Taiwan Elections 2012

[Ithekro]

Is that any different that painting something with dogma and pretending is doesn't exist? It doesn't go anywhere either.

It is like repeatedly white walling wall art that gets painted again and again and again. If no one bothered to scrape off the old paint, it will eventually fall off by being too thick for the wall to support. The same goes for painting ideology over the dogma repeatedly. Eventually it will all fall away. The wall of truth is under all the paint.

History is. Noble or not noble. That it was written down at least lets someone point to it later and say it happened. It would be up to the reader to decide how important it is, and then it gets put into books based on ideology or dogma.

It is finding the originals without the bias that is the tricky part.

[DonQuigleone]

Originally Posted by Tom Bombadil

Sure, one can rob and kill someone, as long as he writes it in the history books, it is all good. How noble.

As I said, painting it with ideology and pretending that one has the moral high ground is not going anywhere.

They can't change the past, but they can admit to it. And they do admit to it, and they (usually) admit that it was wrong. You can't really ask much more of them.

Besides, the british of today, are not the british of 100 years ago. Do not visit the sins of the father onto the son.

[Ithekro]

Originally Posted by DonQuigleone

They can't change the past,

Well that they are telling us anyway.....
(Go Go Mikuru, Time Traveling Waitress)

[Irenicus]

Spoiler for slightly OT rant: on 'History':

Trust me, we historians are pretty good at figuring out who says what and why they say what they say. We're also pretty good at realizing who doesn't say anything and why the silence exists.

It's our job.

We're not stupid. Just because the UK or French or American public are slightly less inclined to accept that their countries have done bad things, doesn't mean there aren't legions of experts who explore these topics far more thoroughly than you think you could possibly know. What were the Culture Wars of the 80's if not academics in the US pushing the boundaries of publicly "acceptable" reexamination of America's "proud" history and riling up the patriots and their revisionist pseudo-historians?

The nationalist revisionists are firmly a minority in a field full of critical experts who have much to gain from slaying the previous generation's sacred cows. Rest assured, British, American, and other Western histories (alternatively, the history of the West as a whole) are in good hands. The winners are always being taken to task, sometimes too much even.


But the problems, you see, are three-fold:

One, you live in a country with, ah, political difficulties. Historians in PRC China must tread very lightly lest they go too far in using their unbiased judgements and run afoul of the official history. This was, erm, historically worse, when reeducation campaigns targeted at dissident intellectuals were the norm.


Two, you are, or you work for entities which maintain the archaic notion that historians are propagandists for hire. Many historians were, historically (keh), propagandizing, but trust me again when I say that we modern academic historians are not stupid and know how to read these things. We know a document from the Crusades written by a Christian noble chronicler has certain viewpoints and in fact because some of us are really good experts, we even argue, with evidence though never with 100% certainty, that this certain chronicler was likely a supporter of House so-and-so and therefore rather hostile to another Crusading Dynasty so-and-so, and therefore his chronicle depicting Lord so-and-so as the Antichrist wasn't exactly something you should take at face value.

We can do the same thing regarding the political figures of China's turbulent post-war history too. We don't always agree on who's right on what (the controversy over Madame Mao continues to this day), but that's exactly how the field continues to develop.

Of course, we are all humans, and we have bias and value judgments too. We can also be taken by prevailing political attitudes. That means the Sixties were the beginning of a great creative destruction of previous entrenched beliefs. That means a liberalized regime contributes to a liberalized academic environment. And that means a nationalist ROC Chinese historian is going to say very different things compared to an official PRC historian. Meanwhile, the Western historian working on the same field can say that he's more unbiased, but he has to be very wary of Orientalist notions entrenched in his perception lest he commits an ethnocentric mistake. Finally, that means historians are fond of tearing each other on perceived major biases.


Three, things are literally lost. On histories long past, just the entropy of time (or worse, the entropy of pyromaniac Mongols) is enough to render our tasks difficult. On modern histories, authoritarian governments burning countless records, making dissidents disappear, and locking what remained of the archives making them inaccessible render the historian's work...complex. And sometimes events are too close that there are no unbiased historian to work on it. 9/11 studies are making progress, but back in 2002 it wasn't a historian's purview, it was for journalists, political scientists, politicians, generals, the public...

