Introduction: Mr. Pang Jianguo, a former "legislator" of the Chinese Kuomintang and a professor at the Chinese Culture University, fell to his death on January 11, 2022. Because of his last words, "In an unjust and unjust Taiwan, I might as well die," many people regarded his suicide as a "death sentence." As former chair of the Department of History at National Taiwan University, historian Professor Xu Hong had a multifaceted relationship with Mr. Pang Jianguo, who also taught at National Taiwan University in the 1980s and 1990s. After mr. Pang Jianguo's death, Professor Xu Hong shared his resonance with Mr. Pang's 12-word last words on social media. The Observer Network interviewed Professor Xu Hong around related topics, and this article was compiled based on the interview and has been revised by the author himself.
【Interview/Observer Network Li Leng, Editing/Xu Hong】
Mr. Pang Jianguo's friend said that he was actually a very optimistic person, cancer is also being treated, and the progress is not bad, probably because the "four major referendums" have not passed, he feels too unreasonable. It is true that in the "four referendums", issues such as "restarting the nuclear fourth" are still controversial, but there is no reason why the "anti-Lai pig" matter is not passed, because no one thinks that they should eat poisonous food.
These are entirely the result of the DPP's manipulation. Now in Taiwan, "anti-Central Defense Taiwan" is a "trump card", as long as the "anti-Central Defense Taiwan" is mentioned, any issue - whether it is corruption and fraud or other bad things - can almost develop in the direction that the proposer wants. In other words, Taiwan's media and textbooks, after years of operation by the Green Camp, have created a mainstream public opinion that believes that the mainland is evil and that Taiwan absolutely cannot be reunified.
·“ Anti-Zhong" originated
In the past, there was no such thing.
During the "Diaoyutai Defense Movement" in the 1970s, when the Taiwan government was quite weak and the mainland was relatively tough, many people in Taiwan at that time placed expectations on the mainland and even used the mainland as a backer.
Taiwan's 1970s "Defense of Diaoyutai Movement" protest demonstration site (Source: Taiwan's Lianhe Pao)
At that time, the "Diaoyutai Defense Movement" also reversed the atmosphere of Taiwan's original total Westernization, and some Taiwanese began to realize that we wanted to oppose imperialism and colonization and return to our own local culture, so there was a corresponding vernacular literary controversy at that time. This made the Kuomintang government at that time very nervous, so at that time some people wrote articles saying that "the wolf is coming, "talking about the literature of workers, peasants, and soldiers", and so on. It can be said that the Taiwanese society of the 1970s was very complicated, but everyone had one thing in common, that is, anti-Kuomintang.
However, since the "Formosa Boulevard Incident," the anti-Kuomintang united front has broken down, and leftists have continued to engage in the labor movement and support reunification, while the rightists have basically slowly moved toward "Taiwan independence." After the "Formosa Boulevard Trial", the power of the right faction grew stronger and stronger, and later they formed the Democratic Progressive Party; at the same time, the left forces were slowly eliminated, for example, Su Qingli, the head of the most important magazine of the left at that time, went to the mainland, and the entire left front slowly declined.
Just as in Taiwan, not only people from this province were anti-Kuomintang people, but when the DPP was first founded, there were all kinds of people, and at first it did not completely advocate "Taiwan independence," but later the road became narrower and narrower, and since the formulation of a declaration on "Taiwan independence," all the people in the party who did not agree with the concept of "Taiwan independence" were slowly squeezed out. Even some people in "Taiwan independence" believe that Taiwan should be the main body, and that Japan's colonial rule over Taiwan is unjust and unjust, and these anti-Japanese colonial "Taiwan independence" figures have almost all been expelled. Among the people who jointly founded the DPP, there are not many people who still remain in the party.
In fact, it can be said that the DPP was cultivated by the KUOMINTANG. The Kuomintang advocated anti-communism, that is, to oppose the mainland, so on the one hand, the Kuomintang said that it wanted to safeguard Chinese cultural traditions (but in fact they did not do much in this regard), and on the other hand, planted the seeds of "anti-communism and anti-China" in Taiwanese society.
