It’s time to take off the “Green Goggles”
It’s easy, comforting and really quite natural for western reporters in Taiwan to feel sympathetic towards the DPP, but in doing so they risk missing seeing Taiwan as it really is
If you’re wondering about what’s been happening with Taiwan’s Legislative Reform bill which caused pandemonium in the legislature and mass protest in Taipei, there’s luckily a raft of western journalists here to explain it to you.
From Guardian, we learn that “Thousands of Taiwanese citizens gathered outside the legislative yuan to protest against attempts by the opposition parties to push through a bill without review.” “Also included in the bill is an ambitious but controversial infrastructure project to link the island’s east and west coasts,”added Al Jazeera’s explainer. $61 billion US dollars, if you can believe it!
But you probably shouldn’t.
At least, don’t believe that you can actually tell what’s going on in Taiwan just by reading those stories or so many others like it!
Legislative Reform 2: parties switcharoo
“Taiwan’s legislature does not have the comprehensive right to investigate! It is like a tiger without teeth!” <== Is that a quote from a Kuomintang (KMT) lawmaker looking to ram the legislative reform through without review?
Um, actually, it is from then-Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lawmaker Lee Chun-yi. You see, before the DPP was against legislative reform to empower the legislature to investigate and hold hearings like the congress in the US, it was very much for it.
In fact, then-legislator Cheng Li-Chiun led the charge. She was the Chairwoman of the Taiwan Thinktank back then, and spearheaded an initiative with the help of a young lawyer named Huang Guo-Chang to draft a bill to give “teeth” to the toothless tiger of the legislature. The draft was eventually adopted by then-legislator Lin Chia-lung, then-legislator Wellington Koo and of Cheng herself as legislator in 2012 and 2016. Candidate Tsai Ing-wen even made it a part of her campaign platform to deliver on legislative reform.
Fast forward to 2024: Cheng Li-Chiun is now the Vice Premier. Wellington Koo is the Minister of Defense. Lin Chia-lung is the Foreign Minister. None of them ever said a peep about legislative reform ever since the DPP took power. Stronger legislative oversight now no longer benefitted their party.
But one person didn’t forget: Huang Guo-Chang, the young thinktanker who helped craft the DPP proposals. He’s now a legislator for the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) and the burning, searing, driving force behind passing legislative reform in Taiwan.
You won’t read about Huang and the role of the TPP in driving the legislative reform bill in western outlets. Just like you won’t read that the DPP was all for giving the legislature more power to investigate before it was against it. Instead you’ll hear from DPP legislators, DPP-leaning NGOs and think tanks saying how dangerous and undemocratic the bill is, and vox pop from people who are all against the bill.
It’s good to be green
Thanks to the Guardian we got to hear from Drag Queen Nymphia Wind speaking from the protest against the KMT/TPP alliance. “We need to defend what we care about today, and everyone should stand up for it,” she said.
In the same story the Guardian also got to speak to a DPP lawmaker, another protester, and quoted unnamed experts who called the bill “potentially unconstitutional.” There was no quote from and KMT or TPP sources. Al Jazeera’s story talked to three experts and NOBODY from the KMT or TPP. Nobody talked to Huang, the chief architect of the bill or quoted him from his copious online video interviews.
And so it’s accepted that the bill was being pushed through without review by almost all the outlets which is utterly untrue. In fact, there were six meetings about it in the Legislative Yuan including three public hearings. THESE MEETINGS ARE STILL ONLINE!
Look I get it. There’s a protest going on so of course you want to hear their grievances, and all the protesters do parrot the line that it’s a “black box.” But isn’t it the reporter’s job to fact check? The lack of any counterbalance to these stories is really disturbing. I also feel bad I’m picking on those two because the problem is really endemic.
I deeply suspect that the reporters themselves come to Taiwan, and they deeply fall in love with the DPP narrative: plucky little island determined to be sovereign and defend its independence and right to be gay and drink boba! I mean, it’s adorable amirite?
Meanwhile, you can tell the reporters never really engage with the KMT or TPP point of view seriously. I know from experience that the KMT can be hard to find common ground with when you first encounter them. They have a tendency to be dour realists who harbor what appears to be ridiculous nostalgia for a bygone non-democratic era. And why do they seem to be such panda huggers? Ew! The recent upstart TPP can also be hard to figure out: why is Ko Wen-je so weird? They’re working with the KMT so let’s call just them pro-China too!
I understand the tendency to just lean more on DPP sources. Especially for correspondents coming to Taiwan without the language and cultural background, the pan-green politicians and organizations are so much easier to interface with.
It’s also a much better narrative to sell to editors back home who wants everything collapsed into a digestible morality play with goodies and baddies and something about the threat of CHINA! Win win win.
The problem is it leads to reporters absolutely getting hosed and captured by DPP narrative.
I’ve read the fact that the KMT/TPP used a show-of-hand vote as evidence to show that the bill was getting steamrolled through the legislature. This totally ignores the fact that the DPP legislators by this point of the proceedings were physically trying to attack the speaker’s podium to disrupt the vote. KMT/TPP legislators had to form a ring of protection around the speaker so that legislative business can proceed while more DPP legislators continually try to breach the ring. This was why they couldn’t use the little voting boxes on their seats. So they voted by raising hands, which is also perfectly valid procedurally.
Red Smears and the missing majority
The problem with this style of reporting…and it’s going to get worse and worse with time I have a feeling…is that it is out of touch with the mainstream of Taiwan.
While foreign correspondents are de-facto cheering on student protesters or swallowing the DPP narrative about KMT/TPP procedural impropriety, the general public in Taiwan just want legislative reform done: polls show 57.7% are in favor of the bill and only 29% are against. This is to say, the KMT/TPP alliance not only have the numbers in the legislature, they also have the numbers when it comes to public opinion. To say “but look at all the protestors” is like saying “look at all those MAGA protestors…they must have a point about how much Biden sucks.”
Looking beyond this event, if you are a correspondent or just have opinions about Taiwan in general, try to think through what you are implying when you describe the KMT and the TPP as “pro-China” parties while you describe DPP as the “pro-Taiwan” party in comparison.
In the last election, roughly 60 percent of the people voted either for the KMT or the TPP candidate. Are you saying that the majority of voters in Taiwan are pro-China? What are the implications of this if you really think it through?
I’m challenging all of you, if you really love Taiwan, to get to know the real Taiwan. That comes from finding ways to “take off the green goggles” and realize that the other side deserves to be heard.
Western and pro-DPP NGOs are experts at propaganda and at shaping public opinions. You think western reporters were "captured by the DPP"? Quite the opposite. They came with a agenda to shape public opinions, both in Taiwan and in the west, in a certain way. In a way similar to what lead to Maidan 2014 in Ukraine, if you know what I mean. Just my 2 cents. Or maybe you could call it my "50 cents" haha. Full disclosure I'm mainlander Chinese by birth but having lived in the west for the past 16 years. I don't read Chinese (propaganda) news but I do read a lot of western mainstream media. And I hereby declare, that the western media definitely have an agenda other than impartial reporting, especially after 2016 or so.
The green-tinted goggles you've aptly used also misses a deeper potential social shift. Like the boy who cried wolf, the DPP gaslighting around an objectively popular bill is tightening the bonds between the TPP and KMT, and likely their supporters as well. The same problem applies to DPP's "protect democracy" and even "抗中保台" talking points, rendering those terms empty rhetoric when some day a REAL threat from China arises.