Echo chamber, hot dog sandwich and the march of the tiny chess
By: Rich Fuh
Tags: LGBTQ, Taiwan, Same Sex Marriage

Taiwan’s parliament just approved the first same sex legislation in Asia.

It’s a 30-year journey for the people fighting for equal right to LGBT communities in Taiwan. The result on 5/17/2019 was certainly a big milestone for the efforts from different parties contributing and supporting this. A tremendous leadership and determination were demonstrated in the past few months by President Tsai, Premier Su and the legislators on the last stage negotiation, alignment and last push to complete the legalization; especially considering the hard push-back from the conservative camp as shown in the result of referendum on 11/24/2018, of which 72% (>7m votes) against to grant same right to same sex marriage in Civil Code. While the legislation process perfectly illustrated Taiwan’s status quo: echo chambers, hot dog sandwich and the march of the tiny yet critical chess.

The result of referendum was a brutal truth to politicians supporting same sex marriage right and a wake-up call to many in the echo chamber of same sex marriage supporters: while it seems that the society gradually accept LGBT in past few decades, and it seems that the gay parade in Taipei always get a lot of support from politicians, media or even celebrity, when it comes to the whole population, it’s still not the majority. And apparently people in support of same sex marriage and the LGBT community haven’t viewed this as seriously as the opposite camp. And the echo chambers are so big that people in the rooms still can’t communicate with each other effectively, resulting in a big gap as shown in the referendum result. That could be as a result of ages, education background, religious belief or even political view and the chamber was now proved to be hard to be broken even after 30 years of effort.

And it’s about challenge of building a hot dog sandwich, a metaphor created by Ray Huang, a Chinese historian and philosopher. The government acts like the hot dog to connect the up and bottom layers of the breads, and as integrator to represent the favor to the sandwich. The hot dog should treat the the up or bottom layer equally or have different strategy? In a huge divided case like same sex marriage, making that call is difficult and it takes courage to make influence and build solution.

Finally, Taiwan is often viewed as a chess between China and US. As viewed as renegade province by PRC government, in the report of 5/17, some media, might be aware of the potential risk and pressure from PRC, choose not to mention Taiwan “as a country to legalize same sex marriage”. China always wants to see get Taiwan under its full control, economically or politically. US, on the other hand, has been strengthening relationship with Taiwan. Sits between the game of big countries, Taiwan is like a chess. A lot of the future path options are directly or marginally impact by the game between China and US. And even for same sex marriage topic, as Taiwan could be a influential indicator to the mainland China LGBT community, China government has been said trying to influence Taiwan and tie the political factor this the referendum, resulting in the referendum. But on the other hand, Taiwan is still like a chess always march to somewhere. The crowd in supportive of the legalization in the pouring rain on 5/16–5/17, is probably the best support to that, even quite a large part of Taiwan might sit and be influenced, there is always a group of people fight for certain universal-common value.

And that’s the issues for Taiwan as country (well, or a state). Learn about difficult conversation so as to break echo chamber and make effective communication; find the balance for the top and for the bottom with a big-old government organization based on the Constitute made while KMT still ruled mainland China in 1948; and finally, how to make sure as a chess, there are still people want to fight the way out.

Developing countries in Asia might also face #1 and #2 of the issues as the mid-class get richer and get more used to the Western life style and value. Taiwan’s experience, while still under accumulation, would be a good reference, and hopefully a good case study with happy ending for the marching the chess.