In his later years, Mr. Chiang Ching-kuo realized that it was necessary to talk about reunification with the mainland. When I was studying at National Taiwan University, a lecturer who had returned from the United States, the son of a Kuomintang veteran, said that he had taken Mr. Chiang Ching-kuo's handwritten letter to the mainland three times in 1985 to meet Deng Xiaoping. The specific content teacher did not say, which should be related to the opening to the mainland to visit relatives. Later, Mr. Chiang Ching-kuo opened the two sides of the strait to visit relatives on November 2, 1987 without the consent of the Americans, and the Americans were very dissatisfied with this matter and immediately sent their intelligence chief Klein to Taipei to quarrel with Mr. Chiang, and the relations between Taiwan and the United States were almost broken.
Unfortunately, not long after, on January 13, 1988, Mr. Chiang Ching-kuo passed away, otherwise the cross-strait relations that had just started would certainly develop in a good direction and would not have reached such a field as they are today.
After the death of Mr. Chiang Ching-kuo, Lee Teng-hui finally became chairman of the Kuomintang after several rounds of inner-party struggle. When he first became the chairman of the party, the party, government, and military power were not yet in his hands, so he often said that he supported national reunification, and he also set up the so-called "National Unification Committee" to promote the work of reunification. But in fact, every time he gives a speech off the script, you can see that he does not support national reunification at all, but on the contrary, he is keen on "Taiwan independence."
In his inaugural speech in 1996, Lee Teng-hui mentioned "reunification" six times, "the Chinese nation" six times, and his self-proclaimed "Chinese" nine times.
Lee Teng-hui had a strategy, and there were some people within the KMT who cooperated with him; therefore, he was able to take advantage of the contradictions within the KMT and step by step pull this and fight that, and by 1995 he was basically in charge of the power.
Lee Teng-hui has been in contact with people appointed by the mainland in Hong Kong, but in fact he is deceiving the mainland. In June 1995, he visited the United States and revealed the true face of "Taiwan independence" when he gave a speech at Cornell University, so the Taiwan Strait crisis broke out in March 1996. Prior to this, in 1994, he had recruited an important staff member, namely Tsai Ing-wen, to help him study cross-strait relations, and later served as the chief writer of the "two-state theory" report on the so-called "special state-to-state relations."
Revision of history textbooks
In the case of "opposing China," Lee Teng-hui and his ilk are very good at using the media, and the most important thing they have done is to revise textbooks.
In 1997, Lee Teng-hui recruited Du Zhengsheng and others to edit and launch a textbook "Understanding Taiwan," which is a must-read textbook for first-grade junior high school students. He said that to understand history and culture, we must start from our own side, only know the Yangtze River and the Yellow River, do not know Taiwan's muddy water streams and Freshwater Rivers, only know China's 5,000 years of history and culture, but we are completely unclear about Taiwan's history, which is not right. You can't say that his intention is wrong.
Having said that, the people of Taiwan are not clear about Taiwan's history, and the Kuomintang is also to blame for this. After the Kuomintang retreated to Taiwan, it was very taboo for everyone to talk about Taiwan's history, so it did not allow it to be discussed. But many things under the heavens are that if you don't let me talk about it openly, I will talk about it privately, so the KmT can't grasp the real changes in public opinion. "Taiwan independence" people have specifically targeted the Kuomintang textbooks and tried to say something different, and many books circulated privately by the people have been written by them. As a result, the history told by the Kuomintang was not believed by everyone; the version circulated in private was actually believed by more and more people. In 1973, Mr. Huang Jilu, who was in charge of education in Taiwan, convened a meeting of university history professors to discuss how to solve this difficulty realistically, but unfortunately failed to produce a specific plan.
For example, in the past, many schools in Taiwan did not offer courses on Taiwan history, and if you want to talk about Taiwan history, at most you will talk about Zheng Chenggong in the Qing Dynasty, and basically do not talk about the "Japanese occupation era". This left them room for arbitrary shaping, and they began to shape a "self-colonizing" view of history, erasing all the achievements made by Liu Mingchuan and others in Taiwan in the late Qing Dynasty, believing that Taiwan's modernization was promoted by the Japanese, and that the reason why Taiwan can have today is due to the foundation laid by the Japanese.
