Cooking

Cooking is my way to empty the fridge without stuffing up the trash can.

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A Garment

It's fun to see Chinese characters being incorporated in commodities because misunderstandings are, in themselves, fun.

Here is an example. The character printed on the pillow case, "縞", is a garment. The character consists of two smaller parts, "糸" & "高", "糸" indicates fabric and "高" is related to the pronunciation.

Some people ask me how can we memorize thousands of Chinese characters, and this is the secret: There are these "parts" that appear in characters repeatedly, so thousands of characters are just a combination of these parts; just like with 26 English letters you'll get thousands of English words. And most Chinese characters are made by one part indicating what it means and another part indicating how it reads, so you can make an educated guess if you get this logic. Every word with "糸" has something to do with fabric, so is "縞".

There is only one minor problem: "縞" represents the white clothes that people wear in a funeral to show their grief.

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Two comments of Men

One from "Heaven Can Wait", a guy saying to the woman he has a crush on:

"If I were, for instance, a suit or clothes, you wouldn't call me a stylish cut, and I prefer it that way. But I can safely say I'm made of solid material, I'm sewed together carefully and I have good lining, Martha. Frankly, I believe I wear well. I'm not too hot in the summer and I give protection in the winter."

Another one from "The Shop Around the Corner". The two are in constant quarrel.

Alfred Kralik: "There might be a lot we don't know about each other. You know, people seldom go to the trouble of scratching the surface of things to find the inner truth."

Klara Novak: "Well I really wouldn't care to scratch your surface, Mr. Kralik, because I know exactly what I'd find. Instead of a heart, a hand-bag. Instead of a soul, a suitcase. And instead of an intellect, a cigarette lighter... which doesn't work."

Both films are made by Ernst Lubitsch. What would Freud say about the "I wear well" claim and the "cigarette lighter which doesn't work" comment? :-)

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Why "Why Taiwan?"

Several things bothered me and they eventually made their way to this blog.

1. Type "中國 台灣" (China Taiwan) in Google's search and you'll get a website claiming to be non-governmental, at www dot chinataiwan dot org. It deals with the news about Taiwan but it's done according to China's imagination instead of facts. Everything about Taiwan is put in the frame of being a province of China, and it goes so far as to list the leaders Wen Jiabao, Hu Jingtao, and PRC's national flags as well as other symbols in the section "political system & state organs" of Taiwan.

The website is full of lies yet it ranks as number one in Google. That's no surprise because according to the Washington Post, the total number of Internet users in China exceeded those in the U.S. and became the largest in March 2008. Chinese internet users link to each other and they are able to boost any dishonest website to number one. For this reason the address of the above-mentioned website is not given as a link. I don't want to contribute to its spreading.

2. Taiwanese students in Germany complain that some of them were noted as Chinese on their visas when they requested an extension. They tried to explain to the officer but it seems that it's pure luck that determines what they get. The same person might get a "Chinese" notice this time and a "Taiwanese" notice next time though he gave the same document and argument.

3. In the Chinese eMule website VeryCD, when you register you'll have to agree to PRC's laws which forbid "to encourage the subversion of the PRC government or socialism", "to compromise the unification of the peoples and encourage the cession", or "to impair the reputation of the country," etc. These authoritarian laws are used to deprive people of their freedom of speech. Taiwanese used to have similar ones but we got rid of them so I didn't register because I don't feel like bending to them. Some Taiwanese did and I see their IDs are with a small flag. That's the flag Taiwan was forced to use in the Olympic Games. Needless to say, all other nationalities get national flags in their IDs. And needless to say, when I searched for the documentary about Hu Jia, an AIDS activist arrested and convicted by the PRC; or "The Gate of Heavenly Peace (Tiananmen)", the results are all irrelevant items.

4. EU refused to sell weapons to PRC after 1989 but now as time goes by and China's economy rises, EU is considering doing it.

5. Bush administration borrows so much money from China so now China owns the U.S.

6. When Ma Ying-jeou was elected as president, all English newspapers focused on the possible improvement of the cross-Strait relationship; and when Chen Shui-bien was heavily criticized, it was interpreted as a failure caused by his aggressiveness on the independence of Taiwan. So it seems that Ma's success and Chen's failure is evidence that the Taiwanese are in favor of a closer relationship with PRC, which I think is misleading. Ma's success comes from his reputation of being clean and decent, and Chen's failure results from his arrogance and corruption. Some media such as NPR don't have a correspondent in Taiwan and the news of Taiwan is covered by their correspondents in China, which partly explains the pro-China frame and its blind spot of Taiwanese perspective.

