Now
Available from
CounterPunch for Only $11.50 (S/H Included)
Today's
Stories
January 3 / 4, 2004
Glen Martin
Jesus
vs. the Beast of the Apocalypse
January 2, 2004
Stan Cox
Red Alert
2016
Dave Lindorff
Beef, the Meat of Republicans
Jackie Corr
Rule and Ruin: Wall Street and Montana
Norman Solomon
George Will's Ethics: None of Our Business?
David Vest
As the Top Wobbleth
January 1, 2004
Randall Robinson
Honor
Haiti, Honor Ourselves
David Krieger
Looking
Back on 2003
Robert Fisk
War Takes an Inhuman Twist: Roadkill Bombs
Stan Goff
War,
Race and Elections
Hammond Guthrie
2003 Almaniac
Website of the Day
Embody Bags
December 31, 2003
Ray McGovern
Don't
Be Fooled Again: This Isn't an Independent Investigation
Kurt Nimmo
Manufacturing Hysteria
Robert Fisk
The Occupation is Damned
Mike Whitney
Mad Cows and Downer George
Alexander Cockburn
A Great Year Ebbed, Another Ahead
December 30, 2003
Michael Neumann
Criticism
of Israel is Not Anti-Semitism
Annie Higgins
When
They Bombed the Hometown of the Virgin Mary
Alan Farago
Bush Bros. Wrecking Co.: Time Runs Out for the Everglades
Dan Bacher
Creatures from the Blacklight Lagoon: From Glofish to Frankenfish
Jeffrey St. Clair
Hard
Time on the Killing Floor: Inside Big Meat
Willie Nelson
Whatever Happened to Peace on Earth?
December 29, 2003
Mark Hand
The Washington
Post in the Dock?
David Lindorff
The
Bush Election Strategy
Phillip Cryan
Interested Blindness: Media Omissions in Colombia's War
Richard Trainor
Catellus Development: the Next Octopus?
Uri Avnery
Israel's
Conscientious Objectors
December 27 / 28, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
A
Journey Into Rupert Murdoch's Soul
Kathy Kelly
Christmas Day in Baghdad: A Better World
Saul Landau
Iraq
at the End of the Year
Dave Zirin
A Linebacker for Peace & Justice: an Interview with David
Meggysey
Robert Fisk
Iraq
Through the American Looking Glass
Scott Burchill
The Bad Guys We Once Thought Good: Where Are They Now?
Chris Floyd
Bush's Iraq Plan is Right on Course: Saddam 2.0
Brian J. Foley
Don't Tread on Me: Act Now to Save the Constitution
Seth Sandronsky
Feedlot Sweatshops: Mad Cows and the Market
Susan Davis
Lord
of the (Cash Register) Rings
Ron Jacobs
Cratched Does California
Adam Engel
Crumblecake and Fish
Norman Solomon
The Unpardonable Lenny Bruce
Poets' Basement
Cullen and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Activism Through Music
December 26, 2003
Gary Leupp
Bush
Doings: Doing the Language
December 25, 2003
Diane Christian
The
Christmas Story
Elaine Cassel
This
Christmas, the World is Too Much With Us
Susan Davis
Jinglebells, Hold the Schlock
Kristen Ess
Bethlehem Celebrates Christmas, While Rafah Counts the Dead
Francis Boyle
Oh Little Town of Bethlehem
Alexander Cockburn
The
Magnificient 9
Guthrie / Albert
Another Colorful Season
December 24, 2003
M. Shahid Alam
The Semantics
of Empire
William S. Lind
Marley's
List for Santa in Wartime
Josh Frank
Iraqi
Oil: First Come, First Serve
Cpt. Paul Watson
The
Mad Cowboy Was Right
Robert Lopez
Nuance
and Innuendo in the War on Iraq
December 23, 2003
Brian J. Foley
Duck
and Cover-up
Will Youmans
Sharon's
Ultimatum
Michael Donnelly
Here
They Come Again: Another Big Green Fiasco
Uri Avnery
Sharon's
Speech: the Decoded Version
December 22, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Pray
to Play: Bush's Faith-Based National Parks
Patrick Gavin
What Would Lincoln Do?
