, inciting us as they do, I can see why they aren't promoted in China today; their people have passed through that phase and there are more subliminal ways, pioneered by the CIA and Western media, that China uses, too, for a better purpose than corporate and religious domination. 
     I ordered a 6"x 4" bilingual facsimile of Mao's Quotations so I don't have to use a magnifying lens to read the tiny edition I got at Alishan a few years ago. They sell it as a souvenir now but I have always taken it seriously. It has the main reasons why a revolutionary should fight opposing imperialist capitalism. Everyone should refer to it, but not necessarily memorize it. I like using it with DeFrancis Annotated Quotations to study Mandarin. I have given up hope of influencing anarchist Facebook pages, or friends, that criticize me for accepting state communism, yet I remain a Wobbly in my heart; anarchism in the workplace, socialist states.