And more, and more. The Chinese-speaking world is dominated by Chinese nationalism and censorship. The censorship is not only executed by the government but also supported earnestly by numerous Chinese "netizens": some of them leave messages expressing hatred, some of them post information of dissidents online and encourage harassment against these individuals, and some of them attack the server to paralyze the website. Psychologically China is stuck in the early 20th century when it was invaded by western countries and Japan. This is a person suffering from child abuse and now has grown into a giant, but still traumatized by the powerlessness in his childhood. It's a recipe for disaster when a powerful person fails to recognize the power he has now and feels righteous due to the pains he suffered.

It deserves sympathetic understanding. China has not got the justice it deserves. Compared with Germany who has reflected on the sins of WW2 in an almost masochistic way, Japan basically pretends nothing happened. The hatred between Asian countries is pretty much in the present tense. It could be the future tense if the luck goes against us. China itself had been an imperialist force before its misery. It became a victim of western and Japan imperialism and as a result, the imperialism of China has never been reflected upon. The kid was a bully before he was abused, but how can you hold the abused kid accountable for what he did before? The thing is, the grown-up seems to try to restore his life so he can again freely bully his neighbors.

The imperialism of China could be, if the luck goes against us, the future tense too.

Due to the huge difference between Taiwan and China in terms of the population and political power, I am pessimistic about the communication in the Chinese-speaking world. I notice that some Taiwanese websites try to exclude users in China in a subtle way. Some write Chinese with a lot of Taiwanese dialect, some don't allow the users to register with email addresses from 126.com which is popular in China, and some ask for posting done in Chinese traditional. But even if all Taiwanese come to speak the same thing, sigh, compared with 1.3 billion Chinese, it is still like a drop in the ocean.

The English-speaking world might be worth a try. It is not flooded with Chinese nationalism and might be more accommodating to dialogue and debate on the cross-Strait issue. The lack of understanding seems to be easier to tackle, compared with interest conflict; that's why I do the excerpts of "Why Taiwan?" Maybe it's not any easier, but it's something that a hermit crab like me can do.

People say that the Internet makes us to be able to shout louder but we don't know if others are listening or not. Well, who knows with this kind of thing. But what the heck, I'll shout and see.

I am not a nationalist and I don't fancy to be one. Taiwan is part of my existence and I don't appreciate it to be distorted, misinterpreted, or lied about. I have every right to use the national flag; it's my freedom to hang it up or to set it on fire.

I am writing here not as a fundamentalist in the independence of Taiwan, not as a Taiwanese nationalist, not as a patriot, not as a partisan, not as a supporter of the government (whichever), but as a sexual, political, and sexual political dissenter, who does not reduce her life to politics only.

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Notes on Why Taiwan: (4) Conclusion and comments

This is not the conclusion of the whole book but serves well as the concluding points of the parts that I cited in previous posts.

"As Tu Wei-ming writes, 'Educated Chinese know reflexively what China proper refers to' and are deeply imbued with the idea that 'geopolitical China evolved through a long process centering around a definable core.' Taiwan, though, was never part of that definable core. It was swept into the Chinese orbit only after Dutch and Spanish aggressors expressed interest in its potential as a base from which they might engage China in international commerce, gaining advantage over the Portuguese who occupied Macao (p.42)."

"Indeed, one scarcely risks provoking objection by observing that Beijing has invested far more political capital in pursuit of its claims to Taiwan than it has in most of the territorial disputes it settled with neighbors... One does not regularly read or hear, for instance, that the future of China's 'rise' and development depends on recovering sovereignty over Diaoyutai, the islands in the South China Sea, or the territory that India governs as part of the state of Arunachal Pradesh (p.29)."

"If Taiwan is valued in part because of its geostrategic salience, then every act by the United States or Japan that Beijing interprets as encouraging or exploiting the autonomy of Taiwan is a strike at the heart of the PRC's sense of security (p.162)."

"Taiwan's people seek the dignity of sovereignty and the assurance that so long as they do no harm to the PRC, Beijing will regard the island with neighborly comity. However, the geostrategic perspective leaves adherents in Beijing-- like the sailors Odysseus ordered to fill their ears with wax-- unable to or unwilling to hear Taiwan's plea in any way other than as an insidious challenge to China's future that must, without concern for cost, be overcome (p.164)."