Marjorie Cohn
How to
Try Saddam: Searching for a Just Venue
Kathy Kelly
The
Two Troublemakers: "Guilty of Being Palestinians in Iraq"
December 20 / 21, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
How
to Kill Saddam
Saul Landau
Bush Tries Farce as Cuba Policy
Rafael Hernandez
Empire and Resistance: an Interview with Tariq Ali
David Vest
Our Ass and Saddam's Hole
Kurt Nimmo
Bush
Gets Serious About Killing Iraqis
Greg Weiher
Lessons from the Israeli School on How to Win Friends in the
Islamic World
Christopher Brauchli
Arrest, Smear, Slink Away: Dr. Lee and Cpt. Yee
Carol Norris
Cheers of a Clown: Saddam and the Gloating Bush
Bruce Jackson
The Nameless and the Detained: Bush's Disappeared
Juliana Fredman
A Sealed Laboratory of Repression
Mickey Z.
Holiday Spirit at the UN
Ron Jacobs
In the Wake of Rebellion: The Prisoner's Rights Movement and
Latino Prisoners
Josh Frank
Sen. Max Baucus: the Slick Swindler
John L. Hess
Slow Train to the Plane
Adam Engel
Black is Indeed Beautiful
Ben Tripp
The Relevance of Art in Times of Crisis
Michael Neumann
Rhythm and Race
Poets' Basement
Cullen, Engel, Albert & Guthrie
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
|
Weekend
Edition
January 3 / 4, 2004
Bush
Sells Out Another Democracy Movement
Hypocrisy
on Taiwan
By DAVE LINDORFF
When it comes to rampant hypocrisy, it doesn't
get much worse than the Bush Administration's recent sell-out
of the people of Taiwan. At the same time that the Bush Administration
is claiming to be a champion of democracy and democratization
in Iraq and the Middle East, the president has slapped down a
country that has been making historic strides away from a millenium's-old
totalitarian culture and polity and creating a vibrant democracy:
the Republic of China on the island of Taiwan.
Not too many years ago, Taiwan and the
People's Republic of China would have been hard to distinguish.
The former was run with an iron hand by first Chiang Kai-shek
and then his son, backed by a vicious Nationalist army of occupation
that crushed the slightest sign of opposition from the island's
native Taiwanese. More recently, the Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang,
had mellowed and began introducing democratic reforms, ultimately
legalizing opposition parties.
Today, the country has vigorously contested
parliamentary elections, the president, Chen Shui-bian, is the
head of a pro-Taiwan independence party, the Democratic Progressives,
and the country is hands down among the freest in Asia, if not
the freest.
China, meanwhile, while growing in economic
and military power, remains under the stifling control of a repressive
Stalinist government that brooks no political opposition, that
stays in power through the repressive workings of a police state
that numbers its uniformed minions in the millions, and that
continues to harass and lock up those who try to promote freedom
of trade unions, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom
of religion, or who tries to organize a political party outside
of the Communist Party. In truth, the Chinese political system
has little to do with Marxism these days, and much more closely
resembles fascism as it was long practiced in countries of Latin
America or Europe.
Taiwan's peculiar problem is that it
has never really fully separated, or has been able to fully separate
from China. When Chiang Kai-shek realized that his corrupt and
demoralized Nationalist army was about to be completely defeated
on the mainland by Mao Tse-tung's People's Liberation Army in
the late 1940s, he made arrangements to flee with his most loyal
troops and a large number of China's ruling elite to the island
of Taiwan, recently freed from decades of Japanese colonial rule
(Japan called the island Formosa).
For years afterwards, both the People's
Republic of China on the mainland, under the Communists, and
the Republic of China on Taiwan, maintained the fiction that
they were the only China. The Beijing government called Taiwan
a renegade province, while the Nationalists on the island pretended
that they were the government of all of China.
The U.S., which had backed Chiang's army
against the Communist revolutionaries, initially endorsed the
Nationalist claim that they were the real Chinese government--a
fiction that endured until Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger
made their famous trips to China and finally recognized the Communist
regime in Beijing.
But ever since then, the U.S.--and particularly
the right wing of both parties--has backed the government and
people of Taiwan, making it clear to China that it would not
permit a military attack on the island.
This situation has prevailed down to
the present.
