Aboriginals call on ROC presidential candidates for new deal

By June Tsai 

The Indigenous Peoples Action Coalition Taiwan presented the three ROC presidential candidates with petitions Dec. 9 requesting they commit to negotiating a new partnership with the island’s aboriginals.

“In the first televised debate, none of the candidates said anything about issues concerning Taiwan’s indigenous peoples,” a coalition representative said. “We need them to clarify their positions.”

ROC President and Kuomintang Chairman Ma Ying-jeou, opposition Democratic Progressive Party Chairwoman Tsai Ing-wen and People First Party Chairman James Song have also been invited to back the initiative at a signing event, the representative said.

Scheduled for Dec. 14, the function will be attended by members of Taiwan’s 14 officially recognized indigenous groups.

In addition to signing the agreements and reconfirming the U.N. conventions on economic, social, cultural, civil and political rights at the event, the coalition wants candidates to publicly apologize for the treatment of aboriginals.

“We need them to also promise to realize the basic act, convene a committee on improving the self-rule bill, and implement policies offering dignity and opportunities rather than creating a vicious cycle of welfare handouts.”

Oto Micyang, president of the Taiwan indigenous Peoples’ Policies Association, said a consultative approach was first adopted by former President Chen Shui-bian, who inked a new partnership pact with aboriginals when running for office in 1999. The agreement became the keystone of his administration’s aboriginal policies, and the basis for the 2005 Indigenous Peoples Basic Act.

“Over the years, our goal of equal status and self rule has not been realized either under the DPP or KMT governments,” Micyang said. “Land grabs, gaffes and all manner of outrages continue to take place—it is time for Taiwan to write a new chapter and make a real change.”

This article first appeared in online Taiwan Today Dec. 12, 2011.

Filmmakers document plight of farmers, lives of activists

By June Tsai

Taiwanese directors Juang Yi-tzeng and Yen Lan-chuan, a husband-and-wife team who made their name with 2005’s critically acclaimed documentary “The Last Rice Farmer,” have dedicated the last five years to another film exploring Taiwan’s society and history. “Hand in Hand,” scheduled for commercial release Nov. 18, documents the life of Tian Meng-shu and her husband Tian Chao-ming, long-time advocates of democracy and human rights.

(Courtesy of "Hand in Hand" production team)

In the last few years, issues involving farmers and agriculture have filled Taiwan’s public forum, amid worries over the country’s low food self-sufficiency and excessive land expropriations, believed by many to infringe on farmers’ rights to life and property.

Today whenever agriculture-related controversies attract media attention, “The Last Rice Farmer” is invariably cited, and the main character, Uncle Kun-bin, is quoted as if he were the official spokesman for Taiwan’s farmers.

But when Juang and Yen decided to look into the state of the nation’s agriculture in 2001, the subject was simply too obscure or too plain to have been seriously treated by filmmakers.

“Taiwan had just joined the World Trade Organization, opening its rice market to imports, and local farmers were feeling the impact,” Juang said.

Juang and Yen decided to investigate historical and policy aspects of Taiwan’s agriculture. Yet as the project evolved, farmers and their relationship with nature came to the foreground, he said.

“The more time we spent with farmers, the more strongly we felt that their stories tell more, and are much more interesting, than any academic discourse.” They did not seek out Uncle Kun-bin and his friends, but were introduced to them while undertaking a government-sponsored promotional film project.

The filmmakers spent 15 months following the life and work of Uncle Kun-bin, his wife and their friends. The directors’ wholehearted devotion to understanding the farmers’ lives won their trust. Juang and Yen then spent another 15 months editing the 400 hours of footage they had collected—almost six times that of a normal 2-hour documentary.

The film ended up winning the grand prize at the Taipei Film Festival. Viewers got a jolt when they heard Uncle Kun-bin, with 60 years in the fields, express the hope that his generation would be the last to grow rice in Taiwan, as a result of government policies putting agriculture in a supporting role to industry and suppressing rice prices for decades.

The documentary reveals the homespun wisdom of the farmers, who face their lot with humor and a philosophical attitude.

Son of a banana farmer from southern Taiwan, Juang said as a boy, when government control of the media was still in effect under martial law, he often felt indignant watching TV representations of farmers. “They were shown as graceless, ignorant people. But that’s not true—people at the grass-roots level are wise folk.”

