by Ian Buruma
Contentious political issues, such as Taiwanese independence, were buried during the campaigns under a highly personalized politics. The people around Frank Hsie, the DPP candidate for mayor of Kaohsiung, had released tape recordings of his opponent, a married man, having an intimate telephone conversation with his mistress. His phrase “I love you” was much quoted, as if this were the height of caddishness—in a country where most men with means keep at least one mistress. Frank Hsie, in his turn, was accused of defending a kidnapper who had killed the daughter of a well-known show-business figure. The tearful parent, who happened to be close to the KMT, declared in a widely distributed videotape that a man who would defend such a vicious killer must be a very bad man himself. Rumors also abounded of Frank Hsie’s curious religious predilections. He was said to worship an impostor who had sent out photographs of himself with a faked halo.
There was a peculiarly lachrymose quality to the campaigning, especially of the DPP. I followed one candidate in Kaohsiung, whose sound truck blared out an endless tape of a woman crying and wailing. It was the candidate’s wife, I was told, begging the voters to elect her husband, because he lost the last time and to lose again would break his heart.
But I had come to Kaohsiung to see the grandson of Yu Teng-fa, the old local patriarch who had died so messily in his bath. The Yu family was still the boss clan of Kaohsiung County. The old man had been succeeded as county chief by his daughter-in-law, Yu Chen Yueh-ying. After she retired, her son took over. Her other son, the one I wanted to see, was running for the legislature, and so was his sister. The mother supported her daughter. I had met Yu Chen Yueh-ying a year before at her headquarters way out in the countryside. She was still a formidable figure, running affairs as though she were still in office. I spoke to her in Japanese as she pressed her crimson seal to a huge pile of documents lying on her desk. The phone rang continuously. Men scurried in and out of her office in peculiar cringing postures, as though they were permanently bowing. Outside was a line of supplicants, dark-skinned men and women in badly fitting clothes, clutching petitions.
A plump woman in a colorful silk dress and glasses encrusted with what looked like tiny gems, Mrs. Yu proudly announced that she had been called Taiwan’s Mrs. Thatcher. I knew she also had another name: Ma Zu, after the mother goddess worshipped by Fujian fishermen and in shrines all over Taiwan. (Her daughter was running her campaign for the legislature as “the daughter of Ma Zu.”) She explained that a political career had never been her choice. It was the old man who had made her run for office. She had just been a “bourgeois girl” who played the piano. Still, it was her duty, as a member of the Yu clan, to take care of the people of Kaohsiung County. Just before it was time for me to leave, she barked an order at one of the cringing figures in her office. He disappeared for a few minutes and came back with a neat little box marked PIERRE CARDIN. It was for me. Mrs. Yu took both my hands and said: “We must work for international friendship.” I opened the box later. And there was the gaudiest tie I had ever seen, a kind of overripe fruit salad printed on a shiny, synthetic material. Pierre Cardin had nothing to do with it.
I had been driven to Mrs. Yu’s office by Kathy Wei. The nervous tension she had shown three years ago was gone. These were more placid times. We spoke in the car about her father, and Kathy asked me why I was so interested in dissidents. I had often wondered the same thing. I mumbled some platitudes about the importance of freedom. Yes, she said, politely. Sure, of course. But I felt I owed her a better answer. And I said it was partly because I was fascinated by people who were prepared to sacrifice everything for their freedom. I could not imagine being that brave myself. I wanted to describe people who had the courage to choose prison or torture rather than submit to the servility, the double-talk, the evasions and dishonesties of life in a dictatorship. I knew that many of these people were flawed, wrongheaded, and perhaps intolerant in their own ways, but I admired their sheer cussedness. I was haunted by the idea of tyranny, just as it has haunted many people of my age who were born in Europe not long after the war and the end of Nazi occupation. We were never put to the test.
Kathy and I had dinner with Yu Jeng-dao, Mrs. Yu’s son, in a Sichuan restaurant in Kaohsiung. Even his name, Jeng-dao, meaning Way of Politics, showed the traditional occupation of the Yu family. He was a baby-faced man in his thirties, with thick, soft hands and excellent American English. Yu had gotten a master’s degree in public administration at the University of Southern California and was clearly of a different generation from Mark Chen or Shih Ming-teh. He had no Japanese nickname or memories of 2-28. He had gone abroad not to escape prison but to get a better education. “My generation,” he said, “is able to think freely.”
