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Taiwan is silent on human rights
By Molly Jeng 鄭明麗
During their joint press conference in Washington on Jan. 19, Chinese President
Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) and US President Barack Obama faced questions from four
reporters — two of them from US agencies — the Associated Press (AP) and
Bloomberg, and two from Chinese media — China Central Television and Xinhua news
agency. The two Chinese media are mouthpieces of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP),
so they are hardly worthy of discussion, but the two US reporters posed some
incisive questions.
First, AP’s Ben Feller asked Obama: “Can you explain to the American people how
the United States can be so allied with a country that is known for treating its
people so poorly, for using censorship and force to repress its people?”
Feller’s next question was addressed to Hu: “I’d like to give you a chance to
respond to this issue of human rights. How do you justify China’s record, and do
you think that’s any of the business of the American people?”
Then Hans Nichols from Bloomberg asked Hu to comment on the conspicuous absence
of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker John Boehner from the
state dinner, and he asked Obama, who had just commented that the Chinese yuan
was undervalued, what effect he thought that was having on employment in the US.
President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) government has clearly leaned toward China ever
since it came to power, and government officials are always ready to defend this
policy when people raise doubts about it.
For example, when Democratic Progressive Party Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文)
criticized Ma’s pro-China cross-strait policy, saying that it was causing a lot
of unease in Taiwan, Presidential Office Spokesman Lo Chih-chiang (羅智強)
responded by saying that Tsai was putting a “red label” on Ma.
When former president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) made a similar criticism, Premier Wu
Den-yih (吳敦義) said that the government was “putting Taiwan first for the benefit
of the people.”
However, when a Taiwanese basketball fan displayed a national flag during a game
between Taiwanese and Chinese teams, Wu criticized the fan for using the flag to
provoke a dispute. Is that what Wu calls “putting Taiwan first?”
While our officials never stop boasting, perhaps we can learn from the AP
journalist by asking them some difficult questions. China is a country without a
free press and free speech, and Chinese dissidents who tell the truth are
imprisoned for leaking national secrets.
If Chinese people want to acquire genuine news, they can only do so from foreign
media, and to do that they have to use special software to “climb over” the
electronic barrier known as “the Great Firewall of China.” So how can people in
Taiwan possibly believe that our government, in league as it is with Beijing,
will “put Taiwan first for the benefit of the people?”
The record of Ma’s administration shows that he wants to avoid the Chinese human
rights issue. In the past, Ma used to criticize the CCP every year on June 4,
the anniversary of the suppression of the 1989 -democracy movement in Beijing.
Since becoming president, however, he has stopped doing so.
Some academics suggested that a “human rights clause” be added to the Economic
Cooperation Framework Agreement that was signed by Taiwan and China last year,
but that idea was not taken on board. While international media are boldly
questioning China’s human rights record, our government, concerned only with its
own interests, shamefully stays silent.
Whenever Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait Chairman Chen Yunlin
(陳雲林) and other Chinese officials visit Taiwan, many Taiwanese officials and
businesspeople invite them to banquets. It’s a different story in the US, where
both Senate majority leader and House speaker declined to attend the state
dinner for Hu. Do you think we will ever see Taiwanese officials and
businesspeople refusing to attend such an event in Taipei? That really would be
a surprise.
Molly Jeng is a former research assistant at the Institute of
International Relations at National Chengchi University.
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