What is the method by which “Dozens of Taiwanese celebrities endorse Beijing’s claim on island” (Radio Free Asia, May 27, 2024)?
They have forwarded a CCP propaganda sheet. Just a couple of seconds of doing as told. One or two clicks.
More than 70 artists and celebrities, including journalist Patty Hou, singer and actress Nana Ouyang, and TV host and actress Dee Hsu [shown from left to right, above], reposted a statement from Chinese state broadcaster CCTV on the Weibo social media platform which said that independence for Taiwan, which has never been ruled by Beijing, was “a dead end.”
“The unification of Taiwan with China cannot be stopped,” said the May 22 statement….
“Taiwan has never been a country and will never become one,” the post said, adding “Taiwanese independence is a dead end. Unification with the motherland is unstoppable! China will eventually achieve complete unification.”
It’s just one of an infinite number of CCP propaganda campaigns barking the same old lines. But why are the dozens of Taiwanese celebrities cooperating with it? Honest conviction? Somebody holding a gun to their heads?
Public versus private
President Lai, to whose inaugural address the CCTV post responds, is letting the apparently anti-Taiwan sentiment of the obedient celebrities bounce off him. Perhaps they’re feeling the kind of pressure that is normal when one is “in another person’s house,” he suggests, presumably alluding to whatever opportunities on the mainland they might have had to forfeit had they declined to join the campaign. He says that they may well privately disagree with the implications of what they’re doing. No biggie.
That’s very sympathetic and understanding and everything. But one’s private convictions, if they can be called convictions, do nobody any good if one’s substantive actions only contradict them. “Privately,” it may be that many members of the Chinese Communisty Party know that they’re being fed nonsense and that they are regurgitating nonsense and that the CCP is evil. Doesn’t help anybody unless and until they switch to the other side.
Various ROC officials are emphasizing that nobody in Taiwan is being forced by the government to utter any particular political opinion. The country’s Ministry of Culture issued a statement saying that it extends its understanding to “artists taking a public stance under unavoidable circumstances….” Taiwan “will never ask anyone to take a public stance, nor will anyone be punished for taking, or not taking, such a stance.”
Good. But how untenable is it, really, for Taiwanese personalities who are not being threatened with imprisonment, torture, or murder to tell the Chinese Communist Party to get lost—or at least to abstain from conferring their imprimaturs on CCP propaganda?
Taiwanese actress Yang Hsiu-hui says that she has turned down work in China because of her politics. “I gave up on that market a long time ago.” Yang’s choices seem to demonstrate a possibility. Why hasn’t she been turned into a CCP drone by “unavoidable circumstances”?
Divide and rule
Gong Yujian, a Chinese dissident who now lives in Taiwan, says the celebrities’ pro-CCP actions are “a case of the Chinese Communist Party’s divide-and-rule tactics and cognitive war being waged on Taiwan. The aim is to split supporters of independence [and benefit] the Chinese Communist Party and its fifth column in Taiwan.”
What kind of person, if not actually coerced, goes along with this strategy and purpose, throwing his nation to the wolves even though he “privately” wants the strategy to fail?
