September 23, 2005
OTHER THAN THAT HOW'D YOU ENJOY THE LECTURE, MR. HU?:
Friendship visit by ally of China turns into blistering lecture (Joseph Kahn, SEPTEMBER 23, 2005, The New York Times)
China's leaders may have felt they had no better friend in Taiwan than Li Ao, a defiant and outspoken politician and author who says that Taiwan should unify with Communist China. But when the Chinese government invited Li to tour the mainland this past week, the Communist Party got a taste of its rival's pungent democracy.
During an address at Beijing University on Wednesday, broadcast live on a cable television network, Li chided China's leaders for suppressing free speech, ridiculed the university administration's fear of academic debate and advised students on how to fight for freedom against official repression. [...]
[W]hen he arrived in mainland China, he surprised his hosts with caustic comments aimed not at Taiwanese separatism, but at mainland authoritarianism. Though Li did not criticize Hu directly, he made pointed references to the lack of freedoms in mainland China and suggested that "poker-faced" Communist Party bureaucrats do not have enough faith in their legitimacy to allow normal intellectual discussion.
With several top university officials sitting by his side, he called the administrators "cowardly" for ferreting out professors at the school who are suspected of opposing communism.
Though his arrival in mainland China was covered prominently by the state-run media and his speech was viewed on television by millions around China, the authorities imposed a blackout on reporting about his visit after the speech.
Thereby proving his point. Posted by Orrin Judd at September 23, 2005 12:49 PM
Loop.
Posted by: Michael Herdegen![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://brothersjuddblog.com/nav-commenters.gif)
at September 23, 2005 8:36 PM
UNloop, ya dang non-literalist!
Posted by: at September 23, 2005 11:32 PMWhen I lived in Taiwan during the early 1980s, it was still controlled by the Kuomintang as a military dictatorship. Make no mistake. Taiwan wasn't a democracy yet at that time. But it was a sign of how much more open authoritarian Taiwan was even back then that you could find Li Ao's writings in practically any bookstore on the island.
This was one reason why Taiwan was able to make a peaceful transition to liberal democracy. It is also another reason why China will find it much more difficult. An authoritarian Taiwan under the KMT more than 20 years ago was already much freer than China today where the Communist Party has been been carrying out almost three decades of "reform."
Posted by: X at September 24, 2005 9:12 AMX:
It's the classic distinction that Jeane Kirkpatrick drew and it would seem significant that all those authoritarian allies of ours -- Taiwan, the Dominican Republic, Chile, the Philippines, South Africa, even Iran -- developed into stable democracies relatively peacefully.
Posted by: oj at September 24, 2005 9:25 AMoj, exactly.
The way that China Hands and "China experts" have presented Taiwan and China also shows how badly the United States has been served by them.
In the past, with few exceptions, they belittled KMT Taiwan as a reactionary right-wing dictatorship while lauding Communist China as a liberalizing future great power. Today, even after Taiwan has been transformed into a full democracy, this sad tendency continues with many of America's China specialists, diplomats, and military thinkers worrying more about Taiwan as a "problem" rather than seeing it for what it really is: an inspiring example of millions of people of Chinese descent who created the first working Chinese democracy in history and who are actually China's greatest hope. Thank God that this finally seems to be changing, but there are still too many Chamberlains and not enough Churchills in America's corporate boardrooms and corridors of power.
I am not Taiwanese. I know that Taiwan's democracy isn't perfect. But I also see that Hong Kong is freer than China and that Taiwan is freer than Hong Kong. I would rather be damned to hell first before I would admit that democratic Taiwan should be sacrificed to a Communist Chinese autocracy for the sake of temporary quarterly profits and for an illusory "international stability."
Even the dumbest bureaucrat in the State Department who's brimming with unbounded optimism about China as an emerging superpower should know that something's not right when even a hard-core supporter of reunification such as Li Ao criticizes the mainland regime.
Posted by: X at September 24, 2005 10:08 AMX:
State and the Intelligence services value just one thing: stability. It creates less work.
Posted by: oj at September 24, 2005 4:47 PM