Published in 2007, Why Taiwan received two book reviews: J. Bruce Jacobs in China Journal and Robert Green in Taipei Times. Both are favorable to Wachman's use of the historical material to argue successfully that Taiwan was not part of China. Robert Green has a funny comment:

"At the heart of this reading is the idea that relative strength dictates the imagined geography of security planners and the desire for a greater sphere of influence. Historically, this is a telltale of an expansionist power. As a nation's military capacity grows, so does its appetite for influence. Suddenly, ever-more-distant 'buffer zones' are necessary for security, and often far-flung geographic locations take on an immediacy and vitality for a nation's defense. Lord Salisbury, prime minister of Great Britain during the height of its imperial expansion, once quipped that his military advisors, if they had their way, would 'garrison the moon to protect us from Mars.'"

Technorati Tags:taiwan, china, alan wachman, why taiwan

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Notes on Why Taiwan: (3) 19th-20th century

Continued: On Chinese elite's indifference toward Taiwan in 19th and 20th century

June 2, 1895, Taiwan was ceded to Japan.

"Taiwan, it seems, was not simply 'lost' to Japan, but expunged from the ruling elite's mental map of China (p.69)."

"However, despite vigorous resistance to Japan's occupation that persisted on Taiwan for five months after the cession of the island, Qing court disavowed interest in the fate of the island, turned its back on local efforts to fight Japanese occupation, and resumed diplomatic relations with Japan on June 22. Whether the Qing foreign policy establishment perceived no responsibility or was simply overwhelmed by a sense of futility in the face of Japan's superior military power is hard to know (p.69)."

"Harry Lamley argues that the Qing was willing to let Taiwan go so long as it was ensured that the Liaodong peninsula remained part of China. There is also a myth, concocted perhaps by Li Hongzhang's detractors, that Li had all along aimed to rid the Qing of Taiwan because it was a difficult place to administer. This theme is highlighted in the recollections of the man who, in 1895, had been Japan's Vice-Foreign Minister, Hayashi Tadasu. Hayashi [a typo as 'Hitashi' in the original text] wrote that Li had shrewdly 'surrendered nothing which he was not prepared glad to get rid of, except the indemnity. He always considered Formosa [Taiwan] a curse to China... (p.188)'"

"In Japan, Liang [Liang Qichao, a leading Chinese intellectual who took part in the 100-day Reform in 1898] was sought out by a leading Taiwanese activist who hoped to receive advice about a strategy for resisting Japanese colonialism. Rather than to offer encouragement that resistance should be supported by the Chinese government, Liang preached moderation and made clear his view that Taiwan should not expect support from China (p.188)."

"Nevertheless, 'no Chinese government - Qing Empire, Nationalist Republic, or Communist Soviet - had a realistic chance of restoring sovereignty over the island, and no leader of these entities made Taiwan a major issue in domestic politics or relations with Japan. Simply put... few politicians even considered the island, much less devoted resources to its return (p.70, Wachman quotes from Steven Phillips).'"

Till the end of the WW2 was expected, China claimed the ownership of Taiwan.

"The decision to claim Taiwan was made sometime in 1942, after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and the declaration of war by the United States. The entrance of the United States into the war and the prospect of a transition in the balance of power in Asia may have encouraged China's leaders to envisage for the first time that Japan would be defeated (p.70)."

"Before that moment, though, the public attitude of Chinese Nationalist leaders toward Taiwan can only be characterized as indifference (p.70)."

Detailed evidence of the indifference is offered below.

"When in September 1900, Sun visited Taiwan, local opponents of Japanese colonialism were still locked in an armed struggle against Japan, and yet Sun apparently did not make any efforts to meet with activists on Taiwan who were fighting to alleviate colonialism (p.71)."

"Sun apparently regrets, but does not contest, the cession of those territories in the first list. There, Taiwan is equated with Burma and Vietnam, neither of which have been the subject of anything more irredentist than comparatively limited boundary disputes (p.72)."

Dr. Sun Yet-sen in a 1923 interview with New York Times considers China and Taiwan as different entities.

"If Taiwan had then been viewed by Sun as part of China, he might not have spoken of a difference between Taiwan's master and China's. He might have specified that in Taiwan, China had one master, but on the continent it had several. He did not do this, though, because it seems he did not view Taiwan as part of China's territory (p.72)."

"Dai Jitao, one of Sun's confidantes, wrote in march 1925, that twenty days before Sun died he spoke of three measures Japan should take to reestablish the confidence of people in China and East Asia. According to Dai, Sun advocated that japan grant complete autonomy [initial emphasis] to the peoples of Taiwan and Korea. Had he viewed Taiwan as Chinese territory, he might have expected that Japan return the island to China (p.73)."

Chiang Kai-shek did not claim Taiwan until 1938.

"It is noteworthy that he said, 'we must enable Korea and Taiwan to restore their independence and freedom, and enable them to solidify the national defense of the Republic of China (emphasis added).' That is, Taiwan and Korea- freed from Japanese occupation- were depicted as enhancing the security of China (p.75)."