China has continued to insist that it
wants reunification, and on occasion has threatened military
action, most recently in 1997, when the Chinese military launched
guided missiles into the shipping lanes to and from the ports
on the northern and southern ends of Taiwan. At that time, President
Clinton responded by sending U.S. Navy subs and aircraft carriers
to the Taiwan Strait, a 100-mile-wide waterway that separates
Taiwan from the Asian mainland, making it clear that the U.S.
would intervene if China attempted to attack.
The current crisis has seen a much different
response however.
Facing an election in March, Taiwan's
President Chen has been promoting the idea of an island-wide
referendum in 2004. The issue: not independence from China, but
simply whether to call on China to stop pointing missiles at
Taiwan.
That might seem a pretty reasonable--and
benign--request for the people of Taiwan to make through the
ballot box. Indeed it's a lot less belligerent than the threat
of World War III that President John Kennedy made to Cuba and
the Soviet Union when the USSR began placing missiles in Cuba
pointed at this country.
But our avowedly pro-democracy president
George Bush--the man who purports to be so enamored of freedom
that he was willing, in promoting it, to invade a country and
commit 150,000 U.S. troops to a war whose end no one can predict--was
having none of it. With China's new premier Wen Jiabao (a Communist
proponent of dictatorial rule) standing at his side, Bush warned
President Chen not to push the referendum idea or to try to change
the status quo.
Referendums, it seems, are appropriate
for Californians, not for Taiwanese or Chinese.
It was a major slapdown of Taiwan's democrats
and in fact, represents a big change in the status quo itself.
Self-determination is a fundamental right
of all people, and the people of Taiwan, who have not been a
part of China for many, many generations, have a right to determine
their own destiny, including the right to decide that they prefer
independence to forced subjugation to and incorporation into
a fascist regime and country.
One would think, to hear our president
talk about the joys of freedom and democracy, that this is something
the White House and the ruling Republican Party could get behind,
but no. They and their corporate sponsors are so busy making
money in China and shifting American jobs to the Chinese mainland,
that they don't want any problems from an island of 23 million
people.
The irony is that with any luck, Taiwan
could represent the real future for China. While it's hard to
imagine at the moment, Taiwan could well be the model for China's
eventual transition to a free and democratic society. For thousands
of years, China has been a feudal society run by emperors. Almost
alone among the great civilizations of the world, it has had
no experience with bourgeois democracy (the few years in which
Republican China experimented with a parliament can hardly count,
as the government was thoroughly corrupt and the country was
in the grip of civil war the whole time, and Hong Kong, where
a majority of the legislative council represents business interests,
and where the chief executive is appointed, hardly rates as a
democracy). The only real model of Chinese democracy, then, has
been on Taiwan.
If and when the sclerotic Communist regime
in Beijing finally collapses, that island model is going to become
enormously important in the struggle to build a new, modern China--
which explains why Beijing's rulers are so intent on snuffing
it.
One can only hope that the Bush regime
will not help China's current rulers extinguish this experiment,
though the president's latest action is a bad sign.
Dave Lindorff,
who majored in Chinese in college, has spent six years as a journalist
in Hong Kong and China, and will be a Fulbright Scholar in Taiwan
during the first half of 2004.
Weekend
Edition Features for Dec. 27 / 28, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
A
Journey Into Rupert Murdoch's Soul
Kathy Kelly
Christmas Day in Baghdad: A Better World
Saul Landau
Iraq
at the End of the Year
Dave Zirin
A Linebacker for Peace & Justice: an Interview with David
Meggysey
Robert Fisk
Iraq
Through the American Looking Glass
Scott Burchill
The Bad Guys We Once Thought Good: Where Are They Now?
Chris Floyd
Bush's Iraq Plan is Right on Course: Saddam 2.0
Brian J. Foley
Don't Tread on Me: Act Now to Save the Constitution
Seth Sandronsky
Feedlot Sweatshops: Mad Cows and the Market
Susan Davis
Lord
of the (Cash Register) Rings
Ron Jacobs
Cratched Does California
Adam Engel
Crumblecake and Fish
Norman Solomon
The Unpardonable Lenny Bruce
Poets' Basement
Cullen and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Activism Through Music
Keep CounterPunch Alive:
Make
a Tax-Deductible Donation Today Online!
home / subscribe
/ about us / books
/ archives / search
/ links /
|