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EDITORIAL: Rooting
out injustice
Hardly a week goes by nowadays without farmers, environmentalists, unions and
rights activists petitioning the central government over issues of corporate
predation upon the land and the individual. While every instance could be looked
upon as isolated and unrelated, their frequency in the past two years means that
one cannot help but see a trend.
It would be easy to blame President Ma Ying-jeou¡¦s (°¨^¤E) administration for all
the ills that have befallen the workers in this country or the inhabitants of
areas that are to be destroyed to make room for industrial projects. However,
the problem is a more fundamental one, one that has deeper roots than the
policies of a single administration. The answers and solutions, if ever we find
them, will only emerge when people and organizations that purport to fight for
freedom and justice in Taiwan themselves stop exploiting those who work for
them.
Sometimes this hits so close to home that we don¡¦t even see it.
One need not turn to forced evictions to see what¡¦s going on. In recent years,
too many young educated Taiwanese have struggled to find employment with a wage
that enables them to raise a family, let alone buy a home. At the same time,
entire neighborhoods, with municipal sanction, are facing the prospect of being
razed to make room for new residential buildings that, once they are built, will
be well beyond the financial reach not only of new workplace entrants, but to
the previous residents as well. Far too often, those new buildings remain empty,
totems of financial speculation that only the rich can afford.
The growing injustice in Taiwan isn¡¦t simply an abstract idea: There are signs
of it all around us, and no matter who it affects ¡X from the young graduates who
despair at the pitiful salary offered by their first employer to the farmers
whose land is stolen through expropriation ¡X each case is a form of violence
against the individual. Although one cannot solely fault the government for this
situation, it nevertheless creates the conditions that make it possible for the
powerful to exploit the weak.
Those are issues that need to be raised and debated as we head into the
legislative and presidential elections in January. Neither party has done this
yet.
Whether Ma¡¦s Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is too beholden to autocrats that
it can¡¦t reverse course on exploitation remains to be seen. As for the
Democratic Progressive Party, it will have to go beyond the usual vapid slogans
and clearly articulate an alternative policy for national development that is
just and avoids government-sanctioned theft of private property. Call this
development with a heart, or a road to modernity minus the bulldozers and police
contingents.
The role of China in all this is also something politicians will have to look
into. While it is still too early to fully comprehend the impact of the Economic
Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA), there already is every indication that
the so-called ¡§benefits¡¨ of the pact have been largely felt by the corporate
elite.
As the ECFA is a work in progress, the possibility that this imbalance will be
exacerbated cannot be ignored. For one, the benefits could be exploited as
¡§sticks¡¨ and ¡§carrots¡¨ to reward those who favor it, while punishing those who,
for various reasons, don¡¦t.
What is happening in Taiwan isn¡¦t as dramatic as the forced eviction of 1.4
million Chinese for the construction of the Three Gorges Dam. That said, in the
aggregate, all the greed-driven injustices perpetrated against Taiwan¡¦s
disenfranchised farmers and landowners, workers and young graduates, is no less
serious. Injustice isn¡¦t mere statistics. It is a cold, hard reality and it must
be stopped lest it continues to spread.
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