But he did remember his grandfather, the patriarch who had brooked no contradiction—not from KMT officials, and certainly not from his own family. Even his daughter-in-law, the formidable Mrs. Yu, had obeyed the old man’s orders. “My grandfather,” said Yu, “represented authority. When he made up his mind, we were not expected to oppose him. You see, he liked the way the Japanese governed Taiwan. They were just and well organized.” I recalled something Shih Ming-teh had told me. He said he still worried about the “political culture” in China and Taiwan. It was vital to build the right system, he said, for otherwise the DPP might become as dictatorial as the KMT had been.
In 1998, Yu Jeng-dao had shaved off all his hair, which flattened his features, giving him a pink, egglike appearance. As we made our way in a green-and-white sound truck through the dusty flatlands of Kaohsiung County, with its banana groves, tobacco plantations, rice paddies, and small, industrial plants, Yu told me something about his politics. It was his aim as congressman, he said, to protect the local farmers from American pressure to open the Taiwanese market. Even though Taiwan was a small country, the U.S. had no right to push it around. This was not the kind of thing you would have heard from older dissidents, who tended to look on the U.S. as a political savior. It was more what a young student at USC would have picked up.
Yu also told me a great deal about KMT corruption, how votes were bought for about NT$500 (roughly U.S. $15) per person. And he spoke about the politics at Taiwanese universities, where students of his generation had tried to get rid of political cadres from the KMT, mostly retired army people, who had to make sure the students had the correct line on things. After an hour or two of driving around in the sound truck and stopping at various points to shake hands with voters and hand out leaflets, I was bored and decided to leave for my hotel. Yu told me to come back in the evening. There would be a rally in the courtyard of a Buddhist temple outside Kaohsiung.
It was dark by the time I got there. Taiwanese pop music was wailing from CD players in the market stalls outside the temple. Inside the courtyard, there was an overpowering smell of sweet incense billowing from a large bronze burner, and of barbecued squid skewed on bamboo sticks. The temple, with its southern-style curved roof, like a dragon’s back or a lobster claw, had thick vermilion pillars in front and thousands of gold lacquered Buddhas inside, gleaming in the spotlights. Every time a new speaker was announced, there was an explosion of firecrackers and the sound of marching-band music coming from the speaker’s platform.
The scene was a bit like a medieval pageant. Candidates would enter the temple compound, followed by a retinue of men carrying tall banners announcing the candidate’s name. One trick to attract attention was to parade in front of the platform and shake the banners whenever a rival speaker was about to hold forth. The only language spoken was Taiwanese. None of the candidates, even those from the KMT, bothered to use standard Mandarin in Kaohsiung. Yu’s sister, the “daughter of Ma Zu,” who had the misfortune to arrive without her retinue of banner-men, shouted that “the KMT is a party of foreigners. The DPP belongs to us.” Yu himself had a surprisingly strident manner of speaking for such a mild-mannered person; he hollered and shrieked, repeating the same slogans over and over, mostly about KMT vote-buying.
; I left for the market street outside the temple compound, to get a snack. For about half a mile the street was lined with food stalls, their wares set out on tables lit by naked bulbs: piles of squid, octopus tentacles, endless varieties of shellfish, buckets full of pigs’ innards, intestines, raglike stomach linings, fatty livers and succulent hearts. I settled for a bowl of fried noodles and squid. When I was halfway through my meal, I noticed the familiar sight of green banners coming my way. Yu and his banner-men were moving from stall to stall. At each one he shook hands with the owner and the customers. When he spotted me, he had a quick word with the owner, told him he would pay for my noodles, and slipped him a handsome tip that amounted to quite a bit more than the price of the meal. Things had changed a great deal in Taiwan, but I was happy to note that some traditions still remained the same.
I left Taiwan feeling elated—not so much because of the election results, which were mixed. Chen Shui-bian lost in Taipei; Frank Hsie won in Kaohsiung. Yu Jeng-dao won a seat in the legislature; his sister lost. It would be a bit more than a year later that Taiwan passed the real test of democracy: a peaceful transition from one party to another. In March 2000, Chen Shui-bian was elected as the first DPP president of Taiwan, breaking the KMT monopoly on power.