But again, we are not stupid. Many of us know when to say, "we don't know, we hope the archives are open someday [or "my graduate student is working on an oral history project in Xinjiang and I'm waiting for her research"] until then, this is the up to date critical analysis from available sources." In fact, many historians make entire careers out of digging the archives when they start to be opened, or go down in the ruins and villages and dig out those remnant pieces of garbage, survivors, and so on which survived a major repression, thus returning the voice to a group that may have been brutally silenced before.

Example: the massive Istanbul Archives were opened within the last few decades and still not even completely catalogued yet (50-60% there, actually, make that something like 25%-30%), much less properly analyzed in detail (that would be...10% of the archive materials or so). There's a whole new understanding of Ottoman urban-rural religious movements, alongside a thousand other issues, waiting to be made there. Or for something more "relevant," the understanding Turkish-Armenian ethnic relations and the Millet system prior to the modern era might be advanced, giving a new context to the controversy of the Armenian Genocide. Or something cool like that.

Wait a few decades on modern China + Taiwan. If the archives start to get declassified (what remained after the great proletarian movements anyway), we'll show you what we can do about this "history written by winners" thing. Historiography on Chinese history is also kinda interesting because the "infrastructure" inside the PRC itself is still recovering from the savaging of the Great Proletarian Movement, meaning that for the past few decades the most advanced experts on China, Greater China and so on, and especially pre-modern China, were in Taiwan and Japan, not the mainland. So the ones who were writing the most up to date and nuanced Chinese histories were not exactly "winners" of that bloody contest.

It's changing as we speak, and Chinese history is returning to China. Exciting innit.

[/a rant because I'm getting sick of the "history is written by winners" meme. It's true. And it's not true. History is like that.]

Now, on topic: I take it this means the continuation of the status quo limbo for Taiwan's China policy, right?

Well, good for everyone. At least for the short term.

Oh, and the New York Times is being itself again. By itself I mean it being this consensus-of-American-opinion, media institution-of-record thing that it usually does when it's not under fire from angry Fox News watchers over wedgy domestic issues.

As in, it's trying to be optimistic in continuing the Democracy in China line based on public Chinese reactions to the Taiwanese Presidential election. Interesting article, most certainly reflecting American hopes, but I doubt this is the beginning of a new dawn for Chinese Democracy or something so crazy.

[DonQuigleone]

@Irenicus: I completely agree. I've always loved to read history, I devour it with abandon. Historians don't get enough respect, not only that, but historians get conflated with idealogues.

I think Western Historians haven't put enough into documenting China though. For instance, 19th century China is really under-represented in literature. You might find 100 publications dealing with the American Civil war, or Franco-Prussian war, but only 3 or 4 on the Taiping Rebellion.

It's not so much a matter of bias, but on certain subjects being under-represented. Like the 2nd Sino-Japanese War, the volume of books on it is a magnitude lower then the volume of books on every other theater in WW2. This does seem to be getting corrected though.

[Ithekro]

You can only make books if you have source materials to cite.

[Endless Soul]

Somewhat off topic question here.

Spoiler for off topic question:

What do Chinese people today think of the American Volunteer Group a.k.a The Flying Tigers?

I tried to get my wife and her relatives to answer, but none of them seemed to know what I was talking about.

[Kokukirin]

Originally Posted by Endless Soul

Somewhat off topic question here.

Spoiler for off topic question:

What do Chinese people today think of the American Volunteer Group a.k.a The Flying Tigers?

I tried to get my wife and her relatives to answer, but none of them seemed to know what I was talking about.

I don't know what Flying Tigers is until I looked up Wikipedia (nice to have it back), and I spent 15 years in Hong Kong. It is too small of an episode in WWII to be widely known by most Chinese.

[DonQuigleone]

How about Alexander von Falkenhausen.

It's a bit ironic that Germany's military aid to Chiang Kai Chek, and the german trained divisions that came from it, was instrumental in China managing to hold out against Japan.

[Xion Valkyrie]

I really doubt China would eventually end up being a democracy. If anything, Corporatocracy is far more likely. At the rate things are going, most 1st-world countries are going to end up as Corporatocracies.

[DonQuigleone]

The irony is that the modern PRC is probably a lot closer(if not basically identical) to Chiang Kai-sheks vision as it is to Mao's.

[Tom Bombadil]

Originally Posted by Endless Soul

Somewhat off topic question here.

Spoiler for off topic question:

What do Chinese people today think of the American Volunteer Group a.k.a The Flying Tigers?

I tried to get my wife and her relatives to answer, but none of them seemed to know what I was talking about.