The revision of secondary school history textbooks has been effective. The students who went to junior high school in 1997 are now about forty years old, in other words, people under the age of forty in Taiwan are now affected by this textbook. Several professors at National Taiwan University and the "Academia Sinica" have done a survey, and the poll results have found that people who have read this book, whether they are from their own provinces or the second generation of people from other provinces, will basically have great changes in their national and ethnic identity. It can be said that the people who are leading the "Taiwan independence" cultural and educational work and media work on the Taiwan table at present have all grown up in that era.
When the "Taiwan independence faction" is doing these things, it has a powerful trick, that is, to let people from other provinces take the lead.
If the provincials first wanted to join their relevant groups, they would be suspected of being undercover agents who were trying to infiltrate the Kuomintang, so these provincials had to submit "letters of submission" and behave more radically than they were, so as to gain trust. Therefore, a number of very radical "Taiwan independence" elements have also appeared among people from other provinces. For example, when Zhang Mingqing, then vice president of the Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait [ARATS], came to Taiwan to visit Taiwan in 2008, he was pushed to the ground by Wang Dingyu, then a member of the Tainan City Council; the leader who is now leading the reform of Taiwan's history curriculum is also the second generation of people from other provinces, and some of them are still students I taught.
·The "injustice" of academia
After many years of drilling, coupled with the DPP's administration, they have grasped almost all the power that can be distributed in Taiwan's political and academic circles, and young people dare not speak, few dare to openly contradict them, and those who disagree with them have chosen to shut up.
In academia, for example, they have the power to allocate resources. If you want to apply for government subsidies on topics related to Chinese history, it is almost difficult, but as long as you study the issue of Taiwan, you can get a lot of financial support.
I served as the president of the "Chinese Ming Dynasty Studies Society" in Taiwan, and I planned to hold a three-day large-scale seminar that invited more than 30 foreign friends to Taiwan, including 26 from the mainland and some from the United States, Japan and South Korea. I applied to Taiwan's education department for funding, and they didn't give him a dime, and at the same time, a seminar on Taiwanese history invited only one scholar from the United States, and they allocated him NT$3 million.
Because they have more and more power, the entire academic circles in Taiwan have gradually become "greener," and most of the people who have "greened" the most are the ones who most support the Kuomintang in those years -- from here, we can also see the weakness of intellectuals who see the wind and make the rudder.
Like Taiwan Chengchi University, which we used to joke about as the Kuomintang's party school, it has now become the party school of the Democratic Progressive Party. Huang Wenxiong, who assassinated Mr. Chiang Ching-kuo in New York in 1970, was removed from the department of National Chengchi University, but in 2012 he was honored as the first "Outstanding Alumni" of Chengchi University. For another example, the history department of National Chengchi University was originally an important town specializing in the study of modern and contemporary Chinese history, and now there are no full-time teachers for the study of modern and contemporary Chinese history, and under the leadership of the green dean, department chair and professor, "de-Sinicization" will no longer introduce teachers of modern and contemporary Chinese history.
Mr. Pang and I served at NTU for a while, when I was the head of the History Department and often attended some school meetings, and he was the school representative. At that time, he and Fu Kuncheng, who later went to Xiamen University, and several other teachers had just returned from receiving their doctorates from the United States, and they performed very well and their speeches were very reasonable. But soon after, these people basically slowly left NTU and went somewhere else, and Mr. Pang was one of them.
Mr. Pang Jianguo (Data Map/Taiwan Media)
An important reason is that it is difficult for Kuomintang teachers to be promoted (called "appraisal titles" in the mainland), because more and more people who hold the power of evaluation are Professor Lu. I often participate in judging, so I know that the judging opinions related to them are often bad, and even if there are good opinions, voters do not look at them. It can be said that these people were forced to retreat.
With regard to promotion, I can give a few more examples.
After I retired, I taught at Soochow University and also served as a jury member. There was a very famous professor in the political science department at the time, and when he was promoted, I saw two reports with very different scores —one with an 89 and the other with only 72. I asked their department chair what was going on, and he couldn't make sense. It was a very blue professor, so I guess one of the reviews was from Professor Green, and they didn't look at your academic achievements, but at your political stance, and if you were a member of the Blue Camp, they would kill you.
