|
Page 1 of 2
 Taiwan’s yuppies have other things to do than follow politics the way their elders did
Last Friday, 28-year-old Taipei resident Silvia Chen decided to take the national Double Ten holiday, Taiwan’s birthday, to chat on MSN and work on her personal blog. While parents and children came out for the celebration alongside Kuomintang leaders, and a group urging President Ma Ying-Jieu to accelerate money-laundering investigations of former president Chen Shui-bian, Silvia Chen let the ceremony play on the flat screen of her newly-renovated apartment in one of the city’s suburbs.
She and her husband, Tsao Chin, are members of a kind of new Taiwanese Generation-X social class – aware but apathetic, non-participatory in the political furnace that has characterized Taiwan’s heated atmosphere for decades. The couple voted this year for Ma, and even though Chin works as an aide to a Taiwanese lawmaker, he is just as disinterested in debating national affairs or attending political events.
“It was just boring government stuff,” she said of the national day celebration, and instead directed me to the link on her site with updated pictures of her honeymoon in Eastern Europe. Chen teaches piano and manages the investments that she and her husband made this year after marrying.
“We’ve seen [Taiwan’s leaders] performance and we’re disappointed,” Tsao Chin said. “More and more, we lose interest and a desire to participate.”
When it comes to politics, their elders are “hot-hearted,” a common Chinese term that describes the 70 percent or higher voter turn-out, the brawls in the legislature or divisions between friends based on their party color (green for the pro-independence DPP and blue for the China-friendly nationalist Kuomintang). Those in the south typically identify with the DPP and are considered Taiwanese, the island’s largest ethnic group, which has lived on the island centuries before the Kuomintang’s arrival in the wake of their drubbing by the Communists in 1949. Residents in the north, often first and second generations of families who came over from China with the KMT, are still called waisheng ren or foreign-born. Politicians in Taiwan recently have used identity politics to drum up the differences between the two groups to rally support.
As with the rest of Asia, the young in Taiwan are having premarital sex more, and -- dangerously -- not using condoms as much as they used to and not as much as they should. They are moderate, or what in much of the rest of Asia would be termed conservative. They are material and while their fashion sense is sometimes as adventurous as the Japanese they are not as suave by streets. They don't drive BMWs or Mercedes because those are the established gangster cars in Taiwan. Most ofTaiwan's wealthy opt for the safer, more conservative Lexus to avoid any association.
By and large, Taiwan’s generation of young professionals and college students seem impervious to appeals to national or ethnic sentiment. Their priorities are more in line with Ma’s professed main concern: a better economy. Ma has been heralded by some for easing relations with China and prioritizing ways for Taiwan to profit off of China’s development through tourism and more open trade, and criticized by others for selling out Taiwan or reversing years of democratic progress. To the young, there are more important things than politics.
“Politics is not what gets you a job,” Chin said. “It doesn’t give you food to eat every day.”
<< Start < Prev 1 2 Next > End >>
 |
Subscribe to this comment's feed
Show/Hide comments
and MC Hotdog ('我愛台妹') signify to me that even if Taiwan is opening to China it is perhaps because the population is becoming more comfortable with their admittedly unusual status than because they have decided to subsume themselves to China. 
Show/Hide comment form