But in many ways the test had already been passed. The Taiwanese had shown that Chinese people could establish a democratic system and sustain it. They also made nonsense of theories one still heard in other parts of the Chinese-speaking world, which, more annoyingly, were often repeated as superior wisdom in the West: that “the Chinese” didn’t care about politics, that political freedom would only lead to social chaos, that firm, authoritarian leadership was more suitable to the “Chinese mind,” and that any suggestion otherwise was a form of neocolonial arrogance. Democracy in Taiwan was not a Western imposition, even though it had been encouraged, rather belatedly, in Washington; it had been created by the Taiwanese themselves—and not only by the “native Taiwanese” but by enlightened members of the KMT as well, starting with the late President Chiang Ching-kuo and continued by his successor, Lee Teng-hui.
The history of modern Taiwan showed something else as well. Until the 1980s, Taiwanese dissidents abroad were as impotent and as easily dismissed as irrelevant and quixotic as the mainland dissidents are today. But when Taiwan politics began to turn after the Kaohsiung Incident in 1979, the overseas activists had the international contacts, the expertise, and the financial resources to play a vital role. They knew how Washington worked. Above all, despite their feuding and their occasionally wild and desperate actions, they had kept the flame alive during the dark years, rather like governments in exile, offering hope that one day change would come.
And yet the case of Taiwan sits oddly within the history of China, for Taiwanese freedom was built in defiance, not only of the People’s Republic of China but of the idea of One China. I was often struck by the Japanophilia among the older dissidents and their contempt for “those Chinese” on the mainland, and I assumed it was a necessary defense against the official propaganda of reuniting the motherland. As a gut feeling or prejudice, anti-mainlander feeling can be disturbing. But the belief that the ancient Chinese drive toward central power over a vast land has been inimical to political freedom is surely right. For democracy to succeed, “China” probably needs more Taiwans.
Just before leaving Taipei, on my way to Hong Kong, I went to see John Sham, an old acquaintance. Famous as a comedian in Hong Kong, John had become a ubiquitous figure during the Tiananmen demonstrations in 1989 when he helped channel money and other goods from Hong Kong to the students in Beijing. You would see him on the television news, in his T-shirt and with his wild, bushy hair, leading demonstrations in Hong Kong, cracking Cantonese jokes, and making speeches. And you would see him on the Square in Beijing, talking to Wang Dan, Wu’er Kaixi, or Chai Ling, a man who liked to be at the center of things. He once boasted to me that he was so famous that “everyone with a yellow skin knows me.” After the crackdown, John had helped some student leaders escape to Hong Kong. As a Hong Kong show-business figure, he had many contacts, some of them in the shady world of criminal triads, without whom the students would never have been able to get out.
John was now living in Taipei, running a cable television company. “Quite a show, huh?” he said when I walked into his office. We could hear the noise of an election campaign going on outside his office. Yes, I said, quite a show.
I was interested to know what John made of Taiwan and its new democracy. I knew that the Hong Kong perspective was complicated. During the first presidential campaign in 1996, I had watched a rally in Taipei together with a group of Hong Kong democrats. Lawyers, legislators, and academics, articulate in English and Cantonese, smartly dressed, and mostly rich, they were amused by the rustic manners of the Taiwanese, their gaudy taste, their odd superstitions, their loudness, and their crass sense of style. But there was some discomfort, too, for when it came to politics, these same crass, vulgar, rustic people were clearly way ahead of Hong Kong.
So I asked John Sham what he made of the Taiwanese. He lit a cigarette, threw up his arms, and sighed. The Taiwanese were pretty much like the mainland Chinese, he said. All that talk about “native Taiwanese” was nonsense. Only the aboriginal tribes were native to Taiwan. Culturally, Taiwan was part of China, and culture, in terms of race, was the strongest basis for an independent state.
