5 - The Tug of War over Multiculturalism: Contestation between Governing and Empowering Immigrants in Taiwan

Summary

MULTICULTURALISM: TOUCHING ON THE NERVES OF NATIONAL ANXIETY?

Shortly after the world was shocked by the attacks in Norway on 22 July 2011, the Taiwanese public was upset to learn that the self-confessed perpetrator and right-wing extremist, Anders Behring Breivik, made and posted a video on the Internet before going on his killing spree, in which he expresses his admiration for Taiwan, along with Japan and South Korea, as a “modern country that never adopted multiculturalism”.

When this news spread across the Internet, many Taiwanese posted Web comments expressing their resentment and saying that Taiwan was not at all like how the Norwegian murderer had described it. Government Information Office Minister Philip Yang quickly issued a statement to the media stressing that Taiwanese society had always respected a plurality of cultures. Yang said that a democratic society should be a tolerant one in which different groups respect and appreciate one another, and that this was the kind of society that the international community generally took Taiwan to be. National Immigration Agency officials were also quick to assure the public that Breivik had never been to Taiwan. All this was supposedly to prove that Breivik's remarks about Taiwan were a baseless misinterpretation.

I expressed my opinions on this subject in an article published on 29 July in the Chinese-language China Times, which had invited me to write biweekly commentaries for almost a year. In this article, I pointed out that although Taiwan has never seen a massacre of people of an ethnic minority or migrants by right-wing extremists, our laws, policies and systems are full of discrimination against immigrants and migrant workers. I pointed out that discriminatory attitudes are often seen in the words and actions of bureaucrats, while prejudice is pervasive in society at large. The article called upon Taiwanese who really want to refute Breivik's description of Taiwan as a monocultural society to say a resounding “no” to all words and actions that discriminate against immigrants and migrant workers. On 4 A ugust, I subsequently received an anonymous letter containing a photocopy of a full-page report about Breivik that appeared on the Chinese-language Apple Daily on 25 July. The report includes a photograph of Breivik wearing a special forces diving suit and aiming a rifle at some imaginary adversary.