Lvcatablecc

Honestly, I had to fight back nausea 🤢 while translating this interview. Lo Ta-yu 羅大佑 was one of my favorite singers throughout my formative years, and for generations of Chinese liberals and democracy advocates, he was much more than a Taiwanese musician. Often hailed as the “Godfather of Chinese-language Music,” he holds a place in Chinese-language music comparable to Bruce Springsteen’s in America. We once believed that when he sang of freedom, resistance, and the longing for democracy, he was giving voice to everything those of us who once lived, or still live, in China—where we could not freely speak our minds—had always wanted to shout from the rooftops. And then I watched his interview last night, on Tang Hsiang-lung’s radio program UFO Breakfast—a platform whose political narratives I regard as strongly pro-Beijing. I was utterly disgusted. The man whose songs once represented freedom to us now expresses views I find profoundly hostile to democracy, liberty, women’s rights, and human rights. He singled out former President Tsai Ing-wen, Vice President Hsiao Bi-khim, and former Control Yuan President Chen Chu, pointing to their unmarried or childless status to question whether they genuinely care about Taiwan’s next generation. What a revolting display of sexism from a man whose music once symbolized freedom to so many of us. Since when does a woman’s commitment to her country’s future have to be proven through marriage or motherhood? A woman’s public responsibility should be judged by her principles, policies, and actions—not by whether she has a husband or children. And as if that weren’t enough, he shamelessly blamed the horrific murders of Lin Yi-hsiung’s mother and five-year-old twin daughters on former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and the CIA, without offering any credible evidence. In the course of this outrageous speculation, he even declared, “No yellow person could ever do something like this!”—a breathtakingly racist statement steeped in Greater Chinese ethnonationalism. The Lin family murders remain one of the most horrifying tragedies of Taiwan’s authoritarian era, an open wound in the history of its struggle for democracy. Yet instead of treating this atrocity with the gravity and respect it deserves, he resorted to conspiracy theories that deflect scrutiny away from Taiwan’s authoritarian rulers and shift the blame onto America. Absolutely disgraceful. But what makes this so painful isn’t just how outrageous his words are. It’s that we once genuinely believed his songs represented the freedom we all longed for. We believed he was singing for those who had no voice of their own. Now I realize that someone can sing about freedom without truly understanding it, and sing about resistance without ever standing with those who resist oppression. And this is what makes authoritarian propaganda so terrifying. Its greatest power doesn’t always lie in loud political slogans or overt indoctrination. Sometimes, it begins with a conspiracy theory quietly planted here, a historical truth twisted there, repeated so often that the ability to think independently and distinguish fact from fiction slowly erodes. Until one day, someone who once sang about freedom becomes an almost fanatical mouthpiece for authoritarian conspiracy theories—convinced, all the while, that he is the one who has finally seen through the lies. Perhaps this is the most chilling achievement of the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda machine: it doesn’t need to turn everyone into a Communist Party member. It only needs to turn more and more people into its unwitting mouthpieces.