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Formosan black bear travails
Recently, a Sky1 English TV series featured coverage of the Great Wall of China
as one of the Seven Wonders of the World. At one site near the Great Wall, the
program presented a bear enclosure that featured a number of Asian black bears —
close cousins of the Formosan black bear in blood and appearance.
Not normally a fan of any kind of zoo or enclosure for wild animals, the sight
of these bears in a barren pit begging for food from tourists both upset me and
immediately raised in my mind a comparison with the treatment of pandas at
Taipei Zoo.
The pandas at Taipei Zoo have an indoor and outdoor enclosure, lots of bamboo
and a stylized design that supposedly makes them “feel at home.” Nothing like
that exists for the cousins of the Formosan black bears. They get a sand pit
with some climbing equipment and food thrown at them by tourists. The difference
in treatment is like that of the Hilton and the average squat.
This differential treatment of the bears can also serve as a clear political
analogy. Taiwanese are the black bears, locked in a barren enclosure they can’t
get out of (the Republic of China [ROC] constitutional polity), being thrown
scraps by tourists (purchasing visits by Chinese delegations), while the pandas
— Chinese officials such as Chen Yunlin (陳雲林) — are given five-star VIP
treatment (hiding, confiscating and destroying ROC flags to avoid hurting the
Chinese people’s feelings).
The arrival of the pandas was supposed to signify warming relations between
Taiwan and China, but the truth of Beijing’s real attitude to Taipei is seen in
its treatment of the close cousins of our protected indigenous species — for
Chinese officials, Taiwanese should be constrained and appeased and have no real
long-term concessions offered to them.
If the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) wants to posit former president Chen
Shui-bian’s (陳水扁) acquittal from a set of bribery charges as a reason for
Taiwanese not to vote for the Democratic Progressive Party, then surely the
treatment of the endangered cousins of the Formosa black bears by Chinese while
at the same time President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) administration bends over
backwards to please China should be a good reason for voters to not believe
anything the government says about Taiwan-China (read KMT-Chinese Communist
Party or Chinese Taipei-People’s Republic of China) relations and to vote for a
genuinely pro-Taiwan party instead.
Finally, isn’t it high time we ditched Sun Yat-sen (孫逸仙) as the “Father of the
Nation” and instead called for the Formosan black bear (and the Indo-Pacific
humpback dolphin while we’re at it) to become the national symbols of the
independent Taiwanese nation? Perhaps then, this myopic and ultra-Chinese
nationalist KMT government will finally understand that Taiwanese do not want to
be re-Sinicized into some imagined, imported and imposed “Greater China.”
BEN GOREN
Taichung
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