[PEN-L:9624] FW: Pingquanhui: the Face of Taiwan Racism Text version

["Craven, Jim" <jcraven@xxxxxxxxx>]

-----Original Message-----
From: Mark Munsterhjelm [mailto:gustav88@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Sunday, July 25, 1999 6:57 AM
To: warriornet@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx; Newsgroup MAI-NOT (Canada)
Subject: Pingquanhui: the Face of Taiwan Racism Text version


Greetings,

Here is the text version of an article I posted early today in HTML
format. Sorry for cluttering your mailboxes but there is so little of
this nature available in English.
This article appeared on page 8 of the July 22,
1999 edition of the Taipei Times newspaper. It provides a good insight
into the nature of official racism against Aboriginal peoples that is
still
powerful in Taiwan. The article was written by Martin Williams.

Article begins:

The Pingquanhui: the face of Taiwan racism
ON JULY 5 1999 a scandal broke involving the Tungkang Credit Union in
Pingtung County when NT$900 million in capital was discovered to have
gone missing. The discovery led to an order
preventing KMT legislator and Tungkang Credit Union chairman Kuo
Ting-tsai
from leaving the country while investigations continued. The case has
been one of a spate of recent stories raising concerns over possible
"black gold"
influence in political dealings.

But Kuo Ting-tsai's connection to controversial
organizations by no means ends with the Tungkang Credit Union. His name
also emerged in an investigation conducted late last year by
Academia Sinica researchers Ku Yu-chen and Chang Yu-fen, which
identified him as an important patron
for a conspicuously racist organization, the Alliance of Taiwan
Associations
for the Promotion of Rights of Plains People Living in Mountain
Districts, or
Pingquanhui for short.

The Pingquanhui, which seeks to eradicate benefits or laws favouring
Taiwan's Aboriginal peoples, has the support of many local companies,
segments of the tourism industry and ethnic Chinese landowners, and is
particularly opposed to laws preventing reservation land from being sold

on the open market.

It grew out of a series of loosely connected, county based groupings of
ethnic Chinese living in Aboriginal areas in Nantou, Taichung, Pingtung,
llan
and Taoyuan counties who feared the influence of the Aboriginal land
rights
movement. That movement, which commenced in the late 1980s, sought to
address legal and illegal Chinese occupation of Aboriginal land, and
generated fears in ethnic Chinese that they would be forced to surrender

homes and land back to Aboriginal people.

In 1997, these groups came under the umbrella
organization of the Pingquanhui, headed by a Taichung County
policeman with extensive political connections, Wu Tien-yu , and has
since evolved into a small but far reaching and occasionally effective
lobby group. Its membership extends across most sectors of ethnic
Chinese society in the mountain districts and is also composed of key
agricultural co-operative
officials and elected district representatives.

The racist and violent rhetoric of the Pingquanhui is worthy of note.
According to the report, the organization first utilized the slogan of
"equality"
between Aboriginal and Chinese people in mountain districts in an effort
to
strike down laws providing special rights to Aboriginal
people. But with greater political success this was augmented by the
denial that Aboriginal people were native to Taiwan at all. Instead,
Taiwan's Aborigines are now said by the Pingquanhui
to be "the offspring of 'black dwarf' or 'bird-devil savage' slave
labourers
brought to plunder Taiwan's resources by the Dutch and the Spanish in
the seventeenth century." The Pingquanhui has also claimed that the
promotion of exclusive Aboriginal rights will lead to racial violence
and
bloodshed in the mountain districts.

In addition, with their lobbying success came their more conspicuous use
of
the term huan-a (a Hokkien word meaning "savage" and which has the
offensive strength of "coon" or "nigger") in an attempt to further
stigmatize
Aboriginal people.

An unidentified legislative assistant to Kuo Ting-tsai is quoted in the
Academia Sinica report as saying that Kuo was instrumental at the very
beginning of the Pingquanhui's activities and that its legislative
influence was only realized with his support. He and other legislators
with ties
to the group were also responsible for watering down those laws
benefiting Aboriginal people through prohibiting the sale of reservation

land as well as other legislation. According to the report, Kuo is said
to have
had the following dealings
with the Pingquanhui:
(1)hearing representations from the Pingquanhui; (2) moving an amendment

to a legislative bill favoring Pingquanhui interests; (3) providing
press
releases on the Pingquanhui; (4) acting on behalf of the group in
communicating with official bodies; (5) raising the issue of reservation

land during question time at the legislature; (6) attending the founding

meeting of the Pingtung County chapter of the Pingquanhui; and (7)
employing staff provided by the Pingquanhui for electoral campaigning.

The Pingquanhui's national political network is not limited to the KMT,
even if
the bulk of the group's officials and administrators are made up of KMT
members. The report lists Pingquanhui friends
and legislative advocates in the DPP and the New Party as well as an
independent legislator; most have spoken in the Legislative Yuan or the
National Assembly on the group's behalf. DPP legislator Tsai Huang-lang,
for example, is alleged to have accepted financial support from the
Pingquanhui. DPP legislator Peng Pai-hsien, who has also acted as an
advocate for the group, put forward amendments to a 1996 bill
establishing the executive level
Council of Aboriginal Affairs which limited its powers.

Intriguingly, the report also mentions presidential candidate James
Soong
who in September 1995, during his tenure as provincial governor, is said

to have provided this organization with a "favorable response". In an
effort to court his favor, the Pingquanhui allegedly threw all its
support behind
Soong during his 1994 election campaign. A secretary of the Taichung
County
branch of the Pingquanhui, Lin Chin-kun, is also reported to have been
one of
Soong's campaign aides.

All of this provides an important clue as to the state of ethnic
relations in this
country, in that an organization like the Pingquanhui is conspicuously
active
within Taiwan's main political parties at every level of government, and

yet does not attract substantive concern over what the Academia Sinica
report's authors describe as its "thorough discourse of racial
discrimination"
and its "fascist spirit." If it were reported that influential US
Republican or
Democrat lawmakers - let alone a presidential candidate - had dealings
with the Ku Klux Klan or neo-Nazi groups which culminated
in legislative amendments, the consequences there would be dramatic. The

Pingquanhui, which uses similar rhetoric, does not burn crosses, don
white
robes, or employ memorable totalitarian imagery and symbols. It wears
instead the uniforms of police, farmers, civil servants and other
positions.
For many of Taiwan's Aboriginal people, however, the political muscle
and
social influence of the Pingquanhui has been, if anything, much more
direct and just as worrying.


Martin Williams is a doctoral candidate at the University of Technology,
Sydney, researching modern Taiwanese Aboriginal history.

End of article

Anyone interested in the Taiwan Aboriginal
rights issues please contact
me
and also check the Taiwan Aboriginal Rights
webpage at:

http://www.freespeech.org/taiwanfns/tfn/mainpg.htm

Sincerely yours,
Mark Munsterhjelm
Shihlin, Taipei, Taiwan
e-mail: gustav88@xxxxxxxxxx