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The MoA Week In Review – OT 2024-013
Last week's post on Moon of Alabama:
Palestine:
Ukraine:
Yemen:
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Other issues:
China:
Boeing:
Empire:
India:
Miscellaneous:
Use as open (not Palestine or Ukraine related) thread …
@ Scorpion | Jan 14 2024 17:29 utc | 16
So what part of that did the KMT old guard reject, the friendly relationship or the military buildup? And what part of that is so different from the DPP whose voters also reject the KMT? I still don’t really get what their differences are. Is it not true that there is already huge cross-strait commerce? If true, does that not indicate that the main bone of contention is the governance system, aka control, in which case presumably there are hard core republican (mainly KMT) hold-outs in Taiwan who refuse to knuckle under communist control even though they have no way of displacing them?
(Unless some of those strange Princeling-resistance rumors have some substance and are not just US-sponsored agitprop.)
Wow.big question.
A) Military buildup a bit, but I reckon the biggest fly in the ointment was a refusal to allow the KMT old guard to edit their platform, and certainly the ideas of public housing, rent ceilings, and progressive property taxes terrified them. These are, as I said, people who grew up in families that held sinecures in the court of Chiang Kai Shek, and many of them—both local Taiwanese and mainlander emigres alike—got very, very wealthy from the association. These are people who come from families who firmly believe in and have never questioned a rentier-based financialized economy.
For the KMT, they’re the party who first discussed the prospect of reunification back in the late 70s / early 80s, under Chiang/Jiang Jingguo. They’re the party who accepts the inevitability of reunification, but because of their legacy of decades of wealth inequality, political persecution, and the White Terror—a legacy that, in truth, is as much unfair fiction as truth (it was the KMT under JJG who introduced “Democracy” to the island; first created limited labor unions; and who laid the groundwork and carefully manage Taiwan’s economic explosion from the 70s up to the 2000s)—much of the island (read: the ethnic Min chauvinists in the South) despises them.
B) The DPP evolved out of the anti-single-party-state activists of the 60s and 70s. These, in turn, received a lot—perhaps most—of their support from the Presbyterian church and early European human rights groups—both of which were fiercely anti-communist, to a McCarthyite degree. Consequently, the DPP is absolutely terrified of “the communists” and “communism”. Moreover, the party was built using money donated by established families of great wealth who were only one generation removed from their former status as local nobility.
Thus, while the DPP claims to be “left”, in fact it has only succeeded in pushing through a single meaningful socialist reform: the national healthcare system, which is genuinely a very fine achievement. Beyond that, however, any other “leftist” reforms they have pushed through have been largely window-dressing. Currently, a young couple who wishes to buy a home while earning median wage, here, would need to pay off their mortgage over a span of something like 130 years. Rent eats into the average paycheck to the tune of something like half, or more. Many 20- and 30-somethings are thus forced to live with parents, often in cramped, crowded conditions. This has nearly all happened under the DPP’s watch.
And why is that? Because their moneyed backers are all former landlords looking to return to their pre-KMT days of glory.
Which brings me to ethnic Min (Hokkien) chauvinism: there remains a lot of resentment among the ethnic Min that their language, once the Lingua Franca of the province, has been supplanted by Mandarin. They are also justifiably angry that their history and, in some cases, cultural institutions and leadership has been denied or supplanted by powers imported from the Chinese mainland. These people want some pretty radical changes to the country that, in many cases, are reasonable, but at the extremes are batshit crazy. As of recently the DPP has implemented all the reasonable stuff, but now they simply have no more ideas to carry the country forward—excepting reunification.
Posted by: Pacifica Advocate | Jan 14 2024 18:21 utc | 26
KMT, TPP, and DPP are just different flavors of Taiwanese independence, only varying in how upfront they state their intent and how quickly they want to push the process along. People keep talking about maintaining the status quo as if that is a stable state of existence that can last in perpetuity, but they ignore the fact that refusing to actively work towards reunification is tantamount to supporting independence. Mao deliberately left Kinmen, which is closer to Fujian than the main island of Taiwan, under KMT control as a reminder of the unresolved status of the Chinese Civil War and the eternal bond between people across the strait. Up until 1979, Kinmen was shelled by the mainland regularly – regularly meaning on a set schedule. The shelling is a purely ritualistic act to signify the aforementioned bond. As to why it stopped: 1979 was the year when the US recognized Taiwan as an inalienable part of China and the PRC as the sole legal representative of China.