Another example is related to Professor Chen Guying. After being politically persecuted in Taiwan in the 1970s, Professor Chen Guying served at the University of California, Berkeley in the United States and Peking University in mainland China; after the "National Taiwan University Philosophy Department Incident" in 1997, Chen Guying returned to teach at National Taiwan University.
Before Chen Gu should return to Taiwan but had not yet arrived at NTU, Mr. Li Yuanzhe, then president of the "Academia Sinica," said, "Come to our 'Academia Sinica.'" Because it was assigned by the dean, Wen Zhe discussed Chen Guying's matter. When the discussion was held, everyone said yes, and only one gentleman had an opinion on him, that is, Professor Wang Shumin, a very famous scholar in Taiwan who studied Lao Zhuang. Professor Wang said: "I still have to take a good look at Professor Chen's articles and his writings. They showed him all the relevant treatises, and after he read them, he said, "I have read them, and we can have a meeting." However, the result of the vote was that everyone was against it, and only Professor Wang, who had previously questioned him, voted in favor.
Professor Wang Shumin (Data Map)
Voting on personnel changes in Taiwan's academic circles is carried out in secret, and real names are not allowed, so there are more and more such things. Whether you are at National Taiwan University or other universities, if your political stance is anti-DPP, you will absolutely not be able to enter.
Some time ago, the Department of Chinese of National Taiwan University wanted to introduce a young man, and the votes in the department were all over, and as a result, when the vote was held in the Faculty of Letters, a very, very green professor in the History Department was represented and questioned him. Although the founder of "Summer Tide" magazine has passed away, the magazine still exists and has been busy with cross-strait exchanges, such as young students who want to enter universities on the mainland, they will help with the formalities. The young man took part in the event, which was revealed, and of course he was voted down.
We can see from these things that Taiwan's current academic community is really bad; for Taiwan's academic community, I am actually very disappointed. At the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty, Zhongchang Tong said that the chaotic world is "a gentleman is poor and lowly, and a villain is a noble favorite", and now Taiwan is like this, so many people are corrupt and fraudulent, and the teacher's morality is extremely bad, but they can still soar, and even some people sexually harass girls, because of "political correctness" and are fine. It is extremely difficult for good people to get ahead. Living in such an "unjust" social atmosphere is indeed painful.
• An increasingly depressing society
The current situation in Taiwan is that whether it is an election or anything else, it is basically controlled by the people of the Green Camp, and it is very difficult to recover it under the existing mechanism; coupled with the us long-range and short-range control, as long as there is a trend of tilting toward the mainland, it will be dealt with.
For example, when Hong Xiuzhu advocated the reunification of the motherland, her candidacy for the leadership of the Taiwan region was replaced. When Pang Jianguo was deputy secretary-general of the Strait Exchange Foundation in 2008, he revealed in advance that the Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait (ARATS) and the SEF planned to set up offices in Taipei and Beijing, and as a result, he was removed from his position. Even during Ma Ying-jeou's reign, the slightest tilt toward the mainland was blocked, not to mention the DPP's subsequent rise to power.
In Taiwan today, whether it is the Kuomintang or the Democratic Progressive Party, they are all the same, and at most they say that I do not advocate immediate reunification -- we do not advocate immediate reunification, which we call "Taiwan independence," and most of the others are also "Taiwan independence." They cannot legally declare "Taiwan independence," but in fact they are doing "Taiwan independence, and even Ko Wen-che's remark that "one family is close to the other side of the strait" will be criticized.
Correspondingly, the vast majority of Taiwanese, especially Taiwanese students, will think that "we are not Chinese, we are Taiwanese," and this "Taiwanese" is not a truly independent Taiwanese, but a "Taiwanese" colonized by Japan. There were previous news reports that there were three elderly people in Taiwan who wanted to die as Japanese, which is not a rare case, and I know many people younger than me who moved to Japan with their families many years ago and became Japanese nationals. I once argued with my dean: "Professors who immigrated to the United States (at that time, some Professors from National Taiwan University immigrated to the United States with their entire families and were still single in Taiwan) had no right to talk to us about the future of Taiwan." ”
It is probably not easy to hope that the people of Taiwan will be able to turn their hearts to the motherland. In the early 1990s, when I visited Sun Yat-sen University and the Pearl River Delta, a local journalist accompanied me all day and we talked a lot. Of course, he believes that the people of Taiwan have their hearts set on the motherland, and I told him bluntly that there is no such thing in Taiwan, and that most of the people in Taiwan do not have a heart for the motherland, which is a cruel but ironclad fact, and if we cannot do things in response to this reality, it may eventually lead to greater misjudgment.