Till 1942 there was the pledge that Taiwan should be emancipated and returned to the "mother country".

In 1943 in Cairo Crucible, Roosevelt pledged Chiang to take back Taiwan but Robert Dallek considers it "an outgrowth of Roosevelt's tender manipulation of Chiang Kai-shek (p.77)."

"Evidence of new thinking about Taiwan came from a variety of sources. Owen Lattimore, Roosevelt's adviser to Chiang Kai-shek, reported in August 1942, 'if any western power wants Formosa, the Chinese will claim it, but otherwise they may not insist on possessing it, since they lack the sea power to hold it (p.79)."

In 1943 Chiang published China's Destiny.

"Taiwan is among those territories that Chiang sees as offering a buffer, 'safe-guarding the nation's existence.' (p.80)"

As to elites of Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the attitude is not much different.

CCP was founded in 1921 and in 1922 CCP released a manifesto stating seven major tasks.

"[5] Use the free federal system to unify China proper, Mongolia, Tibet, Muslim Xinjiang in order to establish a Chinese Federal Republic (cited from Wachman, p.83)."

"It is noteworthy that Taiwan was not mentioned. Perhaps the CCP elite also accepted that the Treaty of Shimonoseki was binding and Taiwan's loss permanent (p.83)."

In 1928, Taiwanese is listed as one of the "minority nationalities" among Mongols, Muslims, Koreans, Miao, Li, and peoples of Xinjiang and Tibet.

"While the CCP was later to emphasize that Taiwanese are not a separate nationality but are Chinese, in the first decades of its existence, 'the CCP never referred to the Taiwanese as [brethren] (dixiong), or [the offspring of the Yellow Emperor], or [compatriots] (tongbao).' When they were not categorized by the CCP as a national minority, Taiwan's population was associated with the same category as the Koreans and the Annanese [Vietnamese], all oppressed peoples. (p.83, Wachman quoted Hsiao and Sullivan, The Cinese Communist party and the Status of Taiwan, p.448)"

"A Central Committee notice of that era calls for the reassertion of Chinese sovereignty over Shandong and Manchuria, both then held by Japan. However, Taiwan-- also a Japanese colony at that time-- was not even mentioned (p.192)."

"However, rather than include Taiwan in 'the nation,' the CCP entreats adherents to 'Unite with the people who are opposed to Japanese imperialism (the laboring masses in Japan, the Koreans, the Taiwanese, etc.) as our allies, unite with all peoples and nations sympathetic toward the Chinese national liberation movement, and establish friendly relations with all peoples and nations who opt for a well-considered neutrality in the anti-Japanese war (p.84, Wachman cited from 'Wei kang-Ri jiuguo gao quanti tongbao shu', published in 1935).'"

"Early in his career, Mao Zedong associated Taiwan with Korea and Vietnam (p.84)."

Mao said this in an interview done by Edgar Snow, 1936:

"It is the immediate task of China to regain all our lost territories, not merely to defend our sovereignty south of the Great Wall. This means that Manchuria must be regained. We do not, however, include Korea, formerly a Chinese colony, but when we have re-established the independence of the lost territories of China, and if the Koreans wish to break away from the chains of Japanese imperialism, we will extend them our enthusiastic help in their struggle for independence. The same thing applies for Taiwan (Cited form Wachman, p.85)."

Zhang Guotao, Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping, and Zhou Enlai, all leading elites in CCP, expressed similar stance (p.87-89).

In a 1941 document, CCP made it clear that China should "recover all our lost territories by fighting to the banks of the Yalu River and driving the Japanese imperialists out of China", but kept quiet in the cast land ceded to Russia in 1858 and 1860 (p.89).

"The association of the people of Taiwan with those of Korea and Vietnam, not with those of China, is a characterization that consistently appears in the formal statements of China's communist leadership (p.90)."

"One cannot avoid the conclusion that the CCP and its principal leaders neither viewed the island of Taiwan as China's territory nor felt that it was necessary to incorporate Taiwan into China following the defeat of Japan (p.90-91)."

CCP changed its attitude toward Taiwan in 1942, and possible reasons are:

1. The Comintern considered Taiwan as Japanese colony and believed it deserve "complete independence" like all colonies. Taiwan Communist Party (TCP), therefore, was an affiliate Japanese Communist Party in Comintern, and not CCP. This stance might influence CCP. In 20s and 30s CCP challenged some doctrines of Comintern but it didn't try to contest on the inclusion of Taiwan. Comintern was abolished in 1943 (p.94).