When the poison of Western-style liberalization was introduced to Taiwan and DPP first gained power, DPP began the process of brainwashing the new generation of Taiwanese kids to see themselves as separate from the mainland through educational reforms. When KMT, headed by Ma Ying-jeou, wrested control back from DPP, KMT did not reverse DPP’s pro-independence policies, letting kids grow up with the schizophrenic ideas that they’re the true inheritors of Chinese civilization yet somehow at the same time the Taiwanese people suddenly sprung up on the island with zero connections to mainland China. Other mumbo jumbo such as the Dutch and the Japanese being the true ancestors of the Taiwanese plug the gaps for people who question this DPP narrative. The snake Ma Ying-jeou, whom Twitter/X commentariat Arnaud Bertrand recently championed as a voice of reason for cross-strait relations (Laugh Out Loud), never visited the mainland while he was in power and only found time to visit in 2023 long after he’s left office. Ma was also the originator of the “No unification, No independence and No use of force” policy viewed by most mainland people as a stealth independence policy since no unification and no independence at the same time are contradictory.
When DPP ousted KMT again, DPP did everything to further the impression that Taiwan is independent but stopped short of actually amending the constitution and formally declaring independence, unwilling to bear the consequences that come with such a move. One of the more prominent examples in DPP’s bag of salami-slicing tactics is changing the design of the ROC passport to only have “Taiwan” in big bold letters in English with tiny, almost invisible letters writing out “Republic of China” around the white sun. In Chinese letters, the passport only contains the words “Republic of China” with zero mention of Taiwan. The DPP often exploits the official and unofficial legal language status of Chinese and English in the ROC. In the days leading up to this most recent 2024 election, DPP sent out a phone alert to everyone in Taiwan where they translated a satellite launch (Chinese) from the mainland to “missile” (English) to scare up votes for the DPP. Incidentally, when the mainland did launch missiles after Pelosi’s visit, no such alerts were issued by the DPP who wished to project the image that Taiwan is safe under DPP rule and the US’s protective umbrella.
The White Camp, TPP, straddles the line between DPP and KMT in its policies and it doesn’t deserve coverage since I’ve already discussed the entire spectrum of pro-independence parties from DPP to KMT. TPP also acts as a useful spoiler party for the DPP.
Now, onto what steps towards reunification that Chinese analysts believe would be taken with the DPP victory (DPP was expected to win months ago so these analyses are not new).
The trick is to gain control over the island without causing resentment that an “occupying” force would naturally engender.
ECFA, the trade policy that benefits Taiwan at the cost of the mainland’s economy, will be further rolled back or even cancelled outright. Since Taiwan has made its intent abundantly clear through this election, the faction within the CPC supporting a gentle treatment of Taiwan would likely find it hard to oppose the rollback of ECFA. ECFA allows certain delusional Taiwanese to believe that their “freedom-and-democracy” system is delivering superior economic results and a higher standard of living than the mainland when in actuality the Taiwanese economy is heavily subsidized by the mainland. This smug sense of superiority is one of the main forces impeding reunification so the Taiwanese needs to be brought back down to earth. Remember how Ukraine halted pension payments to Donbass and Russia took up the burden instead? By returning Taiwan to its natural state in the absence of mainland largesse – isolated and impoverished – the mainland is setting the stage for a similar strategy of winning over the Taiwanese. DPP, being in power, would be blamed for the economic woes (to be fair, the DPP doesn’t need help in ruining the economy as it is extremely corrupt, a recent example is them sealing for 30 years under the excuse of national security the procurement costs for their natively developed Medigen vaccine which almost no one in Taiwan uses). The arrival of CPC rule will bring with it rapid infrastructure development and the cleaning out of corruption, which the Taiwanese people would welcome.
What is uncertain is if force will be used to reunify. Reunification by force implies one country, one system while the peaceful approach implies one country, two systems. There are many supporters for forceful reunification as peaceful reunification allows compradors to remain influential in Taiwan and stir up trouble, as the Hong Kong experience has shown. Peaceful reunification also allows Taiwanese to retain a sense of superiority as they’d adhere to different laws compared to mainlanders, likely making flare-ups of separatist movements a common occurence. The use of force would allow the PRC to clean out comprador elements. Compare the institutional rot in nations that negotiated its independence (India) from colonizers versus those that forced the colonizers out (China). There are severe economic ramifications if force is used, most likely US-led condemnation and sanctions, and the CPC is keenly aware of this fact, but it also realizes that there is a point where those costs pale in comparison to the costs of pacifying a restless Taiwanese province and diminished legitimacy in the eyes of the Chinese people. There is also the possibility of civilization-ending nuclear war, but that’s always a given in any armed conflict where one side is backed by the irrational actor that is the US.
