I am someone who adamantly refuses to say "optimize users." "Improve the experience for users" is the language I use. A small story: I actually became politically apathetic starting from my sophomore year. After the same-sex marriage referendum, a few friends and I went to Taipei Main Station to do Free Hugs on the street. Several passersby sneered at us. One woman with apparent mental health issues screamed abuse at us right there on the road.
I felt like I had witnessed a generation in Taiwan fighting for new issues, only for everything to fall back into the same entrenched, long-festering conventions. At the same time, I saw that maintaining politeness and goodness when people hold opposing views is not something everyone can do.
I gouged my passion for social issues right off my body, forcing myself to maintain a kind of detachment toward all issues: "Fine, I'll do some light research, but I will never advocate again."
London
After junior year, I never attended another march. I didn't believe marching would change anything. I remember at my flat in London, I once mentioned to a few friends from RCA Fashion that I was deeply distressed by the queer ecosystem in Taiwan. I felt that everyone in Taiwan was living inside a very thick echo chamber, living in "oh, Taiwan is actually very free, very vibrant," while being completely numb to the real pulse of society. When you've soaked in a comfortable homogeneous circle for too long, your tolerance for dissent and your capacity for critical thinking drop drastically. And this phenomenon extends far beyond queer issues.
"Dialogue cultivates the possibility of something closer to freedom" -- that was our core mission when I served as Head of Speakers for TEDx NTU in my senior year. I've long felt that the Taiwanese society I exist in has been stuck in a condition where effective dialogue is impossible.
Shanghai
This May I went to Shanghai. One afternoon, as I was about to cycle back to my accommodation from the southern district, I stopped at a large intersection. The three o'clock sun beat down hot on my skin. Coming toward me were elderly folks on electric scooters and Meituan delivery riders carrying yellow insulated boxes on their backs.
Suddenly I felt like I was in a parallel universe -- a place that speaks the same language but where everything is profoundly foreign. Even though both sides share the two characters "Zhonghua" and layers upon layers of similar history, fate and the subsequent course of history have led the two down radically different paths.
The funny thing is, another thought struck me in that moment: "If the KMT hadn't lost the Chinese Civil War, if the Nationalists hadn't imposed authoritarian policies on the people" -- what would China look like today?
The thought amused me at the time. But it wasn't until recently that something clicked: Taiwanese and Chinese are fundamentally different peoples.
Taipei
Last week I met up with K, a friend originally from Sichuan who lived in New York for six years and now resides in London. It had been a decade since his last visit to Taipei, yet he was surprised that in his memory, the two trips didn't feel all that different. He bought books by the Dalai Lama and other Chinese-language titles you can't purchase in China, and visited the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall to carefully study modern Taiwanese history and the origins of the February 28 Incident. Over dinner, I mentioned that I feel Taiwanese people have been perpetually processing post-colonial trauma -- Japanese colonization, martial law -- and that we keep trying to answer a question about essence:
"What exactly is Taiwanese? What defines being Taiwanese?"
During the Tsai Ing-wen administration, especially after I went to the UK and reexamined what it means to be Taiwanese, we genuinely established a collective consciousness as a people. Later, K and I discussed the mass recall movement. He was curious about the recall mechanism (naturally). After I gave him a quick rundown of modern Taiwanese history, he shared his observations from his own perspective and education system: the Communist Party's governing legitimacy rests on providing the people with economic prosperity, but once people become prosperous, they begin seeking other spiritual values -- and that potentially destabilizes the foundation of governance. What stuck with me most was when he said:
There is a universal sense of powerlessness among the contemporary Chinese people.
Complaining about the government within China isn't actually a big problem. On this trip back to Shanghai, he unexpectedly encountered several taxi drivers complaining about livelihood issues and government governance. But I pointed out: "That's because there is still an enormous distance between discussion and action, and the Chinese government has already demonstrated through past actions its stance on collective action by the people."
The emergence of June Fourth (Tiananmen) was, in a sense, an inevitable outcome. The same goes for the various media bans in more recent times. Yet the White Paper protests showed that the government, to a degree, fears the recurrence of such events. In short, it's a question of where the line is drawn.
I finally asked about June Fourth. Growing up, I'd always heard it was a banned term in China, but I had never actually verified what the silencing looked like in practice. Here are his exact words:
We never learned about June Fourth. Not at all. I didn't become aware of it until I went to the United States. This kind of collective erasure of memory is truly extraordinary.
Also, I highly recommend everyone watch Chai Jing's commentary on the Deng Xiaoping interview, especially the stance taken on June Fourth. I found the exchange with journalist Oriana Fallaci particularly striking.
Despite my political apathy, I still vote in every referendum and election. Before each vote, I spend time reading through the available information before making my choice. Compared to the past, when it took a long time to understand both sides, this time I used an Agent to break down the information. It happened to coincide with my research into Chain of Thought Prompting -- I wanted to use language models more precisely to deconstruct the knowledge I needed into more accurate, contextualized content, while providing sources I could cross-check for legitimacy.
I built a prompt to scrape data on the Da'an District legislator. I thought the output was quite well-structured, so here it is for reference:
You are a completely objective, impartial, third-party political commentator. I need you to scrape all publicly available information about this incumbent legislator's track record and parliamentary performance, while also comparing the arguments made by the recall groups in the district. Your execution steps should be:
- Scrape publicly available data from the Legislative Yuan and all publicly accessible media sources across all political stances
- Compile a detailed performance and position comparison table, with corresponding in-depth arguments from both sides for each point
- Present the final result in bullet points or table format, ensuring all sources are ones I can independently verify
The legislator information I need you to scrape:
- City/County
- District
- Name
One last thing: regardless of where you stand, go out and vote. Voting is the foundation of civic self-determination and democracy. (But of course, I'll be casting my recall vote.)