Was he in favor of unification, then? Yes he was, and yet, he said, he was very “westernized” himself, much more so than most Chinese dissidents. So much so, in fact, that he often found it difficult to communicate with them or with the Taiwanese. Taiwanese, mainlanders—they were part of the same culture. That is why it was difficult to relate to their idea of democracy. “What are we talking about when we say ‘democracy’? Are we talking about the same thing? The Taiwanese vote in large numbers, sure, but do they really understand what democracy is about, in the way British people do? I doubt it. Look at the way they drive, without any consideration for others or any idea that one should stick to the rules. This is all very different from Hong Kong. In Taiwan and China, people behave as though individuals don’t count. . . .”
I told John of my conversations with older Taiwanese, who had pointed out what a difference Japan had made to Taiwan and who maintained that the Japanese sense of law and order was what distinguished Taiwanese from the mainlanders.
John waved this away with his cigarette, trailing an arc of smoke through the room. No, no, he said. “We are different in Hong Kong. We are westernized. There is no spitting in the streets, we abide by the traffic rules. We take individualism seriously. The thing is, when we look at a problem, we try and find a legal, sensible, humane solution. To the Taiwanese, that makes us look as though we are lacking in human feelings, because we put law and reason in the first place. And why do we do that?” I raised my eyebrows in the shape of a question, even though I could easily guess the answer. “Because we Hong Kong people were ruled by the British.”
Chapter 3
The Last Colony
In Hong Kong it usually rains in spring and summer, the typhoon season. It rained when the Chinese government declared martial law in Beijing, in May 1989. A real typhoon rain, loud and thick and fast, with driving winds and lightning bolts fizzing off the spiky top of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank building. Shops and schools were closed. People were told to stay at home and bolt their windows, yet fifty thousand people forced their way through the typhoon gale to Victoria Park that night in support of the students in Beijing. They sat in the open air, buffeted by the storm, soaked through and through, singing the patriotic hit song of the day, “I Am a Chinese.” Martin Lee asked people to put up their umbrellas, but nobody did, just so everyone could have a clear view of the stage: They were in this together—the very feeling many Taiwanese chose to reject. Later that night, several hundred people stood outside the office of the New China News Agency (the unofficial Chinese embassy) in an even heavier rainstorm
and sang the Chinese national anthem, a patriotic gesture both ironic and deeply felt. The following day, a million people came out in the streets.
It rained again on July 1, 1997, the night of Hong Kong’s “return” to China, when Prince Charles, with perfect British sangfroid, pretended not to notice the steady stream of rainwater cascading, absurdly, off the peak of his cap to the tip of his nose. It rained so hard you could barely get into town that week. Avalanches of liquid, toffee-colored mud were blocking the roads.
It rained solidly every day, from morning to night, during the legislative elections in May of the following year, the first after the handover. In some places, people had to wade through water that reached their knees to cast their votes. Old people in the villages were carried to the voting booths. And yet they came, in larger numbers than had ever turned out to vote before.
But on June 4, 1999, the tenth anniversary of the Beijing Massacre, it merely drizzled, softening the hot and humid night in Victoria Park, where some seventy thousand people had gathered to remember. It was dark when I arrived from the neon-lit malls of Causeway Bay. Everything in the park was wrapped in a steamy gauze: men, women, and children sitting in neat rows, as they always do in Hong Kong, holding candles; the spotlights picking out the Pillar of Shame, a truly hideous sculpture made by a Dane, named Jens Galshiot, to commemorate Tiananmen, something between a totem pole and a turdlike ice-cream cone, showing emaciated figures writhing in death agony; the flames leaping from a bronze torch; the replica of the Goddess of Democracy, which had been crushed by tanks in Beijing ten years before; the white column with the words “The spirit of democracy martyrs will live forever”; the huge video screen showing blurred images of students on Tiananmen Square, of young people covered in blood being rushed away on carts, and of tanks rumbling along Chang’an Avenue; and onstage, the activists, the politicians in white T-shirts, and the singers of patriotic songs. Once again the plaintive sound of “Descendants of the Dragon” filled the night, again and again. The chief executive of Hong Kong, the successor to the British colonial governors, a former shipping tycoon named Tung Chee-hwa, had warned of “chaos” and told the Hong Kong Chinese to put the “baggage” of the past behind them. He did not like these gatherings, because he didn’t want to upset the new colonial power in Beijing. In fact, he had no taste for any kind of protest. If it were up to him, he would run Hong Kong along the lines of Singapore. But it was not entirely up to him. Opinion in Hong Kong was still supposed to be free.