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Political satire spices up Taiwan
campaign
By Laurence Eyton
TAIPEI - Although Taiwan's presidential election
is not until next March, and the campaign does not
officially begin until next year, it is in fact already
under way, with weekends throughout November having been
devoted to mass rallies by the contending camps and the
release of platform statements timed to keep public
interest at a peak.
The public, however, has
been diverted by something completely different from the
dry discussions about constitutional change the parties
intended to focus on. Instead it has been treated first
to a series of irreverent video compact discs (VCDs)
targeting opposition politicians, then to the quite
extraordinary lengths the opposition parties have gone
to try to have the VCDs suppressed, civil-libertarian
outrage, the government reversing itself - some of its
supporters would say finding itself - on a free speech
issue and finally, some pointed questions about how much
of the old dictatorship lingers on, both in government
institutions and people's minds.
The VCDs -
there are supposed to be four of them, of which only
three have so far been released - are part of a series
called Special Report. Their content is satire,
much of it in the Taiwanese dialect rather than the
Mandarin that Taiwan uses officially, aimed at some of
the more notorious grandstanders among Taiwan's
politicians, particularly among the opposition.
To an outsider familiar with the sometimes
scarifying political satire in Western democracies - one
only has to think of the jokes told by the likes of Jay
Leno during the recent California recall vote -
Special Report is not exactly humor with an edge.
In Taiwan, however, it seems to have cut to the bone. In
particular it has angered politicians in the People
First Party (PFP), some of whom it has targeted, as well
as the party's leader James Soong.
Soong is a
hugely controversial figure in Taiwan politics, equally
adored as a savior or loathed both as a human-rights
violator and a common criminal. But it is no accident
that a satirical VCD made in Taiwanese, the language of
Taiwanese nationalism, should target him. It was Soong,
after all, who 20 years ago, as the head of the
Government Information Office (GIO), which is both the
government's spokesman and the nation's official censor,
banned Taiwanese-language programming from the airwaves.
Soong, a hardline supporter of reunification with China,
is seen by advocates of Taiwan independence, to whom the
use of the Taiwanese dialect is a sign of
identification, as being the unificationists' only real
hope of regaining power in Taiwan and independence's
biggest threat.
Although in the upcoming
presidential election Soong is only the running mate,
with Lien Chan of the Kuomintang (KMT) heading the
ticket, Lien is looked on as a vain and idle individual,
who is likely, if he wins the presidency, to let Soong
take the position of premier, or head of the executive
branch, as well as the relatively powerless vice
presidency and, in effect, let Soong do all the work in
preparation for his own bid for the presidency in 2008.
The VCD therefore, by attacking Soong in
Taiwanese, stands astride two of Taiwan's more visceral
divides: the ethnic one between Taiwanese - those whose
families have lived in Taiwan for several generations -
and the mainland exiles of Chiang Kai-shek, of whom
Soong is one, and who excluded most Taiwanese from
political power for 40 years, and the divide between
unificationists and independence supporters.
Even so, this hardly explains the rabid reaction
of Soong's supporters. There have been attempts to sue
the producers, distributors and even the actors in the
VCD for defamation. The actors, in particular, have, by
their very visibility, been the target of such an
astounding torrent of hatred and abuse that one of them,
actress Wang Hsiao-fen, attempted suicide.
And
there has been more than just the legal harassment of
those involved in making the VCD. No sooner was the
first disc in the series available than PFP legislators
demanded to know of the head of the GIO how his office
could pass such material for distribution. The GIO
director general, Huang Hui-chen, said that in fact the
GIO had never approved the VCD for distribution and
determined they were therefore, illegal. It was,
however, up to local government authorities to police
this.
Huang's admission brought two immediate
reactions: the KMT mayor of Taipei, Ma Ying-jeou, who
has ambitions to be Soong's running mate in 2008,
launched police raids around the capital to stop the
sale of and seize the VCDs. Legislators from the ruling
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), on the other hand,
pointed out that the GIO head both didn't know what he
was talking about and had gravely offended against the
principle of free speech, a principle that, although
written into Taiwan's constitution, has been more often
honored only in the breach in the past half-century,
most notoriously by James Soong himself.
The
exact bone of legal contention of the legislators was
that that the GIO was attempting to regulate the VCD
under the Broadcast and Television Law, according to
which TV programs need prior approval before they are
aired. But the VCD was not meant for TV broadcasting.
Given the lack of any specific policy dealing with VCDs,
the GIO was treating them in the same way as videotapes
made for broadcasting. But Special Report was
neither a tape nor was being broadcast - it was in fact
being sold in night markets. While it is true that
originally the producers of the VCD had hoped to sell
the shows to a TV company, it was absurd to apply laws
relating to broadcast media to something being sold from
market stalls.
