Zhang Zhijun, president of the Taiwan Cross-Straits Relations Association. Credits.
A black joke: Beijing tells citizens of Taiwan how to make “the right choice” in the elections.
Bitter Winter, 01/11/2024
by Kok Bayraq
Earlier this month, a senior official from the Chinese mainland called on the people of Taiwan to make “a right choice” in the upcoming Taiwanese elections. It seemed like black humor to me that a man who had never experienced free elections in his life, either as a candidate or as a voter, lectured a people who have been free for half a century about elections.
As a member of a people (the Uyghurs) that has heard and felt the effects of such dark humor for seventy years, I felt it was my historical duty to translate this humor for readers of “Bitter Winter.”
Zhang Zhijun, president of the Taiwan Cross-Straits Relations Association, made this dark joke in his New Year’s message, saying the vote in in upcoming election was an important choice between “peace” and “war” and “prosperity” and “recession.”
The translation of this joke, which means “Taiwanese brothers, return to our arms,” in more understandable terms, is as follows:
1. Give up the so-called freedom of expression, which is boring, sometimes confusing, and troublesome. Our Party schools and Party leaders will teach you the truth in a simple way and even drill them into your minds. You will be free from this boring brain work. You will have the opportunity to feed yourself and survive using only your arms and legs, not your minds.
2. Leave aside the chaotic and dangerous actions called demonstrations, so that you can enjoy working from morning to evening, and your sleep will be early and sweet. Do not get tired by changing channels throughout the night, watch only CCTV on one single channel until the morning. Your time will not be wasted.
3. You all go to elections every four years, you spend a lot of money for this, and sometimes you fight with each other. This is a waste of mind and money. Come back to our arms. We will appoint some of you to represent you, and they will bring your voice to us in our two meetings. They will know exactly what sounds we want to hear, so their voice will never go unnoticed.
4. Do not trust America’s modern weapons for security. Not only do we have all these weapons, we also have a large population that they do not have. The moment you return to us, our population will flock to you, live side by side in your apartments as it does in the homes of the Uyghurs, and protect you. You will be a Taiwan with a population of 100 million, not just 30 million or less as today.
5. Of course, where there is a carrot, there is a stick. If there are anarchists among you, we will silence them just like we did in Hong Kong. If there are separatists, we will take them to camps like we did in Xinjiang. If there are superstitions among you, we will destroy temples as we did in Tibet, so that devotees may see and taste heaven and hell—well, mostly hell—in this world, without having to wait for the next one. Perhaps Taiwan is not as large as Xinjiang, but it is still perfect for concentration camps.
6. Peace? We are the champions of protecting it. We are not stupid like Russia, we will not shed the blood of “separatists” like they do in Ukraine, we will simply make their bodies rot in prisons like we do in Xinjiang. We are not naive like Israel, we do not broadcast what is happening to the whole world like they do in Gaza, we only show people dancing and singing and praising the Party. We act as both prosecutors and judges when we kill, and with this record we can also be the mediators of peace in the world.
7. Are you talking about justice? Justice is by definition the Communist Party itself, can there be injustice under its rule? Can there be lack of light under the sun and thirst in the sea?
If I continue the translation of Zhang’s remarks into plain language, it may easily reach item number 70…
Yes, this is a Chinese official’s New Year’s dark joke on the Taiwanese people. The darkness of this humor becomes more evident in Xi Jinping’s annual New Year’s Eve address, with his claim that Taiwan would “surely be reunified” with China.
I hope that everyone, anywhere in the world, will only regard it as black humor—and may God protect us from this ever happening. Just like the Chinese official’s advice to Taiwanese today to choose the “right path,” the predecessors of these officials in 1949, when they entered East Turkestan (Ch. Xinjiang), said that they would help Uyghurs to preserve their independence within a socialist system. As historian Dr. Nabijan Tursun demonstrates in his book, Chinese General Wang Zhen promised to withdraw from “Xinjiang” with his troops after three years, that is, after establishing socialism. Well, we have been waiting for 72 years and the troops brought by Wang Zhen are still there and occupation has escalated to genocide. Taiwanese who would not understand Zhang Zhijun’s black joke may one day find themselves in the same situation.