2. Some Taiwanese went to China and advocated for the restoration of Taiwan as a province of China. "Where the TCP was devoted on the independence of Taiwan after the defeat of Japan, the noncommunist activists were urging the ROC government to restore Taiwan's status as a province of China, following the defeat of Japan (p.96)." These pro-China Taiwanese felt frustrated to learn the indifference from the Nationalist Party, and CCP might consider this to be a chance to extend the rivalry with the Nationalist (p.97).

"That the CCP changed its stripes on the matter of Taiwan independence strikes Michael Hunt as characteristic of a party that was focused on expedience, not consistency. He writes that sympathy expressed early in the CCP's history for the weak and oppressed peoples was discarded when inconvenient for the party to uphold this line. Simply, the party operated unapologetically out of political opportunism (p.98)."

Technorati Tags:taiwan, china, alan wachman, why taiwan

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Notes on Why Taiwan: (2) 16th-19th century

Continued: On how Taiwan entered (or did not enter) the imagined geography of China

"By the middle of the sixteenth century, though, economic opportunity, as well as 'push' factors along the southeast coast of China, impelled profit-seekers to flout Ming regulations restricting seagoing ventures and to enter into the vibrant oceanic trade that entangled Japanese, Southeast Asians, European, and, increasingly, Chinese merchants into the skein of commercial interactions (p.51)."

"Davidson writes that 'A formal cession of the island was now made, which, considering that the Chinese had no right to it and never claimed any, was probably not a heart-rending task for them' (p.53)." (referring to 1624)

"Emma Teng argues that the prevailing view of Taiwan inherited from the Ming was 'that it was [beyond the seas] (haiwei); and... that it belonged to a realm known as [Wilderness] (huangfu) (p.57)."

"Teng makes the case that negligible contact with Taiwan and scant knowledge of it contributed to the view that it was an untamed frontier (p.57)."

"She cites, as examples, The Record of the Naval Defenses of Fujian Province [Fujian Haifangzhi], in which it is written that Taiwan 'extends from the northeastern to the southeastern like a standing screen; it is the outer boundary for China's four [coastal] provinces (p.59).'"

"In this formulation, Taiwan is not 'Chinese' in the sense of being territory deeply enmeshed in the national consciousness. It became China's for instrumental, geostrategic purposes long after the concept of China's territorial heartland had established in the minds of Chinese elite (p.59)."

"Chronicles of the cross-Strait dispute ordinarily begin with the ROC-CCP rivalry of the 1940s and, occasionally, peek back at the cession of Taiwan to Japan in 1895 and, more rarely, review the Qing history of interaction with the island dating to the early seventeenth century. Most analyses of the contemporary controversy focus on the cross-Strait dispute as if it were bounded by a logic and history that is separate from China's contest over other territories and over the island prior to 1950s. It is not (p.67)."

"Taiwan is not simply an object of bilateral dispute between Beijing and Taipei that emerged from Chinese civil war, but is perceived by some analysts in the PRC as a struggle for security and power in the context of an enduring rivalry with the United States for hegemonic influence in the Pacific (p.67)."

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Notes on Why Taiwan: (1) introduction

Why Taiwan? Alan Wachman wonders, as many others, why China has such an interest in taking Taiwan? Some would say it's for the sacred territorial integrity of China, but China didn't pay equal attention to other areas such as Mongolia or Arunachal Pradesh where China had disputes with neighboring countries. Wachman argues that Taiwan is considered significant and inseparable for geopolitical reasons; "Taiwan matters not only because of what it is, but because of where it is (p.32)." Here are some quotes from the book Why Taiwan? Geostrategic rationales for China's territorial integrity.

"Taiwan is one of those tracts of earth that has a 'history of ambiguity'. It has changed hands repeatedly and has been the focus of recurring struggles over identity, sovereignty and control. For the most part, since the seventeenth century, it has 'been defined as a small part of something else.' Taiwan, as Steven Phillips notes, has been administered as an overseas possession of a European power (1624-1661), an independent kingdom (1661-1683), a prefecture of a province (1684-1885), a province of an empire (1885-1895), a colony of a rival empire (1895-1945), and a province of a republic (1945-1949) (p.45)."

"For most of China's recorded history, the Chinese elite was largely unaware that the island even existed (p.46)."

"Qing territory waxed during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but waned from the nineteenth to the collapse of the dynasty in the early twentieth century. To state that the PRC now inhabits the territories of the Qing is misleading (p.49)."

"In the case of Taiwan, the dominant motive for expansion was not security, per se, but 'take it or it will be taken'. The Qing decision to take the island was justified by a policy of strategic denial intended to ensure that Taiwan did not fall into hostile, foreign hands and then become a threat to security (p.49)."

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