Not using force has its benefits. A different facet of the Hong Kong experience is that the CPC has been careful in not deploying the PLA to pacify the riots. This allowed the clashes to remain between the rioters and the local police instead of involving a third “outside” force. The PLA’s involvement would have been resented by both the police and the rioters, and any excessive use of force would be blamed on the PLA. Over time, as the widespread chaos caused by the rioters began to hit home for the people actually living in HK, they recognized the rioters for what they are – destructive elements working on behalf of Western instigators – and lost sympathy for the rioters. The police force, drawn from the local HK population, gained their sympathy. The cost of a hands-off strategy is the economic devastation of HK, although some see it as a blessing in disguise. The HK economy has wrung all it can out of the real estate development model (a model which the mainland copied and sunsetted in recent years after it has played its role) so a downturn is unavoidable as the economy is reconfigured towards a different model. HK has also lost its advantageous status of being the only gateway to mainland China since other ports and financial hubs have been developed after reform and opening up. All the problems in HK’s economy would now be blamed on the unrest caused by rioters. Any economic improvement post-riot would be credited to the stable rule of the CPC.
Posted by: All Under Heaven | Jan 14 2024 21:09 utc | 62
Posted by: Peter AU1 | Jan 14 2024 20:55 utc | 61
I do not intend to start a debate about the fucking SARS-CoV-2 because there are so many millions of written pages and personal testimonies that, my ignorant opinion, is irrelevant.
I only intend to highlight certain phenomena related to the “COVID-19 Pandemic” that are relevant to nation-state societies.
1. From February-March 2020, the mass media reported (this is key) that people went to hospitals with typical flu symptoms, but worsened:
1. Difficulty breathing, tightness in the chest, increased heart rate: “I can’t breathe properly”
2. The muscular system does not respond to the usual demands: “my body hurts”, “I can’t move.”
3. The intestines cause problems: the kidney area hurts, my liver feels swollen, I am constipated and I cannot eat any solids without vomiting.
4. I have a fever and feel terrible. I’m going to die? I better go to the hospital.
In the hospital, people are treated according to their symptoms and the need to prevent them from dying.
A doctor’s action protocol has a single purpose: to save the life of his patient who is suffering the possibility of dying.
The doctor treats acute symptoms that lead to the death of a human: if you are not breathing well, I help you breathe using a breathing apparatus. If you have a fever of 42ºC, I will reduce your fever to hell, because that temperature cooks your brain.
But, although this protocol saved lives, later, in the chronic process, it took them away: thousands of old people, dead in private residences for the elderly, died so that the institutions could keep the leftovers.
I’m going to tell you my experience. Nothing special.
I have not been vaccinated.
My wife, yes, 3 times. She is a high school teacher, but she has never been forced by the government to do so: she wanted to jump through hoops. I don’t.
I have had covid. Normal.
I work in a company that has 3 shifts, 6 days a week, in shifts: 07-23, 07-15, 15-23, and every 3 weeks, 1 off.
No worker has died from Covid in the last 3 years. Most unvaccinated.
On August, I catch covid. My bad. 4 times from 2020.Every fucking year I catch the first days of august, the fucking covid. 1 week of fever, 38 ºC, and 2 days off. Muscular pain during 2 days, and my stomach feel bad. Also, my mind is not clear when I’m suffering the infestation: bad mood, bad thoughts.
What must be do, from my experience, when you catch, Covid-19, and maybe, always.
Reduce your tobacco: Malboro is not good tobbaco. Chose a good one provider.
Reduce your mind: feel your emotions with a kind of perspective. When you are really bad because you are suffering a disease, it’s the time to go inside.
Increase your touch with the world: walk, 1-2 km per day, take time for you. Make money.
Give the fucking off this falsity: so many time wasted for nothing?
Try
So. No special thing
Posted by: Dado | Jan 14 2024 23:38 utc | 78
@All Under Heaven | Jan 14 2024 21:09 utc | 62,
Thank you very much for the very detailed information. I much concur and agree with what you described therein.
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@All barflies,
In essence, the Taiwan problem is basically a Chinese internal affair (meaning among Chinese themselves) as a result from the civil war between CPC and KMT since 1945.
If one wants to have a CLEAR understanding about Taiwan, one has to get a grasp of its historical context in addition to Taiwan politics nowadays.
The historical context includes:
1. I believe there is NO dispute about who owned the sovereignty of Taiwan before Sino-Japanese War in 1894-95. It is unquestionably Qing (Dynasty).
