Taipei Times - archives

Taipei Times - archives: " was established was a settler colonialism in which the incoming Mainlanders were the privileged colonial overlords and the Hoklo, Hakka and Aborigines routinely discriminated against. For non-Taiwanese to put this in perspective, think of Taiwan as Ireland, and the Mainlanders as the Protestant ascendency. For the argument over Sun Yat-sen (???) this week you can substitute the argument over the 'correct' name of the city of Derry. " A concise distillation of the pan-blue take on Taiwan's historical development. It is difficult to argue with the gist of this argument. If I were going to make a devil's advocate arguement against, it would include: reminding people of the central role of Chiang Ching Kuo in the localization of the KMT - without him, there is no Lee Teng Hui, no evolutionary progress to democracy; also, while Taiwanese were discriminated against, it is also true that many of the mainlanders came here with few resources, while the Taiwanese have wealth in the form of inherited land and property. This does not justify the pattern of discrimination, but it gives pause to reflect that if the mainlanders had not dominated the public sector, they surely would have constituted an underclass in society. In retrospect, dominating the private sector wasn't really such a bad consolation prize for the Taiwanese, was it?