Reappearance of an Authoritarian Personality

By Su Yeong-chin

United Daily News, December 27, 2020

Growing up in an authoritarian eras, I can say with certainty that authoritarian control does not require continuous use of a large police force. What it really cannot do without is the universal authoritarian personality.

When the coronavirus (COVID-19) broke out in China’s Wuhan at the beginning of the year, a local writer Fang Fang recorded everything that happened in the city in the form of a diary, which exposed the world to the fear and helplessness of the people alongside the panic and bewilderment of the government. Her Weibo attracted tens of millions of people a day. Many took to it as a forum to vent and by shining a light on the situation, it also brought comfort. However, when the epidemic was brought under control three months later, various accusations arose accusing the writer of "disregarding the overall situation" and "pointing fingers, with state media attacking in droves." Her work was blacklisted. Those who cited her retracted their support or suddenly developed amnesia. This can hardly come as a surprise, but simply a manifestation of the authoritarian personality.

Since the establishment of Communist China, the Chinese mainland has implemented a one-party dictatorship system. In the first 30 years, freedom and the rule of law have quickly been reduced to zero. After reforms and opening up, the dictatorship has remained unchanged. Freedom and the rule of law have progressed to a certain extent due to the introduction of the market economy but not to a point of qualitatively changing the system. This has put some scholars in a quandary, namely those like Chinese American researcher Pei Minxin, who hypothesized that high economic development would lead to inevitable democratization.  

At the start of the coronavirus outbreak, China was not immediately able to control the narrative. It was then that there was an observable desire on the internet of the broad middle class for systemic reform. However, this sentiment quickly dissipated after Fang Fang’s swift rebuke. It demonstrates that when the authoritarian personality reemerges, it takes no effort to maintain the regime.

Taiwan’s own authoritarian personality formed slowly during the Cold War era. The prevailing issue of national security made most people wary of implementing democratic decision-making procedures, thinking that democratization could wait. However, the democratic movement spurred by non-Kuomintang magazines had already attracted much interest in the early 1970s when the Cold War eased. The article titled “The Voice of the Citizen” by the Central Daily News serves as a good measure of the ebbing popularity of authoritarian personality during that time. In the end, Taiwan proved a fundamentally different story because President Chiang Ching-kuo decided to promote democratization. After the completion of the democratization reforms in the 1990s, the authoritarian personality familiar to the Taiwanese people quickly dissipated. Today, thirty years later, everyone is surprised at the recurrence of this phenomenon and indeed, this should not be taken lightly.

The ultimate goal of authoritarianism is to protect the regime. With that in mind, I think that the ruling Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) failure in local elections two years is indeed the beginning of the turn. The topics best used to illustrate this point is national security and the coronavirus. 

The sudden emphasis on and need to control freedom of speech is what awoke the authoritarian personality that lay in dormancy, inflamed by national security issues ranging from Xi Jinping’s speech on New Year’s Day, Hong Kong’s extradition law, to Trump’s Indo-Pacific strategy. The coronavirus issue also gave rise to opportunities to deify the epidemic prevention policy. We saw that the free speech market, once thought to be stable, began to quake with government messaging in the name of defending democracy or the epidemic. 

It used the Act Against Infiltration to suppress contacts between people on both sides of the strait, condemned people to the courts for spreading "fake news," revamped curricula focusing on a national education regime, shut down the CtiTV News channel which advocates active cross-strait exchanges. The government also recently asked all the publications of mainland books to be reviewed. When the Internet and the media gradually became unable to hear different voices, the authoritarian personality slowly returned once more, “to secure the position”.

I don’t write this to cause any alarm. In my opinion, the most incredible and most worthy of vigilance is the case involving the opening of domestic markets to American pork containing ractopamine. What’s scary about the situation is that it serves as a litmus test, one that clears the uncertainty of many conditions. Please note that it began when President Tsai Ing-wen personally announced the opening of the markets to pork containing ractopamine in August without warning. So far, she has not revealed the decision-making process behind it, nor has she explained what kind of diplomatic or trade benefits the public can gain from sacrificing their health. Moreover, it does not involve national security or natural disasters. The immediate and obvious danger is to all the people and has actually caused considerable panic. Needless to say that all these opposing reasons were stated by the opposition DPP only a few years ago.

The test here is this: Under such circumstances, can the people endure and take into account the overall situation? And can elected representatives still hold their position without fear? If even such unreasonable things can be accepted, it should prove that the authoritarian personality has been successfully reconstituted, and there will be nothing to stop them.

I don’t know the political stance of Asia Weekly, which was edited by a Hong Kong overseas Chinese who was once a Taiwanese political dissident, but this issue will use the image of President Tsai wearing the emperor’s gowns as the cover to analyze the phenomenon of the new authoritarianism of the DPP’s political camp. It is indeed worthy of us Taiwanese to ponder: is this just the first step backward for Taiwan?  

From: https://udn.com/news/story/7339/5124554
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