In fact, the current situation of hostility between the two sides of the strait is even more serious than when the Kuomintang was in power. When the KMT came to power, everyone thought they were all Chinese, but one was the Communist Party and the other was the KMT; now the DPP regards the mainland as an "enemy country." In mainland parlance, what was originally a "contradiction among the people" between the two sides of the strait has now evolved into a "contradiction between the enemy and ourselves."
So we can also see that some old Kuomintang members who were very anti-communist at the time, such as General Xu Linong, who was in charge of Taiwan's political operations and propaganda, issued an open letter in 2017 explaining his reasons for "no longer opposing communism.". He said: The reasons for the Nationalist government's anti-communism in the past have long ceased to exist, the compatriots on the other side of the strait are not living in "deep waters," and the mainland has become a world economic power second only to the United States; therefore, the only way to choose cross-strait reunification is a "mutually beneficial and win-win" plan.
But it is difficult to use the achievements of the mainland to persuade Taiwanese to change their national identity. Because Taiwan cannot see CCTV or even Phoenix, the Taiwan media broadcast news about the mainland are "anti-China and anti-China" and smeared. Young people don't read news about the mainland at all, they turn it off as soon as they see it; as soon as you say something they don't like to hear, they don't listen anymore. One of the things they often tell us is", "You have been brainwashed by mainland propaganda."
Still have hope
But don't be too pessimistic. Now many people have also begun to persuade that the general direction cannot be turned, so don't be angry about this kind of thing anymore, everyone first save their lives, and then slowly do things in private.
The people have been promoting Chinese literature and history education and carrying out "classical self-help". For example, a few of our friends have produced eleven episodes of "History Salon • Searching for Qin", and are currently preparing to write a set of "Ideal Chinese History". Sponsored by Chairman Song Jufang of Hanguang Education Foundation, Yiluxiang Cultural Undertaking Company planned to publish "Ideal Reader, Chinese Language".
Of course, this is not easy, and the intermediate process will also encounter some obstacles. For example, when we were looking for someone to provide financial support, at first there were several rich bigwigs, especially the bigwigs in the science and technology industry, who were willing to cooperate with us, because they were also very concerned about Taiwan's history education. A few of the big guys have told us that they see that there are no heroes of the Three Kingdoms in the new textbooks, and they are very worried about this, hoping that we can do something in this regard. But later, they hesitated again, because they were afraid that if they donated money to us, they would be troubled by the DPP authorities. This practice by the DPP authorities has indeed restricted Taiwan society, especially businessmen.
Some people say that we can go to the mainland to raise funds, which is absolutely not allowed, if the DPP knows that even if there is only a little bit of funds, we will be finished, maybe we will be arrested. This is very sensitive, Taiwan's secret service system is too powerful, the mainland can not take a dime.
It is very difficult to openly confront them now, and a few of us who have common ideas can only come step by step. Some of the students I taught this year said when they wrote their reports about how their past ideas were, but after reading some of the books that guided them to read, they found that Chinese and Chinese history were not like that. For other people's perceptions, we can change one by one, and we can only try to do so.
My little grandson went to elementary school, and when he saw the teacher talking about Taiwan every day, he asked the teacher, "When can we get out of Taiwan?" The teacher said, "You can't go out before you graduate." In other words, if they want to know the history and stories outside of Taiwan, they have to rely on extracurricular reading. In Taiwan, there is now a set of comic books from the mainland, "If History is a Bunch of Meows" (Cute Cat Comic History), which is very popular. There is a studio in Shenzhen that uses cats as the protagonists to tell the history of China in the form of cartoons. The book is well-written, not only with comics, but also with small squares next to the comics that explain the historical sources of the story and guide children to read other easy-to-read bibliographies. Little children, like my little grandson, love to read this book.
Things like this can be done more so that children are not completely brainwashed by them. If this seed is planted, it will always blossom in the future.
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