2. How and when Taiwan got separated from China- as a result from Sino-Japanese War in 1894-95.
3. The 50-years of Japan occupation/colonization (1895-1945).
4. How and when Taiwan returned to China- as a result of Japanese unconditional surrender to the Allies during World War II, based on Cairo Declaration (1943) and Potsdam Declaration (1945).
The history of Taiwan presidency since ROC took back Taiwan from Japan:
1. Chiang KS (KMT, 1945-1975)
2. Yen Chai-kan (KMT, 1975-1978) (Chiang’s VP and the successor of the presidency at Chiang death. My impression is that Yen might be a care-taker and it’s said the real power is in Chiang KS’s son Chiang Ching-kuo.)
3. Chiang Ching-kuo (KMT, 1978-1988)
4. Lee Teng-hui (KMT, 1988-2000, Chiang CK’s VP and the successor of the presidency at his death in 1988)
5. Chen Shui-bian (DPP, 2000-2008)
6. Ma Ying-jeou (KMT, 2008-2016)
7. Tsai Ing-wen (DPP, 2016-2024)
8. Lai Ching-te (DPP, 2024-?)
KMT is truly for reunification only during the two-Chiang period. Since Lee’s reign, he gradually transformed KMT to a party that claims to keep the status-quo (, which is NOT reunification). Tasi Ing-wen was actually the chair of the government agency Mainland Affair Council under Lee’s presidency. She was a main contributor to Lee’s claim of Two-States Theory (Special State-To-State Relationship) in 1999. After Lee and as the effect of changes in Taiwan curriculum in the grade schools, few KMT politicians who seek public offices dare to publicly favor reunification in elections. If someone still asserts that KMT favors reunification with China today, a few possibilities:
(a) That person still lives in the two-Chiang period mentally about KMT
(b) That person is either lying or misleading
One can easily verify this by checking KMT presidential candidate Hou’s stands toward China in this election. I bet he said nothing much about favoring reunification in fear of losing votes that way. In the last a few days before the vote, Hou’s campaign kept some distance from the former president Ma because Ma publicly supports the 1992-concensus with China. Today, even 1992-consesus is a taboo in Taiwan politics- DPP would claim there is no such thing and KMT would skip mentioning it.
As for Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), its leader Ke Wen-che publicly claimed that he’s a deep-green during his 2024 presidential campaign (source in Chinese). Note that DPP’s representative color is green. KMT’s is blue and TPP is white. IMHO, Ke is simply an opportunist.
As I noted before, Taiwan would be in big trade deficit for years if it doesn’t have HUGE trade surplus with China. The numbers can be easily looked up and that may be why it does not get disputed. Those who said that Taiwan helped China to develop and China needs Taiwan more than the other way around. IMO, that’s partially true before but no longer now. At that time, China needed capital and know-how and Taiwan could offer that in the labor-intensive industries like textile after Taiwan experienced a take-off in economic development since 1980s. Around that time, China offered very cheap labor and a lot of incentives instead of “regulations” in environment or others. At the same period, Taiwan started to pay attention to environmental matters. So a lot of Taiwan businesses moved to China. It is basically mutual-beneficial- China got the capital and know-how and Taiwan (businesses) got the PROFITS.
One has to look for the facts about what actually happened and what the known ramifications of those events in Taiwan. Then comb through those to come to an objective conclusion. However, this is not possible for most people to take such efforts for every topic/subject. In the blog sphere, people basically rely on the good intention of other people to share information/expertise, anecdotes, and/or opinions. But this is really tricky and there is ample room for misleading and cognitive warfare. Applying the same standard, barflies can feel free to cast doubts on my comments here with a truckload of salt before verifying the noted events or facts. I am trying my best to note what is my opinion and what is not.
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@The one who offered a good number of opinions about Taiwan in this thread so far,
Regarding your teaching experience, my guess is that you were a teacher at either an elite private school or an amerikkkan school in Taiwan. It is much less likely that typical public schools would have foreign teachers. It’s good that your students took this opportunity to find the facts and apply logics/common sense instead of ideological interpretation of their finding. However, the students are probably in a school that is with different resources than typical public schools and they take a very small percentage of the student body in Taiwan overall. Extrapolating from that to students in Taiwan seems way over-generalized. In a “democracy”, one vote is one vote, regardless whose vote it is- a professor, a cashier, a teacher, or a worker. Since your students are not significant by the number, I wonder how much impact they’d have in the “democracy”. In addition, did you encourage your students to share their findings with others outside the classroom?
