ERSHUI (Taiwan) — It was bad enough, villagers thought, when the kindly Buddhist nuns were forced out of their historic temple and longtime home. But what began as a bitter property dispute took a bizarre political turn — right into the heart of cross-strait tensions between China and Taiwan.
After taking over the property and evicting the four nuns who lived there, Mr Wei Ming-jen, a Taiwan native hired to build an addition to the century-old building, set out to convert Biyun Temple into something likely never before seen on this island: an extravagant shrine to China’s Communist Party.
Gone are the Buddhist ritual drums and traditional Chinese calligraphy scrolls. Instead, Communist Party symbols, propaganda posters and portraits of party leaders like Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai now adorn the century-old temple tucked into a hillside in Ershui, in central Taiwan.
Outside the temple’s entrance, the fire-engine-red and canary-yellow flags of the People’s Republic of China and the Communist Party soar into the sky, overlooking sleepy villages and verdant rice fields.
While such a shrine would not be out of place in mainland China, which abounds in so-called red tourism spots with Communist Party themes, it is rare — though not unheard of — to see such a brazen display of support for the party on the island.
“I declare to the whole world and all of China that I am determined to lead the people of Taiwan province to reunify with our motherland,” said Mr Wei, 60, an intense man with close-cropped hair and an unflinching stare, in an interview at the converted temple.
“It is my responsibility to raise China’s flag in Taiwan,” he added. “No country and no forces in the world can stop us from uniting.”
Mr Wei’s actions would have been considered treason a few decades ago, but Taiwan is now a thriving democracy with broad protections for freedom of expression.
“Taiwan is a free country,” said Mr Akira Chen, the director of the Changhua county cultural affairs bureau. “We will not stop you just because you raise the Chinese flag.”
Still, a deep suspicion of the Chinese Communist Party has lingered on the island ever since the Communists defeated the Chinese Nationalists in a civil war in 1949, forcing them to flee from the mainland.
Since then, Taiwan has been on high alert for any signs that China may be acting on its stated plan to eventually take back the island, which it sees as its rightful territory.
That is why Mr Wei’s “patriotic education base,” as he calls it, has prompted concerns among some locals, who wonder if he is acting as a proxy for the mainland government even though there is no evidence of direct Chinese government involvement in the shrine.
Fueling such suspicions are recent revelations about China’s efforts to influence the domestic affairs of countries like Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
Mr Wei dismissed concerns about mainland meddling, saying that he alone came up with the idea to convert the temple and that he used his own money, amassed from a successful business as a contractor.
But the manner in which he took over Biyun Temple has added to the intrigue.
Several years after Mr Wei was hired to build the addition, the contractor said the nuns owed him money.
The nuns said they had paid Wei the full US$3.2 million (S$4.38 million) fee in multiple installments. They also said he persuaded an elderly member of their order who has only a primary school education to sign documents she did not understand. They were promissory notes for additional debts the nuns said they did not owe him.
“We have spent our whole lives in the temple, so we know very little about the real world,” said Ms Shi Fa-ming, 61, one of the nuns.
A court ruled for Mr Wei. After a public auction, he came into possession of the property; the nuns were evicted in 2012.
Since then, they have been sleeping in shipping containers beside the property. Posted along the divider separating the temple and their encampment is a wall of receipts — proof, the nuns say, of their payments to Mr Wei.
Villagers are angry over the loss of the temple, which was built using donations from the community and had been a central place of worship for local rice and banana farmers for as long as anyone can remember. There is no choice now but to worship at a makeshift temple set up by the nuns at their encampment. Attendance has dwindled.
“We just want the temple back,” said Ms Fa Ci, 70, another nun. “It was built with the people’s money.”
Mr Wei has held firm to the position that his actions were justified.
“This is a society based on rule of law,” he said. “I didn’t receive the full payment, so the building became legally mine.”
The nuns believe that even if the Chinese government was not involved, at the very least, Mr Wei has deliberately aligned himself with the Chinese Communist Party to tap into growing nationalist sentiment in China and gain an advantage, financial or otherwise, in the protracted property dispute.
“He is taking advantage of the Chinese flag to make money,” Ms Fa Ci said. “He said he would ask the People’s Liberation Army to come fight us if we dared to provoke him.”
And there is no question that Mr Wei is winning hearts in the mainland.
“The flag-raising ceremony organised by Wei Ming-jen and our other Taiwanese compatriots has deep historical significance,” reads an article on Utopia, a popular Maoist website in China. “Their acts of righteousness will surely be written into the annals of Chinese history.”
Officials have said the addition built by Mr Wei will eventually be demolished because it does not meet safety standards. At the moment, however, Mr Wei and his supporters appear energized.
On a sultry afternoon, Mr Wei and several others — ranging in age from toddlers to grandmothers — changed into combat fatigues and assumed positions for the twice-daily flag ceremony.
When the triumphant opening bars of Communist China’s national anthem began blaring over the loudspeakers, two older women started lowering the flags.
As Mr Wei and several others sang and saluted, his wife, Ms Lee Pai-jan, captured the ritual on her phone to upload later to the internet.
One of the women lowering the flag, Ms Wen Hsu-ping, a retired Taiwanese civil servant, said that in recent years she had grown increasingly disillusioned with Taiwan’s “rotten” politics and the island’s movement away from its Chinese heritage.
Through Mr Wei she has come to believe that reunifying with the mainland was the only answer. Giving up Taiwan’s democratic freedoms, she said, would be a small sacrifice in exchange for the global stature that would come with allying with the mainland.
“Don’t be jealous of Taiwan’s independent democracy or reject China because it doesn’t have freedom of speech,” she said, her eyes following her grandchildren as they played inside the temple’s main hall. “Just look how powerful China is.” THE NEW YORK TIMES
https://www.todayonline.com/world/buddhist-temple-now-communist-shrine-plants-chinas-flag-taiwan
