THE PSYCHOLOGIST : Old China Rivals Make Peace

Old China Rivals Make Peace

Fifty-five-and-a-half years after the end of the Chinese Civil War, the principal antagonists of that conflict, the Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang or ?????) and the Chinese Communist Party (Gongchandang or ?????), have finally resumed contact at an official level, as Lien Chan (??) paid a visit to the mainland. What his intentions may be have yet to play out, but he did contact President Chen Shui-bian (???) before his departure. China Times reports (in Chinese) that Lien emphasized that, whatever citizens may contribute toward conciliation, it is finally up to governments to see things through:

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Translation:
Chinese Nationalist Party Chairman Lien Chan expressed, after today's meeting with Hu Jintao, that what citizens can do on their own initiatives in regard to bettering cross-strait relations is limited, and that even if these cross-strait talks bear some fruit, only government approval, support, and initiative can realize them.

Commentaries about the intent behind Lien's visit have been flying all over, with supporters claiming that Lien is trying to reduce tensions, while critics comment that he is trying to undermine President Chen's policies and power. For now, I'll just say that it's something slightly less benign than the first, and less sinister than the latter.

They say that all politics is local; and despite the authoritarian past of the KMT, leaders realize that they cannot simply wave a wand and hope to regain power. In order to recapture the Presidency, they must prove worthy. Indeed, it is speculated that the successive Chen victories are not so much an endorsement of his policies, but the result of infighting among the so-called "outsiders" (waishengren or ???), most notably Lien and James Soong (???) in 2000. Indeed, the opposition between the executive and legislative branches of government had led to gridlock, and probably best explains the slight shift away from the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP or ???) in the 2004 Legislative Yuan elections. In other words, whereas voters are willing to give the new kid on the block a shot, if there are no results, and the other person has a better proposal, then votes will switch.

Lien seems to me to be trying to accomplish three things:

Persuade the Party: He hopes to demonstrate that he has the respect and clout to be a credible leader of the KMT going forward.
Persuade the Voters: By visiting the mainland and holding successful talks with China, he hopes to show himself to be a statesman worthy of consideration for the next presidential elections. If he can get any concessions from China, even on mundane matters such as business contract enforcement and protections for Taiwanese investors, he'll have proven a lot.
Persuade the World: If the talks are successful, he can jockey for attention from the United States, which has been reluctant to support President Chen because of the gambles he's taken with Taiwan's security. The US would prefer to see a leader that doesn't inflame tensions, but who will also not roll over and play dead at the PRC's whim.

Indeed, some concessions may be on the way. As the Taipei Times reports, Beijing is recognizing that any rapport with Lien would be of a party-to-party nature, and is mulling talks with the DPP:

According to a Hong Kong media report on Wednesday, Sun Yafu (???), the deputy director of the Taiwan Affairs Office of China's State Council, said China recognizes that discussions with Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Lien Chan (??) are of a party-to-party nature, and that discussions with the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) may be possible.

During a talk on Wednesday at Peking University, Sun said that any consensus reached with Lien, or any document signed, would take into consideration legal ramifications in Taiwan.

A report in the pro-China Hong Kong daily Wen Wei Po quoted Sun as saying that China had taken note of Taiwan's response -- the threat of legal proceedings -- to KMT Vice Chairman Chiang Pin-kun's (???) visit, and since then had moved to better understand the legal situation in Taiwan.

He added that any agreement with Lien would be expressed in the "most suitable form" and that China "still hoped to have more contact with the Democratic Progressive Party."

However, President Chen is no political slouch either. Taiwan News Online reports that, as Lien has been talking about his vision for a peaceful reunification, Chen has retrained some light on what voters can expect with the usual Chinese offer of "one country, two systems":

President Chen Shui-bian (???) yesterday declared that the record of nearly eight years of China's "one country, two systems" formula in Hong Kong and Macau had only served to erode judicial autonomy, individual freedom, social order, public administration and economic development in the two territories.

Speaking to a delegation from the "Hong Kong and Macau Taiwanese Association," the president also stated that no process of "political integration" across the Taiwan Strait could begin until the Chinese Communist Party-ruled People's Republic of China had realized genuine democratic elections, a depoliticized military and freedom of speech and religion.

The president reaffirmed his administration's concern for the rights and interests of the over 40,000 Republic of China citizens residing in Hong Kong and Macau, especially in the wake of the transformation of the two former colonies into "special administrative zones" of the PRC in July 1997 and December 1998, respectively.

Therefore, Chen related that the Taiwan government had formed a "Hong Kong Affairs Bureau" and a "Macau Affairs Department" under the Mainland Affairs Council, and had set up related office offices at the Hong Kong International Airport and initiated visa granting operations in Macau that include the provision of landing visas or application for visas through the Internet.

To be sure, the abuses have come under focus, not least of all from the United Kingdom, which still keeps an eye on the former British Crown Colony. The latest six-monthly report on Hong Kong is available from the UK's Foreign and Commonwealth Office homepage. Thus it is greatly in Chen's interests to show that he does, in fact, care not just about independence for independence's sake, but for the sake of retaining to citizens of the Republic of China the liberties that they have come to take for granted, which would undoubtedly be withdrawn by the CCP (which had promised the same guarantees to Hong Kong in 1997). In this manner he is also perhaps marching to the beat of US President George W. Bush's drumming, the call for the spread of democracy.

This trip, in short, is many things, but ultimately it is about local politics. The lines are being drawn for the 2008 elections.

[Cross-posted at Between Worlds and Naruwan Formosa]

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Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights

THE PSYCHOLOGIST

Old China Rivals Make Peace

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