climber's death

Politics not worth killing or dying for

Last week this newspaper reported the tragic and distressing death of 70-year-old Mr. Huang from wounds sustained while climbing on Chai Mountain, known locally as the “Lungs of Kaohsiung City.”

This was a particularly upsetting incident since Huang was not injured by the gangs of Formosan macaque that inhabit the area and are known to attack ramblers for food. Nor did he succumb to hyperthermia, which would be unlikely on a subtropical hill with a peak just 356 meters above sea level. Rather, he was wounded by a fellow climber, identified as 52-year-old Mr. Guo.

Huang and Guo had stopped for a rest during their ascent and became engaged in an animated discussion of local politics. Reportedly, this led to fisticuffs after pro-independence Huang called pro-unification Guo a “Taiwan bull,” and ended, two days later, with Huang dead in hospital and Guo arrested by the Kaohsiung police.

There are very few things worth dying for, and even fewer worth killing for. Surely, in this day and age, differences in political opinion are not one of these. Throughout history, however, political issues - or their prehistoric equivalents -were commonly solved through the legitimized murder of war, latterly under the euphemistic title of gunboat diplomacy.

This is not surprising, since politics, in part at least, represents the struggle between individuals or, more commonly, competing interest groups. What they compete for are resources, such as food, territory, sex, water, oil and so forth. Although in modern times this is often manifested in the appearance of competition for political power, it is essentially still the same millennia-old struggle over resources between different groups, such as between kings and nobles, nobles and common people and so forth.

Politics, at its best, is the sublimation of armed conflict over resources into the civilized and rational struggle for voters' allegiance at a local level, and diplomacy at the international level. Thus one measure of the relatively civilized nature of cross-Strait relations - despite the tensions, posturing, threats and arms proliferation, albeit with outside influence - is that barely a shot has been fired for almost half a century. This has given Taiwan the opportunity to develop into the world's 18th-largest trading nation and has offered China the chance to bring the world's largest population back from the brink of starvation and, most recently, onto the global stage.
But China has yet to experience the growing pains associated with transforming authoritarian government into representational democracy, while Taiwan is not long out of short trousers on the same issue.

Perhaps Taiwanese people still retain some of the frontier mentality of their ancestors, since for centuries disagreements were settled by clan-based feuds in the absence of effective rule of law.
Indeed, Huang might be forgiven his rudeness and Guo his punches, given the insults and blows frequently traded by their elected officials inside the Legislative Yuan, Taiwan's national parliament. And parliaments, by their very definition, are intended to be talking shops, having specifically evolved as a means to avoid armed disputes.

Taiwan's maturing democratic institutions have achieved many noticeable successes during their short histories. Of all these, perhaps the most significant change brought about through government policy in the two decades since the end of Martial Law - more significant even than the peaceful transfer of political power in 2000 after five decades of one-party rule - was the reduction of the work week from six days to five.

This key indicator of Taiwan's progress from rural to industrial to post-industrial society was implemented gradually between 1998 and 2001.

Moreover, the political debate over the two-day weekend represented a typical modern take on the classical struggle over resources, in this case fought over the resource of time between the contending vested interests of capital and labor.

This has subsequently led to a wide-ranging re-evaluation of people's priorities and concomitant social changes.

This is still being played out, as can be seen from the way people choose to spend more time with family and friends; from the massive increase in hobbies, such as the recent craze for cycling; from the improved balance between making money at work to spending it on leisure; and from the growing market for organic food products and a desire to clean up the environment following the industrial pollution of recent decades.

It is ironic, therefore, that Huang and Guo fell out while engaging in their shared passions for exercise, health and the great outdoors. Hopefully the tragic death of Mr. Huang will remind legislators and other elected representatives of their function as role models for wider society, and remind the general public of the importance of identifying which causes are not worth dying for, and better still, those that are worth living for.