Juang said Taiwan’s farmers tend to have low self-esteem due to biased public representation and lower incomes compared with employees working for government or private companies. “They may come off as being very inarticulate, but after we had worked with them for six months, they began to display their eloquence, talking freely about themselves, their beliefs and experiences.”

Village farmers even took on the role of cinematographer, Yen added, telling the directors where and when they could get characteristic shots of the locale.

The filmmaking duo attempted to cover all aspects of the farmers’ lives. “We took in things that we knew would probably not be used in the film, more than enough to make another documentary, say, about the evolution of cultivation equipment or methods for planting seedlings,” Juang said.

Upon completing the work, he said, they were exhausted and had zero confidence in its success with audiences. “We comforted the farmers, and ourselves, with the thought that if the film did not sell, it at least would have anthropological value in 30 years.

“Our attitude is that when we are making a film, we want to do our best so we won’t have to say sorry to the participants for not doing enough,” he added.

Juang and Yen almost decided to stop making documentaries, due to the tremendous workload involved and low material rewards. Juang said the subsidies they got were just enough to cover production costs, and their prize money went to pay debts incurred from their previous documentary ventures on victims of the Sept. 21, 1999 earthquake.

Besides, given the way they worked, Yen feared “being once again caught up completely in a project that would seize total control of our lives and minds.”

But they overcame their reluctance a year later when Taiwan Public Television Service asked if they would be willing to take over a project documenting the lives of the activists Tian Chao-ming and Tian Meng-shu.

Juang admitted knowing nothing about the couple before being offered the project. But after getting a glimpse into the life of this couple from his parents’ generation, he was inspired by the opportunity to delve into the political history of Taiwan since World War II that the biographies of the Tians encompass.

An eyewitness to the February 28 Incident of 1947 and the ensuing martial-law rule of Taiwan under the Kuomintang, Tian Chao-ming has never felt at ease with authority, remaining a lone dissident in the face of injustice.

Tian Meng-shu, better known as Mama Tian, became a political activist after marrying Tian Chao-ming. She is still a familiar presence at events advocating democracy, human rights and political independence.

Armed with this background information, Juang finally persuaded Yen that they should take on the project. With only one crew member, the team embarked on a five-year filmmaking odyssey so arduous it left Yen with acute muscular pains that doctors have not been able to identify the specific cause of.

When they began work in 2006, Juang said, Chao-ming was bedridden as a result of multiple strokes and unable to speak. They relied on Meng-shu to trace the couple’s history.

For the next 40 months, the directors recorded her life story and memories, and sorted out materials she had collected about her husband, including 20,000 pictures, numerous papers and 250 hours of tape recordings and video footage.

Meng-shu, from a rich family in Tainan, fell in love with Chao-ming, a Japanese-educated physician 16 years her senior, when she was a high school student. In the 1950s, this age gap and the fact they shared the same family name were taboos. She eloped with the young doctor and was never welcomed back again to her family.

“Dr. Tian introduced Mama Tian to cultural and political activism, but after he was hit by strokes, she has continued his dedication, in an even more publicly impressive fashion,” Yen said.

Hand-in-hand, they worked to free jailed political dissidents in the 1970s. They stood by Lin Yi-hsiung after his mother and 7-year-old twin daughters were slain while he was in detention following the 1979 Kaohsiung Incident. In 1989 they struggled, but failed, to dissuade dissident Cheng Nan-jung from immolating himself in a search for “absolute freedom of speech.”

“Through those years of social and political turmoil, the love between the couple was sustained in the form of a lifelong devotion to a greater cause, and that’s the story we hope to tell,” Yen said, explaining the connotations of the film’s title.

Unconventionally, computer animation plays a role in presenting the Tians’ 60-year story. The technology, Yen said, is intended to help visualize the past and add dimension to the largely one-person narration.

The eight animated sections of the movie total 20 minutes, but overseeing their completion took nearly as long as editing the rest of the film—which was 18 months.

“Everything, from clothing and hairstyles to buses on the street, had to be redrawn to reflect different times and settings,” Juang said. They even filmed real people acting out the scenes so the animators could grasp what needed to be represented.

The 140-minute documentary, cut down from 800 hours of footage, encountered one final hurdle before the project could be completed. For the official screening on its TV channel, PTS suggested cutting two-thirds of the gory episode on the Lin family murders and leaving out Cheng’s self-immolation altogether.

Refusing to compromise, Juang told PTS to discontinue the contract. They then had to borrow money to liquidate the ensuing NT$3 million (US$99,321) debt and get the film released. An award at the Taiwan International Documentary Film Festival last year vindicated their efforts.

