Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

Yunlin County Commissioner Su Chih-feng (蘇治芬) and a group of Mailiao Township (麥寮) residents yesterday appealed to Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) and the government to listen to their complaints about pollution from a naphtha cracker in their town.

Braving the scorching sun, the protesters knelt in front of the Executive Yuan during their protest. They also threw dead fish and clams that had been found days after a fire broke out in a residual desulphurizer at Formosa Petrochemical Corp’s petrochemical complex on Sunday night.

During the Communist revolution in China, one of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) slogans was that “workers have no motherland.” Nowadays, capitalists advocate globalization based on the view that businesspeople have no motherland. Both are wrong, because both workers and businesspeople have a motherland. The only exceptions are the businesspeople of Taiwan: They exist in limbo, somewhere between having and not having a motherland.

Taiwanese businesspeople who have invested in China are affectionately called “compatriots” by Chinese officials, who welcome them back to “the motherland.” However, according to the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) Constitution they are not citizens of that motherland and so their treatment, for good or for bad, differs from that accorded to their “motherland compatriots.”