On top of this was a simple
free-speech issue: who was the GIO to decide what
political satire people could and could not see? Even
after the end of martial law in the late 1980s and
Taiwan's democratization, the GIO has been left with a
formidable arsenal of censorship powers - used to such
memorable effect in the bad old days by Soong - but
these have in recent years, by a sort of gentleman's
agreement, only been used in cases regarding possible
obscenity or endangerment of national security. Damage
to James Soong's amour-propre, the DPP
legislators said, hardly falls into either category.
While the GIO didn't concede the point about the
non-applicability of the Broadcast and Television Law,
it made a change in regulations removing the need for
prior GIO approval for "programs concerning current
affairs" and "VCDs circulated with publications". It did
this, it said, in the interests of free speech.
In theory this should have stopped Mayor Ma's
crackdown on sales of the VCD. But Ma was anyway already
in trouble. His opponents quickly pointed out that
Taipei's night markets were awash in VCDs both
unlicensed and - many of them - obscene, and questioned
why political satire merited a crackdown when
pornography didn't. And then it was discovered that, as
part of his re-election campaign last year, Ma had
distributed a promotional VCD that also had not received
prior clearance from the GIO. On top all this was the
absurdity of having the half of the Taipei metropolitan
area controlled by Taipei city Special
Report-free, when it was freely available in the
half run by the DPP-controlled Taipei county government.
PFP efforts to suppress the VCD were not to be
frustrated, however. As well as intimidation of the
actors and production team, Soong's acolytes tried to
get the production company, Bi-Sheng Broadcasting Co,
closed down on the basis of also being improperly
licensed. This failed when the company produced a
business operation license granted, embarrassingly, by
Ma's Taipei city government.
Having lost its
various legal challenges, all the PFP can do now about
the VCD, the third and fourth of the series of which
were released this week, is muster its formidable array
of commentators on to TV talk shows to argue that it
welcomes the VCD because, by showing how crass and
uncultured are the Special Report team and, by
implication, the DPP government - which is supposed to
tacitly support the VCD - the satire will alienate
voters from the DPP at election time. This is, perhaps,
a far better joke than anything in Special Report
itself.
In its reaction to the satire, the PFP
has done itself remarkable harm. The VCDs raise a laugh
at the expense of Soong and some of those close to him.
The PFP, in trying to turn this into an act of lese
majeste has only shown itself to be extraordinarily
intolerant.
At the grassroots, a large number of
Taiwanese who otherwise would have paid no attention to
the disks have now watched them to see what the fuss is
about, have deemed them innocent fun at the expense of
the puffed-up and have judged the PFP's behavior to
exhibit their intolerance of free speech, especially
free speech that involves Taiwanese laughing at
mainlanders rather than kowtowing to them as in the days
of the Chiang dictatorship.
But there is a
bigger issue at stake. Despite 15 years of apparent
liberalization, Taiwan's media are still largely in the
hands of pro-unification mainlanders. Partly this is the
result of the political vetting of media ownership
carried on by the likes of James Soong and other GIO
heads of the martial-law era; partly it is because of
the educational imbalance between mainlanders and
Taiwanese during the same period; and partly it is
simply because the pro-independence Taiwanese camp has
rarely had deep enough pockets to be able to get its own
media up and running in Taiwan's viciously competitive
environment.
As a result, the progressive and
Taiwan-nationalist DPP government has met a huge amount
of hostility from the conservative reunificationist
media. Taiwan's laws of defamation are so weak that it
has become a common practice in the unificationist media
to print the most outrageous slurs about members of the
government - a recent example involved an attempt to
hound a health minister out of office on a completely
false charge of sexually harassing another male employee
- safe in the knowledge that they have little legal
recourse to clear their name.
Special
Report can be seen as a reaction to this media
dominance and the culture of defamatory mud-slinging
that provides its common fare. It is an attempt by
pro-independence Taiwanese to find a voice and an
audience that is denied to them in the mainstream media.
Given the popularity of Special Report, more of
these guerrilla productions can be expected.
Also in question now is the role of the GIO. Few
people gave the organization much attention until the
Special Report fracas. But now opinion makers are
asking why this remnant of the bad old days still
exists. Its administration might, currently, be
benevolent. But that is no guarantee for the future. Why
should it exist at all? A ministry of information could
serve the purposes of providing important information
domestically and overseas and a communications
commission could perform such functions as broadcast
bandwidth licenses. Let the courts handle issues such as
obscenity. What Taiwan doesn't need, say civil
libertarians, is an official censor.
Overall,
the lasting impression of the Special Report
storm in a teacup is that Taiwan might be a democracy in
the sense of having regular free elections, but 15 years
has been far too little for libertarian values to become
deep-rooted. And some of Special Report's
supporters claim that, as long as assiduous servants of
the former dictatorship such as James Soong remain
electorally viable, liberal democracy's roots in Taiwan
will remain shallow. For this reason the upcoming
election is being seen as a watershed.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication policies.)
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