Juang said the two episodes were essential to the characterization of Tian Chao-ming. “If they had been downplayed or deleted, it would not have done justice to his biography and the movie as a whole would have been affected,” he said.

“Some may accuse the film of siding with certain political views, but as documentary directors, we hope to represent subjects as they were, and once completed, the film is beyond us.”

Ahead of the documentary’s commercial screening, Juang urged viewers to decide for themselves. As for the directors, “We are grateful for being able to explore history that textbooks have ignored,” he said.

This article first appeared in online Taiwan Today Nov. 12, 2011.

Orchid Islanders protest ROC government nuclear waste policies

By June Tsai

Representatives of the indigenous Tao people from Orchid Island held a news conference in Taipei Nov. 30, accusing the government of exposing the Tao to radiation from its nuclear waste facility and demanding an immediate policy review.

Orchid Island, off Taiwan’s southeast coast, has served as a nuclear waste repository since 1982. A law governing the search for a new storage site was passed in 2006, but with no new site yet determined, the island, also known as Lanyu, remains the disposal site for waste from Taiwan’s three nuclear power plants.

“For the past three decades, my people have had to live with the fear of radiation,” said Sinan Mavivo, a Tao activist, adding that cancer has become the No. 1 cause of death for Lanyu residents in recent years.

“We demand that locals be part of the monitoring crew and that the government conduct health checks for all residents,” she said. Sinam Mafefu recently became a Green Party Taiwan at-large legislative candidate, vowing to oppose the development of nuclear power in Taiwan.

The news conference followed the recent release of a study that said signs of possible leakage of radioactive materials were detected outside the disposal facility.

The report, released at a symposium in Taipei Nov. 26, said radionuclides of cobalt-60 and cesium-137 were detected at 6.5 Becquerel per kilogram (Bq/kg) and 32.9 Bq/kg, respectively. Though both figures are lower than the safety standards allowed by Taiwan’s Atomic Energy Council, scholars said leakage is definitely a problem.

The study was conducted by Huh Chih-an, a research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Earth Science, and commissioned by state-run Taiwan Power Co., which operates the nuclear power plants.

Huh’s report stated that no leakage of cobalt-60 had been detected before 2009, but is now increasing, while levels of cesium-137 outside the storage plant are also rising.

According to Peter Chang, a professor of public health at Taipei Medical University, cesium-137 was already detected at several spots on the island 10 years ago. “A comprehensive inspection by a third party is necessary,” he said.

Lee Chin-shan, director of Taipower’s nuclear waste management department, said the appearance of cobalt-60 was probably related to radioactive dust from the company’s inspection and replacement of storage barrels, beginning four years ago and completed last week.

Lee said the company will clean up the storage site following the repackaging operations and step up efforts to monitor and prevent leakage.

This article first appeared  in online Taiwan Today Dec. 1, 2011.

National history museum puts Taiwan on the map

(Courtesy of National Museum of Taiwan History )

By June Tsai

Visitors to the newly opened National Museum of Taiwan History in Tainan City are greeted by a slanted solar-panel wall, a “wall of clouds” reflecting the sky and surrounding natural landscape.

In stark contrast to this imposing structure, an old-time thatched-roof bamboo hut stands humbly beside twin lakes in a corner of the 20-hectare museum complex. Historically the area was an estuary beset by frequent flooding, where bamboo cabins made for easy relocation.

In the 16th century the site was separated from the Taiwan Strait by a string of islets, and functioned as Taiwan’s first trading hub, where the Chinese, Japanese and Dutch came to do business with Chinese immigrants and indigenous residents.

Museum Director Lu Li-cheng believes no place could be better suited for a museum on Taiwan history. “History here refers to the history of the land and people, rather than history as interpreted by historians, and the location says that.”

The Tainan area was so important that its name was sometimes used to refer to the whole island. The outside world had no set moniker for Taiwan: Ming-dynasty Chinese called it Dongning, the Portuguese referred to it as Formosa, the Spanish Hermosa, the Dutch Taijouan and the Japanese Takasago.

“Imagine this. It was the opening chapter of Taiwan’s 400 years of history, a page filled with meetings of different cultures and peoples that also put Taiwan on the map of the Age of Discovery,” Lu said.

After the museum’s preparatory office was set up in 1999, one of its most important projects was seeking out maps and documents pertaining to Taiwan archived overseas by museums and other institutions, as well as individuals.