They are still remembered and respected for those who know their contributions. But I am afraid they are gradually fading into history because the rocky relationship across the pacific. There is simply not much incentive to celebrate their bravery.

[Crusify_me]

Originally Posted by DonQuigleone

@Irenicus: I completely agree. I've always loved to read history, I devour it with abandon. Historians don't get enough respect, not only that, but historians get conflated with idealogues.

I think Western Historians haven't put enough into documenting China though. For instance, 19th century China is really under-represented in literature. You might find 100 publications dealing with the American Civil war, or Franco-Prussian war, but only 3 or 4 on the Taiping Rebellion.

It's not so much a matter of bias, but on certain subjects being under-represented. Like the 2nd Sino-Japanese War, the volume of books on it is a magnitude lower then the volume of books on every other theater in WW2. This does seem to be getting corrected though.

I don't find the lack of documentation by Western Historians as a great lack of problem, since the tone of Chinese history and literature is vastly different than Western history. Even if you look at modern literature today, Western fantasy is a alot different than Chinese/oriental fantasy (which consists martial arts, wuxia ect..) Attempting to westernize chinese literature/history I think is a mistake.

But to get back on the OT
What does President MA winning his second term mean for Taiwan in the next 4 years?

[SaintessHeart]

Originally Posted by DonQuigleone

The irony is that the modern PRC is probably a lot closer(if not basically identical) to Chiang Kai-sheks vision as it is to Mao's.

It is the same as what China is throughout 5000 years minus the Internet.

[DonQuigleone]

Originally Posted by Crusify_me

I don't find the lack of documentation by Western Historians as a great lack of problem, since the tone of Chinese history and literature is vastly different than Western history. Even if you look at modern literature today, Western fantasy is a alot different than Chinese/oriental fantasy (which consists martial arts, wuxia ect..) Attempting to westernize chinese literature/history I think is a mistake.

I don't really see how that be used as a legitimate argument. The goal of History is to chronicle the history of the whole world, that we may understand historical processes and peoples. China is not exempt from that, if anything, China is an especially interesting subject to investigate, due to it's rather unique history.

There is no reason why Chinese scholarship should be exempted from the standards of western scholarship, when the primary standard of Western scholarship is truth, conciseness and impartiality.

China has plenty of historical documents, ripe for production of history.

[Ithekro]

My grandfather packed parachutes for the Flying Tigers...well more likely the 23rd Fighter Group that came from them since I don't think he was in the area until 1944.
It is hard to track exactly what unit he was in, just that he served in India, Burma, and China from 1944 to 1945.

[SaintessHeart]

Now here is an interesting commentary I got :

As long as its westerners, getting assfucked is fine eh? good for you

I am quite astounded that there are still people living under rocks. Bigger countries have been buttraping smaller ones since the start of civilisation. Living in a smaller country means to offer your ass to someone who you know that don't rape you as hard or painfully as someone you don't. US did a pretty good job in mass media convincing that the Orwellian nature of Russian society is fact rather than fiction - hence their supporters throughout to the collapse of the Soviet Union. But both of them buttrape their satellite states and supporters simply because they are huge superpowers in the 20th century.

[Crusify_me]

Could we revert back to OT

What does President MA winning his second term mean for Taiwan in the next 4 years?

[Paranoid Android]

Originally Posted by Crusify_me

Could we revert back to OT

What does President MA winning his second term mean for Taiwan in the next 4 years?

Whatever possible civil war or independence will be delayed at the least.

While he is focused on economics and improving relations with China, it's hard to say he actually wants unification. I'd say he's just being careful and saying what Beijing wants to hear. Which is the right choice, pursuing independence now is not the wisest choice. It's China, it's not the kind of freedom we have in other nations. Listening to the one pointing the gun is the only choice.

I don't think Taiwan will change much at all in the next 4 years. President Ma is trying to go along with Beijing and that probably means keeping relations the way they are.
--------------
As for things not related to Beijing-Taiwan conflicts, I wouldn't know. That's all I really care about. xP

[SaintessHeart]

Originally Posted by Crusify_me

Could we revert back to OT

What does President MA winning his second term mean for Taiwan in the next 4 years?

Not much difference. Ma isn't quite honest about his stand so as not to provoke anyone from any side. It is a pretty tencious issue for him and he can't afford to act like North Korea.

Though I find it sad that no matter what their decision, that place is a hotspot for crises, or just buttrape by either NATO or China.