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On the Taipei prepare station, a Chinese language human rights activist named Cuicui watched with envy as six younger Taiwanese politicians campaigned for town’s legislative seats. A decade in the past, they’d been concerned in parallel democratic protest actions — she in China, and the politicians on the alternative facet of the Taiwan Strait.
“We got here of age as activists across the identical time. Now they’re working as legislators whereas my friends and I are in exile,” mentioned Cuicui, who fled China for Southeast Asia final yr over safety considerations.
Cuicui was one in a gaggle of eight ladies I adopted final week in Taiwan earlier than the Jan. 13 election. Their tour was referred to as “Particulars of a Democracy” and was put collectively by Annie Jieping Zhang, a mainland-born journalist who labored in Hong Kong for twenty years earlier than shifting to Taiwan through the pandemic. Her aim is to assist mainland Chinese language see Taiwan’s election firsthand.
The ladies went to election rallies and talked to politicians and voters, in addition to homeless folks and different deprived teams. They attended a stand-up comedy present by a person from China, now dwelling in Taiwan, whose humor addressed matters which can be taboo in his dwelling nation.
It was an emotional journey stuffed with envy, admiration, tears and revelations.
The group made a number of stops at websites that demonstrated the “White Terror” repression Taiwan went although between 1947 and 1987, when tens of hundreds of individuals have been imprisoned and a minimum of 1,000 have been executed after being accused of spying for China. They visited a former jail that had jailed political prisoners. For them, it was a historical past lesson in Taiwan’s journey from authoritarianism to democracy, a path they consider is more and more unattainable in China.
“Though it might seem to be touring backward in time for folks in Taiwan, for us, it’s the current,” mentioned Yamei, a Chinese language journalist in her 20s now dwelling exterior China.
Members of the group flew in from Japan, Southeast Asia and the USA — wherever however China. Each China and Taiwan have made it tougher for Chinese language to go to the island as tensions between them have spiked over Beijing’s more and more assertive declare on the island. They ranged in age from their 20s to their 70s. Some have been activists like Cuicui, who left the nation just lately, whereas others have been professionals and businesspeople who’ve lived overseas for years and usually are not essentially political of their outlook.
Angela Chen, an actual property agent in Portland, Ore., joined the tour to take her mom on a trip. Ms. Chen is a naturalized U.S. citizen who identifies culturally as Chinese language. The journey was eye opening, she mentioned. She was shocked to learn the way tragic and fierce Taiwan’s democratization course of had been. Her father, like many Chinese language dad and mom, instructed her to not become involved in politics. Now she felt that everybody needed to contribute to push a society ahead.
Till a decade in the past, visiting Taiwan to witness its elections was a preferred exercise for mainland Chinese language who have been eager about exploring the probabilities of democratization.
It’s straightforward to see why. Most Taiwanese converse Mandarin and share a cultural heritage with China as Han Chinese language. As mainlanders looked for another Chinese language society, they naturally turned to Taiwan for solutions.
I traveled to Taiwan in 2012 to report about such a gaggle, which had greater than a dozen prime Chinese language intellectuals, entrepreneurs and traders. On the time, debates in regards to the professionals and cons of democracy, republicanism and constitutionalism have been frequent on Chinese language social media.
Opinion leaders have been asking whether or not China would ever have a pacesetter like Chiang Ching-kuo, the Taiwanese president who regularly shifted away from the dictatorial rule of his father, Chiang Kai-shek, within the Eighties.
That looks like a lifetime in the past. Quickly after that, Xi Jinping took over as China’s chief, and he has moved the nation in the wrong way. Civil society has been pushed underground and discussions about democracy forbidden.
Final week’s group visited Taiwan underneath very completely different circumstances. Most of them needed to stay nameless, agreeing to speak to me provided that I recognized them by their first title, as a result of merely cheering Taiwan’s democracy is politically delicate.
At Jing-Mei White Terror Memorial Park, the previous jail, it was straightforward for the group to image how folks had spent their time in crowded, humid and tacky cells and washed their garments in bogs.
“Many individuals thought that Taiwan’s democracy fell from the sky,” Antonio Chiang, a former journalist, dissident and adviser to the departing president, Tsai Ing-wen, instructed the group over lunch after their go to to the jail website. “It was the results of many individuals’s efforts,” he mentioned.
Mr. Chiang added, “It is going to be a really very long time earlier than China turns into a democracy.”
Everybody knew that was true. Nonetheless, it was deflating for them to listen to. However their despair didn’t final lengthy.
They heard from the daughter of Cheng Nan-jung, a writer and pro-democracy activist who set himself on hearth to protest the dearth of freedom of speech in 1989. On the website of his self-immolation, her feedback resonated with the visiting Chinese language: “The predicament of a rustic can solely be resolved by the folks of that nation themselves.”
Then they went to the stand-up present by the comedian, who was from Xinjiang, the western Chinese language area the place a couple of million Muslims have been despatched to re-education facilities. Everybody cried. It was each heartbreaking and cathartic for them to listen to somebody utilizing phrases, similar to “Uyghurs,” “re-education camps” and “lockdowns,” which can be thought-about too delicate to be mentioned at a public venue in China.
“If everybody does what they will, does it nicely and with a bit of extra braveness, our society will turn into higher,” mentioned the comedian, who requested to not be named.
For the group, essentially the most empowering a part of the tour was to witness the residents organizing themselves and casting their votes. Because the guests gathered on the island’s presidential palace, Yamei, the journalist, was shocked that its entrance was painted peachy pink.
“It was not an establishment surrounded by absolute solemnity or excessive partitions that might intimidate you,” she mentioned. The distinction with Zhongnanhai, the compound for China’s prime leaders in Beijing, “was fairly putting.”
After watching a documentary about bar hostesses who had organized a union, they discovered that the ladies had drafted laws to guard their rights. That will be unimaginable for anybody in China.
Whereas homeless individuals are largely invisible in Chinese language cities — as a result of the authorities received’t permit them to be seen — the group discovered that many organizations in Taiwan present homeless folks with meals, locations to bathe and different assist.
At election rallies, they noticed voters — younger and outdated, and fogeys with strollers — pack squares and stadiums to hearken to candidates make their pitches.
Within the days earlier than the election, they’d heard from many Taiwanese who had nonetheless not determined which of the three presidential candidates they might vote for. But, the turnout on Taiwan’s Election Day was 72 %, greater than the 66 % that got here out within the U.S. presidential election in 2020, the best turnout in an American vote since 1900.
The candidate of the ruling Democratic Progressive Occasion, Lai Ching-te, received with 40 % of the vote — not a satisfying consequence even for a few of the social gathering’s supporters. However nonetheless the folks selected who could be their chief.
At a rally within the southern metropolis of Tainan, amid the sounds of drums, gongs and fireworks, Lin Lizhen, the proprietor of a jewellery retailer, instructed the tour group proudly, “That is democracy.”
Then she mentioned: “I do know the mainlanders like freedom, too. They only don’t have the facility to combat again.”
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