MJ Akbar
NOW that one is getting there, ancestor worship seems to make much more sense. We reached Taipei in the precise middle of the Ghost Month during which the gates of afterlife open in Chinese cosmology. ‘Afterlife’ is so much less judgmental than heaven or hell. These gates open on to a two-way street.
Departure jostles with arrival, although ghosts on a nostalgia trip are naturally preponderant. They are also hungry. Whatever the pleasures may be of the Chinese afterlife, rice and noodles are obviously not among them. The living welcome spirits with food and paper money visible on stalls full of joss sticks and lanterns and effigies set up for sale during this propitious lunar month. At nightfall people release lanterns on rivers, burn paper money and celebrate that most precious cell in the honeycomb of humanity, the family.
Is paper money an anachronism or an oxymoron? What is real money except notional paper or, these days, a plastic promise? No one in Taipei was handing out credit cards to ancestors. But one must not be flippant, particularly when one is in the queue to the Great Ether in the Sky. It strikes me that people who measure time by the moon rather than the sun are blessed with more imagination. The moon is inconstant, as beauty must be: temperamental, parsimonious, and more powerful in memory than in sight. The moon is the guardian of ghosts.
Two-faced Taipei
Like all successful cities Taipei has two faces. The economy leaps ahead during the day: Taiwan now has a higher per capita income than Japan, as one is informed by more than one proud citizen, having multiplied eight times over the last four decades. The evening belongs to leisure. Leisure is eastern calm, not frenetic. Pavements expand into streets; the thoroughfare becomes a park. Food stalls cater for late hours. Music, now in the custody of part-time maestros with instruments, replaces the hum and screech of cars. Soft smiles displace tension and frown on faces.
This is also the land of high-tech, so maybe there is some Big Brother churning out photographic fodder for an unknown vault, but who cares? A sense of pride in achievement without the sacrifice of freedom breeds indifference to any possible surveillance in the name of security rather than fear. Freedom has not been won easily in Taiwan, so it is preserved with care.
Taiwan no longer wants to be the Other China. It wants to be itself. On paper, the number of countries denying its formal existence keeps growing; more significantly, the number of international flights to Taiwan keeps rising along with the figures in its national bank account. In the second quarter of 2024 alone, Taiwan recorded a current account surplus of $21,819 million in its foreign trade. That’s American dollars.
In the decade between 2012 and 2022, the current account balance averaged 12.7 per cent of GDP as compared to 1.9 per cent for Asia-Pacific, according to the solemn statistician. Even for someone who understands economics even less than mathematics, this sounds like news one could live with.
Acquisitive avatar
Beijing, once again in the grip of an acquisitive avatar, has promised to swallow Taiwan in three years, but that will be a very long thousand days. The reaction to this threat is quietly robust. Taiwan is counting on the abacus to better times, not counting down to doomsday.
One wonders: Has Beijing calculated the cost of its political ambition? China, having gulped Tibet but not quite digested it, is the only country with active or dormant territorial claims on virtually every neighbour: Japan, Russia, across the Pamirs and the Himalayas, Vietnam, Philippines. Pakistan surrendered a chunk of Kashmir seized from India in 1948 to become a supplicant state.
