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China is a ‘big brother’ indeed
Critics of Chinese philanthropist Chen Guangbiao (陳光標) might have recoiled in
horror over the weekend after the tycoon said China was like a “big brother” to
Taiwan. The fact of the matter is, China is indeed a “big brother” — but in the
Orwellian sense.
In their tumultuous history of interaction with Chinese, which has intensified
amid efforts by President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) to foster closer ties across the
Taiwan Strait, Taiwanese often complain about China’s lack of knowledge about
Taiwan. In the same vein, survivors of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989
point to continued efforts by Chinese authorities to filter information on the
mass demonstrations that led to the crackdown, with the result that ordinary
Chinese now suffer from collective amnesia.
So much for the observation by Chinese intellectual Wang Hui (汪暉) that “history,
experience and knowledge are resources we must use to overcome ourselves in our
present state.”
Or, for that matter, the “one country, two systems” formula often touted for
Taiwan, which risks sucking Hong Kong — the first experiment — into China’s
cognitive limbo: More than two decades after the Tiananmen Square protests,
former student leaders like Wang Dan (王丹) and Wuer Kaixi (吾爾開希) now find
themselves unable to enter the territory.
The list of domestic abuse by the state and manmade catastrophes covered up by
Beijing — from the Cultural Revolution to protests by Tibetans and Uighurs — is
long and has given rise to a polity that, though it is becoming increasingly
educated, remains largely uninformed about its past.
There are now signs that censoring information about domestic affairs is
insufficient to ensure China’s stability. News reports over the weekend revealed
that amid unrest in Egypt, where thousands of demonstrators have taken to the
streets calling on the largely undemocratic regime of Egyptian President Hosni
Mubarak to step down, Chinese censors have blocked the word “Egypt” from
microblogging Web portals, such as Sina.com and Sohu.com, with searches for the
word saying results could not be displayed “in accordance with regulations.”
It is not difficult to establish the rationale behind China’s action: Beijing
hopes to prevent events in Egypt (or other examples of the “color revolutions”
that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union) from setting an example of
political mobilization in China. Although Chinese censors cannot block every
platform, just as they cannot prevent occasional reporting on government
corruption or natural catastrophes, their actions nevertheless set the
boundaries of “acceptable” political discourse.
The ever-changing nature of what is and isn’t permissible, added to the
randomness by which the law is applied, is often sufficient to deter would-be
inquisitive minds from engaging in dialogue “to overcome themselves in the
present state.”
This leads to avoidance and self-censorship, with the consequence that over
time, an increasingly wealthy, educated and mobile population remains unable to
outgrow its antiquated mold and incapable of tapping into other people’s
experiences in their quest for modernity.
The implications for Taiwan as it develops closer ties with China are alarming.
Given that challenging the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) grip on power remains
unacceptable to Chinese authorities, those in Taiwan who regard Ma’s strategy of
engagement as a means to liberalize — and perhaps help democratize China — are
in for a rude awakening. If knowledge of distant acts of rebellion, such as
those that are reverberating across Egypt, is deemed too dangerous, one can only
imagine the kind of treatment that would be meted out much closer to Beijing,
when events involve a people with a similar culture and language.
Taiwanese might be regarded as “small brothers” and “family” to the Chinese, but
in the end, should Taiwanese, with their democracy and freedoms, threaten to
undermine the CCP’s foundations, a fate far worse than the blocking of a term on
a search engine awaits them.
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