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Western media ignore crackdown on opposition in Taiwan by Lai

Western media ignore crackdown on opposition in Taiwan by Lai

The Western news media have gone out of their way to report on every mass protest against the governments in Hungary and Serbia. But when there was a huge rally against the government in Taiwan, there was not a word.
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The lack of reporting last week was positively wilful, considering
tens of thousands took to the streets of Taipei as part of an opposition rally against the island's president, William Lai Ching-te, and his increasingly, unpopular Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).
The issues that prompted the mass rallies in all three places are quite similar – the use of legislative or judicial means to cripple the opposition in a system of government that either is, or is moving towards, what political scientists call illiberal democracy.
You can understand why, though. Those recalcitrant central Europeans have been very naughty so far as the European Union is concerned. Viktor Orban of Hungary has long been a thorn in the side of Brussels.
The EU has effectively blocked Serbia's application to become a member state because it has refused to join the pan-European sanctions against Russia. So those governments are put under a microscope, but their opposition is put on a pedestal.
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Talk about double standards. In Taiwan, the opposition has been targeted since the pro-American and independence-seeking DPP lost its majority in the legislature.
The opposition Kuomintang (KMT), which helped organise the latest mass protests, claimed more than 200,000 people took part. Police reported about 60,000.
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But it is doubtful that the women who were arrested this time would all agree to the label 'gay erotica' to characterize their writing, which poses the question: Why does Western media do so in its reporting of the crackdown? So why are writers of this type of fiction being arrested in China? Online fiction is big business in China, and Beijing has an economic and ideological interest in controlling the sector. Large, Chinese-based commercial websites such as Qidian and Jinjiang Literature City offer access to novels across a range of popular genres. The most popular authors in this format have made millions of dollars from not only subscriptions, but also the sale of their intellectual property to the makers of online games and TV series. According to a recent report compiled by researchers from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, there were more than 36 million works of literature available on Chinese websites in 2023, including 4 million or so that had been published that year. The online reading sector was worth around US$5.5 billion, while the market for the intellectual property derived from online fiction was worth some $27.5 billion. In short: Chinese literature generates big profits, creates jobs and provides entertainment. The Chinese government wants to support it and also sees it as a potential source of cultural 'soft power' to rival Japanese manga or South Korean boy bands. But from the Chinese government's perspective, boys' love literature – which consistently ranks as one of the most popular genres, if not the most popular – poses a problem. For ideological reasons, Chinese authorities want to suppress what they consider 'unhealthy' or obscene content, even if it sells well. All types of pornography, gay and straight, are considered a scourge of capitalism for which there should be no place in socialist China. A line of boys' love books at Kinokuniya Bookstore in Japantown, San Francisco. Wikimedia Commons For the past few years, authorities have been successful in strong-arming the largest websites into monitoring their own content to make sure that anything erotic is significantly toned down, to the extent that boys' love fiction has disappeared from all of those sites, even if the genre can still be found hidden in other categories. However, there is little that the Chinese government can do to prevent aspiring Chinese erotica authors from publishing their writings on websites outside its jurisdiction. Problems can arise for boys' love writers when they get paid for their writing, and those payments are then remitted back into the country. The recent arrests, for example, appear to have involved women who had published their work on the Haitang portal in Taiwan and had received income from those works. Haitang is known for publishing much more explicit boys' love fiction than what can be found on websites in mainland China. The works in question were probably considered obscene by Chinese authorities, and citizens who earn money from obscene publications are breaking Chinese obscenity laws. In China, commentators tend to see these laws as outdated, both because of the severity of the prescribed punishment – up to 10 years in prison – and because the amounts of profit considered illegal are based on income levels from the 1980s. As the Southern Daily article points out, doubts about the quality of the legislation in these cases have often prompted judges to impose minimum sentences, as well as many sentences being reduced on appeal. But significant gray areas persist. Cases that attract too much media attention, including attention from Western journalists, often suddenly disappear from the radar. That's what happened back in 2018, when a woman writing under the pseudonym Tianyi and her publisher were sentenced to more than 10 years in prison for fairly minor profits made on the sale of a printed novel deemed to be 'obscene' by authorities in Anhui province. The case drew a lot of criticism in China. Western media was also all over it. But what Western media failed to notice was that, only one month later, an appeals court hearing was held. Because of the huge attention the case had received inside China, the hearing was livestreamed and watched by more than 2 million people, but seemingly not by a single Western journalist. They saw the prosecutor admit that procedural mistakes had been made in the original trial and ask the judge to remand the case back to the lower court. Chinese media widely reported this turn of events. But after that, there was silence. Was the sentence changed? Did Tianyi and her publisher ever go to prison? We don't know. This is the type of censorship that I find genuinely concerning and that deserves much more attention – the cases that suddenly go silent and disappear from the pages of both Western and Chinese media outlets. Michel Hockx is director of the Liu Institute for Asia & Asian Studies in the Keough School of Global Affairs, University of Notre Dame This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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