“Since Taiwan’s history began with encounters with outsiders, we knew there had to be many important texts waiting to surface in foreign archives,” he said.

Since 2002, the museum has collected more than 200 books about Taiwan published in languages other than Chinese, along with maps drawn between the 16th and 19th centuries. The largest number of materials comes from the Netherlands, with many also from France, Germany and Japan. The acquisition work continues.

According to Lu, an anthropologist, in the past most writing on Taiwan history relied heavily on Chinese-language documents, which contain errors that have been repeated over and over again, “due to lack of support from field studies and unquestioning copying.”

“Textbooks tell us Taiwan’s opening up began with the Qing court sending officials to manage the island, but foreign materials provide a very different view,” he said. “These documents help redefine the identity of Taiwanese in the modern context.”

Indeed, the museum takes visitors to the island’s hybrid origins, prompting them to ask, “Who are the Taiwanese?”

Arranged chronically in seven sections, the museum’s exhibition begins with archaeological excavations from throughout the island with finds dating back to 20,000 years ago. It then focuses on the interactions among different peoples and cultures over the past four centuries, as well as humanity’s relation to the land.

The display is designed so that people are not told about the past, but instead re-experience it, from the perspective of ordinary people rather than well-known historical figures.

For example, Lu said, Japan’s control of Taiwan (1895-1945), with its emphasis on law and order, is represented in the re-creation of a Japanese-era police station, modeled on the remnants of one in Chiayi City. “Police officers of the time were involved in every aspect of people’s daily lives,” he noted. “That’s why to sum up the colonial era we chose a police station over the Governor-General’s Office in Taipei, now the Presidential Office.”

The museum’s focus on folk life continues in its reconstructions of popular entertainment, important industries and wartime Taiwan.

The last two sections cover life from the end of World War II, when the ROC government came to Taiwan, to the present day. A classroom teaching anti-communist and Chinese-culture centered ideology shows aspects of postwar education; a “living room-cum-factory” presents a microcosm of the everyday life behind Taiwan’s economic boom of the 1980s; and protesters in the street take visitors back to the political and social struggles prior to and following the lifting of martial law in 1987.

“Here in the museum we have a summary of Taiwan’s history, and while gaps and omissions are inevitable, we’ve done our best to keep them to a minimum,” Lu said.

“There are no ‘national treasures’ in our collections, but lots of stories about people from all walks of life,” he added.

When it comes to the indigenous peoples, special attention is devoted to their clash with the concept of a modern state, particularly under the rule of the modernizing Japanese—a clash that has continued under the later Han Chinese governments.

“The museum does not represent Formosan indigenous peoples as static objects for display,” Lu said. “You see the Tao culture on Lanyu from the last century, as well as their people taking to the streets in the 1980s to protest against the nuclear waste being dumped on the island.”

The facility’s name may lead to confusion with the National Taiwan Museum and National History Museum, both in Taipei. According to the director, however, the NTM does not feature history, and the NMH highlights Chinese culture and history.

The new institution is not a complement to either of those museums, but has its own purpose. “It does not simply display historical objects, but attempts to convey an idea, an attitude toward history,” Lu said.

He explained that at present interpretations of Taiwan’s history often come through political prisms, a consequence of decades of authoritarian rule and the backlash from the repressed that came with increased social freedoms during democratization.

But Taiwan should not restrict itself to nearsighted political disputes, Lu said, and should instead see the island from the perspective of global history. “This helps us imagine, and work toward, a Taiwan where citizens with different backgrounds and memories embrace cultural diversity and democratic values as common goals.”

As with any museum, education is a primary objective. “We pay particular attention to making the museum attractive to children, hoping to cultivate the right attitude toward history and an open mind toward different cultures,” Lu said.

The 1,514-square-meter first floor is dedicated to children under 9, designed to connect them with Taiwan’s past, natural environment, agriculture and the games their parents and grandparents used to play.

Research is another major function for a museum, and several smaller galleries on the fourth floor serve as venues for special exhibitions on current studies by the institution’s researchers, which the director called “our most precious assets.”

“A museum is not a museum just because it has a building and displays artifacts,” Lu said. “A museum must be able to continue to generate knowledge, inspire people and help build dreams.

“This museum is dedicated to all the people of Taiwan, and we hope each one of them, regardless of age or background, will gain a unique experience here.”

This article first appeared in online Taiwan Today Dec. 2, 2011.