Foreigner attitudes towards Taiwanese : Judge less, accept more

It was a while ago that I attended a speech at NCKU given by an American diplomat in Taiwan. The speech title was “An American Diplomat: A Life of Service in the Global Village” as part of an EAGLE lecture series “Envision the World”.

It was a very interesting speech, and I was quite impressed with the speaker – his clarity, flow, experience and perspective. As he studied in Taiwan during the KMT rule and now serves as a diplomat in Kaohsiung he’s made a strong point about the impressive change Taiwanese society has gone through from being under martial law to a full democracy. I’ll quote the “Impressions of Taiwan” part from his slide show to compare Taiwan of 1980 of Taiwan of today :

Impressions of Taiwan (part 1 – 1980):

• Small island, big heart
• Society in transition
• Mindful of traditions
• Conservative government
• Need for global engagement

Impressions of Taiwan (part 2 – 2008):

• Vigorous, dynamic democracy
• Active, uninhibited, free press
• Developed civic society
• Improved environmental protection
• Prominent identity issues
• Reliance on links with the world

I’d say that’s a very high-level politically correct summary of the differences between the two periods and his examples made it quite insightful for those like me who haven’t been around at the time of the KMT.

Yet, when talking about Taiwan in the global village, he went on further to address some “issues”, which is where I started to feel a bit uncomfortable.

He started by referring to the press – the free, active  inhibited Taiwanese press – as he put it. He was impressed, as I am, with the fact that on his cable TV there are no less than 9 Taiwanese news channels working around the clock to cover news. Yet what he wondered about was why all those channels cover only local news, and most of the time exactly the same news. That morning there was a Taiwanese news item on Chen Shui Bian’s poor daughter that had enough of the reporters following her everywhere and it seemed that on that morning all channels were repeatedly covering that exact same event in pretty much the same way.

His point was that – maybe unlike other countries Taiwanese don’t think global, are not interested in world events and politics and that this is something for the Taiwanese students to think about. Is that so?

But it’s something small, why would something like that bother me? it’s not only that I don’t think it’s accurate, but also that I’ve been to the states, a few times, for long periods of times and I know quite a few Americans, and I think this criticism that I hear quite often is unfair. I believe it’s happening everywhere, especially in the states, perhaps on a worse scale. I’ll give you an example from a TED.COM speech about American media :

And that wasn’t the only point he made in that speech that I thought was a bit condescending and unfair. It also happens quite often that I hear my fellow foreigners criticize the Taiwanese for things  that are “better where I come from” when it’s not always clear that that is really the case. We, westerner foreigners in Taiwan, tend to criticize Taiwan more than we would criticize ourselves back in our home countries, sometimes having the inherent bias of not being able to see the same weaknesses in the place we come from. “This never happened back home” we would say, pointing out where we see faults. In a sense I could generalize to say that we are generally more accepting towards things in our own country and are generally less accepting towards other cultures we live in. Yeah, an American might not like Bush and would complain about the inner workings of the American political system but statements will become far more extreme, almost catastrophic, sometimes apocalyptic and fatalistic for the same things in Taiwan and the Taiwanese political system, like accepting president Bush’s flop in Florida with poor Al Gor while still claiming that the KMT did something with the last elections 2 million differences. I’ve seen it time and time again. Western presenters, some of them dear friends and classmates of mine, throw amazing judgmental phrases at their Taiwanese audiences for what they think is wrong with their society, how they believe Taiwanese should be and how Taiwanese should act. “Be global”, “care more”, “express yourself”, “bad”, “not good enough” or plainly “do it like we do it” and the Taiwanese listen politely with blank faces while I move around my chair uncomfortably debating with myself whether I should say something. The few times that I’ve decided to say what I think were times when I heard Taiwanese professors who came back from staying a few years abroad at the states saying such things to their own people. It was too much to bare.

One of my talented American classmates, which I hold very high respect for, has thought up a “Believe less, think more” campaign around Tainan, with photo-graffiti, a photography website and other yet to come media gigs. I think it’s absolutely terrific, but in a way – this slogan continues the issue I was making before. So instead I would like to suggest a different slogan aimed at us -

“Judge less, accept more”

… and I apologize if that sounds judgmental.