The Dark Side of Recall Madness

Unsavory revelations of a key pro-recall influencer puts the DPP in a quandary and further polarizes Taiwan

I kind of knew Ba Jiong and his sidekick Minnan Wolf were bad news as soon as they appeared on the scene as the newest anti-China influencers. They were confrontational and provocative. They had bad juju.

They also became the de-facto leaders of the Great Recall movement against KMT legislators. Part of this was the DPP wanted to preserve the narrative that the Great Recall was a grassroots initiative that had nothing to do with the party. Part of it was how undeniably effective Ba Jiong was at attracting attention with his inflammatory rhetoric: “We must have have a Great Recall to get rid off our Commie-licking legislators. I’m anti-unification, anti-Chinese spouses.”

When I saw the flier for the April 19th “Protect Taiwan, Resist Forced Unification” event, I immediately saw the graphic design choices as verrrrry questionable:

For anyone with an ounce of media literacy the signs are unmistakable: the ominous black eagle over Taiwan, the bold red and black color scheme, the silhouetted fists raised. This here is authoritarian/populist iconography.

For a pro-democracy demonstration, the aesthetics is worryingly illiberal.

I wrote at the time “…there’s been what I can only describe as a key change from major to minor when it comes to the DPP’s message from Tsai to Lai. During President Tsai’s tenure, it’s all about plucky little Taiwan and our like-minded democratic friends showing up big bad China. The moods a little darker now: from declaring China to be an enemy openly to the indiscriminate recall campaign on opposition lawmakers. Even the flirtation with supporting Korea’s disgraced Yoon for his coup-attempt. Not saying that purges are next, but it feels like we’re going down a path I’d rather not be on.”

People tried to tell me I was being paranoid BUT IT TURNS OUT I WAS RIGHT!

Right after the failure of the great recall, Ba Jiong’s sidekick Minnan Wolf snitched on him, revealing that Ba Jiong was inspired by Nazism. “I thought he was joking at first, but he wasn’t. Ba Jiong wanted everybody to rush forward. His extremism made him the spiritual leader of the recall movement, but it also pushed the average voter away.”

According to the Line message Minnan Wolf released, Ba Jiong said “I’ve been researching the Nazis, because the Nazis were anti-communist. How did they leverage anti-communism and anti-semitic sentiments. We should learn it and use it in all our rallies.” “We should turn a certain group into Jews, and then incite.” “We should invent a new hand gesture.”

Maybe this one? Ye Gods, he’s even got the armbands!

This happened a few days ago and I really didn’t want to write about it on Taipology, although I tweeted about it. I don’t think Ba Jiong is representative of the Great Recall movement and I didn’t want to give people the wrong idea about a whole group of Taiwanese based on a bad ‘un, although one that was obviously given a disturbingly large platform. But then I realized that far from distancing himself from them, most pro-recall folks are flocking to defend him, putting the blame on Minnan Wolf instead for being a traitor and probably a CCP plant!

Legislator Puma Shen defending him, saying essentially sometimes an eagle is just an eagle and ppl shouldn’t read too much into it, and also that Ba Jiong apologized so we should all leave him alone. Fellow pan-Green influencer Potter King went as far as to say “sometimes you need to fight dark magic with dark magic.”

The last straw was the revelation, also by Minnan Wolf, that they maliciously edited a phonecall in order to make it sound like another popular influencer, Zhong Ming-Xuan, was taking money from CCP to produce pro-Chinese propaganda. Readers, Zhong was cyberbullied so relentlessly on the back of those allegations he was suicidal at one point.

Again, the pro-recall people were almost universally still slamming Zhong and Minnan Wolf rather than Ba Jiong. Basically Zhong’s crime is being pro-DPP and then going to China to make some travelogue videos saying it’s a nice place and he liked it.

“What’s wrong with cyberviolence and bullying? We are saving our country. It doesn’t matter if we end up stepping on a few ants along the way.”

A dilemma for the DPP

The initial recall on 7/26 was a huge flop, with all 24 KMT legislators surviving the recall challenge, many by a wide margin. At that point, the DPP had a dilemma: What to do with all those peripheral influencers they relied on to drive the recall effort? We’re not just talking about Ba Jiong but heavy-hitting funders like billionaire Robert Tsao.

Tsao and other rally organizers saw the loss not as a reflection on the recall effort itself but the lack of support from the DPP. So what about the lagging batch of 7 legislators to be recalled on 8/23?

After a bit of a wobble, President Lai Ching-te said the DPP will go “shoulder to shoulder with the civic groups” and support the recalls “to the last mile.” To me, this belated declaration might assuage the anger of the recall organizers who felt unsupported by his party, but it also made a mockery of earlier statements that the recall efforts were spontaneous and had nothing to do with the DPP.

We can’t keep reporting like this…

I’m usually a big fan of Kathryn Hille, who covers Taiwan for the FT. But her post-Recall fail piece, titled “Why Taiwanese fear China could take over from within” was spectacularly slanted. With the 24-0 result, the people spoke loud and clear: they’re against the recall. But they weren’t given voice. Instead, we heard even more from the tiresome pro-recall crowd.

Most of Hille’s piece reads like pro-recall propaganda. “For her and others, the KMT, which fought the communists for decades in the first half of the 20th century, is now best described as a party of traitors and a fifth column. ‘The KMT are the CCP’s fellow travellers, they are the CCP’s biggest agent in Taiwan,’ says Hsu.”

The fact that the recall effort failed is basically treated as a huge problem for democracy in Taiwan, without any curiosity as to WHY they failed.

Let me tell you…if there’s anyone tearing Taiwan apart, it’s not the CCP lurking in the shadows, as the Bluebird protestors would have you believe. It’s the DPP who have misgoverned for 9 years now, relying on the “resist China and defend Taiwan” card to farm votes. People are sick and tired of it.

You want to talk about depression and anxiety of the pro-recall activists now that their effort failed? What about the annoyance and anger they generated by trying to remove legislators we just voted in last year? By congregating on every street corner for the last six months doing their stupid dances and buttonholing random folks just trying to get on with their day with their tiresome Red Scare spiel?

Those Taiwanese voices don’t get any press. They’re not the useful Taiwanese voices, the one that pushes the narrative forward for setting up Taiwan against China in conflict. Increasingly, the Taiwanaese just don’t have the appetite for that shit anymore.

And it’s not because we’ve been scared into compliance by Big Bad Choyna, but because the China Threat has been weaponized as a political tool that degrades our democracy.

Anybody wants to write THAT story?