Your comments look like a lot comes from personal interpretations. If that is the case, please note it is an opinion piece instead of to present it like a fact sheet.
Posted by: LuRenJia | Jan 15 2024 1:33 utc | 83
Posted by: persiflo | Jan 14 2024 19:35 utc | 42
Today I was hinted at the work of Mr. Bernardo Kastrup, a philosopher from the Netherlands. I find myself in agreement with much he says in this recent interview, but mostly in the field of Zeitgeist diagnostics. At times, it is almost word for word the same as I posted here during the Heidegger debate last summer. ….
In this also recent and quite similar interview with Kastrup, the interviewer calls his work a “copernican revolution” of philosophy. With all due respect, I believe this glory rightfully belongs to Edmund Husserl.
First, thanks for that link. Nice interview. About ‘copernican revolution’ check this out in a Buddhist Encyclopedia about Yogachara, or ‘mind-only’ school. It’s all the same subject matter: https://encyclopediaofbuddhism.org/wiki/Yog%C4%81c%C4%81ra Related sutra: https://encyclopediaofbuddhism.org/wiki/Samdhinirmochana_Sutra From about 2,000 years ago and earlier….Truly, there is nothing new under the sun (and nothing exactly the same either)…
Excerpt:
DANIEL PINCHBECK — I enjoyed your book The Idea of the World, where you talked about allegory — this view of consciousness as the underlying foundational reality, which understands reality itself as kind of a collective woven dream, in the way poets and mystics have understood it.
BERNARDO KASTRUP — We have this naive view that the world as we perceive it is the world as it actually is in itself. In other words, we think of perception as a transparent window onto the world. We have definitive reasons to know that that cannot be the case. If our inner cognitive state or perceptual states mirrored the states of the world, there would be no upper bounds to our internal entropy, and we would just dissolve into hot soup. Evolution doesn’t favor seeing the world as it is — seeing the truth. Evolution favors survival, so we will see the world in whatever encoded version will distill what is salient for our survival and preserves our inner structure. To put it metaphorically, we are pilots of an airplane that has no transparent windshield. We only have the instrument panel — we are flying by instruments. What we call the physical world is what is displayed on the dashboard of the instruments. We have sensors, like the airplane, that measure the real world out there. In the case of the airplane, it’s an air-pressure sensor, air-speed sensor, and so on. And we have retinas, eardrums, the surface of the skin, the tongue, and the lining of the nose. The results of these measurements on the world as it actually is are presented to us, just like in the airplane, in the form of an internal dashboard that allows us to navigate the world successfully but doesn’t display the world as it actually is. Just like the dashboard isn’t the world outside, the physical world in perception isn’t the world as it is — it’s a representation thereof. And if you accept this, then every facet of the physical world is a symbol on a dashboard; everything is telling you something behind and beyond it. The physical world now denotes and connotes something that transcends the physical world itself, in the same sense that the sky outside transcends the dashboard.
DANIEL PINCHBECK — What’s fascinating about The Idea of the World is that it almost felt like you were proposing a philosophical and scientifically grounded way to reexplore the poetic, symbolic, shamanic imagination.
BERNARDO KASTRUP — Yeah. There are many theories that go under the label of idealism. The only unifying aspect is that all of them state that reality is fundamentally mental.
His use of the dashboard analogy as a nonmaterialist explanation of ‘reality’ is excellent. (That said, the word ‘mental’ is problematic because most associate it with the dashboard dials or our personal thought forms; and ‘idealism’ is similarly challenged.)
One way I’ve been formulating an explanation recently is to describe three dimensional ‘reality’ as created using a deep level of cognition which is a function of localized awareness ‘dissociated’ from the larger field in which all manifest Creation dwells. Localized consciousness through the medium of its manifest physical body literally creates the living, vividly real dreamlike illusion of dimension/solidity, duration and particularity. Any particular features space around it in all directions; this space IS primordial Mind – the underlying field out of which localized individuation in an Ocean of potential dimension emerges, folded by Mind into infinite particularity waves and ripples each of which is ‘dissociated’, i.e. distinct, from the whole whilst remaining within its (primordially loving) embrace.
It’s not that three dimensional space-time doesn’t exist; but it IS made up. Our world collectively dreams up space and time (‘Creation’) with our particularity bodies moment by unfolding moment – all of us plants, insects, living creatures, gods, humans and worlds.
There is no solid, unchanging ‘objective’ mechanical physical external reality; that is just a somewhat primitive word-derived construct, or belief.
Posted by: Scorpion | Jan 15 2024 2:00 utc | 85
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