The Taiwanese and international contexts of the case were presented in one of the best attended sessions of the international conference.
by Massimo Introvigne
An article already published in Bitter Winter on June 3rd, 2024.
Just days after the historical trip of Dr. Hong Tao-Tze, the Shifu (Grand Master) of Tai Ji Men and his dizi (disciples) to Italy, two other dizi landed in Palermo, Sicily, for the yearly conference of the European Academy of Religion, one of Europe’s largest organizations of scholars of religion.
At the Pontifical School of Theology of Sicily, one of several venues where the conference was held, a session was organized on May 20 on “Religion in Taiwan After the 2024 Elections: Social and Tax Issues.” It turned out to be one of the best attended parallel sessions of the whole conference, perhaps also because it was held a few hours after the inauguration of the new President of Taiwan, Lai Ching-Te, as a result of his victory in the presidential elections of January 13, 2024. The event was widely covered by Italian media because of reactions from China to his inauguration speech.
Rosita Šorytė, from the International Federation for Freedom of Belief (FOB) and a specialist of international politics, chaired the session and explained in her introduction that while President Lai won the elections, his party does not have a majority in Taiwan’s Parliament, the Legislative Yuan. This has already led to a bitter and even violent confrontation between newly elected parliamentarians of different parties. Šorytė noted that Western media were only interested in Taiwan’s cross-Strait relationships with Mainland China, which were surely important in the elections but were not the only issue. Economy and taxes also motivated the voters. She also tried to guess whether the Lai administration will show a new attitude on both religious liberty and tax issues. She concludes that what the government will do or not do to solve the long-lasting Tai Ji Men case will be an important test of its willingness to protect human rights and deal with relics of Taiwan’s authoritarian and post-authoritarian periods.
Stefania Cerruti, external relations manager of MEDIS, the Major Emergencies and Disasters International School, stated that the academic study of disasters, a comparatively recent scholarly field, went through three stages or paradigms. The first was the paradigm of the vulnerability, which insisted on the vulnerable situation of the victims of both natural and human-made disasters. Cerruti noted that what happened to Tai Ji Men can be studied as a human-made disaster, where they were initially hit as vulnerable victims of a powerful post-authoritarian state machinery. However, Cerruti said, they were not passive victims but resisted bravely, so that the paradigm of resilience, which gradually replaced the vulnerability model, can also be applied to them. Today, however, she added, the prevailing paradigm in disaster studies is the community model, studying how the reaction to a disaster is successful when the victims and those who support them manage to build a network of support based on altruistic motivations and conscience. Since conscience is one of Tai Ji Men’s main teachings, Cerruti concluded, Shifu and dizi were able to create an effective “disaster community” that enabled them to continue to function and even expand during the long years of persecution.
Davide Suleyman Amore, an Italian historian of religions, a member of the Italian Association of History of Religions (SISR), and the secretary of “As-Salàm” Islamic Cultural Association, which manages a mosque where he sometimes serves as imam, presented the teaching on taxes of one of the greatest Muslim philosophers, Ibn Khāldun. Already in the 14th century, he developed a view of history emphasizing that states need taxes, but when they succumb to the temptation of imposing an excessive burden on taxpayers, they decline, lose their prosperity, and may ultimately collapse. Amore then examined the main features of the Tai Ji Men case. He concluded that, while there are no signs that the Taiwanese state is collapsing, surely tax and legal injustice went beyond Tai Ji Men and created systemic problems that it would be dangerous to underestimate.
Shelly Tu, a Tai Ji Men dizi and certified public accountant from Taiwan, presented her experience of martial arts. Those in the West who only know Chinese martial arts from movies, she said, may easily misunderstand their ultimate purpose, which is to teach their practitioners how to “stop attacks” or “stop war” and work for the benefit of others. Westerners need to grasp a broader meaning of the expression “martial arts,” Tu argued. For example, she said, for her speaking at an international conference is also part of “martial arts,” as is taking part in the trips that have led Dr. Hong and his dizi to 103 countries, offering inspiring performances and promoting love, peace, and conscience. Tu also argued that the spirit of martial arts inspired Tai Ji Men’s peaceful resistance to persecution, which always avoided anger and, while fighting uncompromisingly for justice, relied on kindness and tolerance.
Charlotte Lee, a lawyer from Taiwan and a dizi, presented the master-disciple relationship in Chinese culture in general and the Shifu-dizi relationship in Tai Ji Men. This relation is the very core of Tai Ji Men culture, she said, and explains how sacred teachings on Qigong, martial arts, and self-cultivation were transmitted throughout the centuries. She warned that the Shifu-dizi relationship should not be confused with the one between teacher and students in a school, much less in a for-profit school such as the cram schools normally preparing pupils for exams. Yet, a malicious misunderstanding was fabricated by the man who created the Tai Ji Men case, Prosecutor Hou Kuan-Jen, and exploited by rogue bureaucrats of the National Taxation Bureau (NTB). They claimed that Tai Mi Men was a cram school, with the consequence that money given to its Shifu by dizi should not be regarded as non-taxable gifts but as taxable tuition fees. Eventually, Tai Ji Men won its court cases and even the NTB had to admit that there was no cram school and no tuition fees. However, based on a technicality, the NTB maintained its tax bill for 1992, based on which Tai Ji Men’s sacred land in Miaoli was seized, unsuccessfully auctioned off, and nationalized in 2020. It is thus important for solving the Tai Ji Men case, Lee concluded, to keep clarifying that the master-disciple relationship in the movement never created a cram school.
I concluded the session by observing that there is now a general consensus that Tai Ji Men is indeed not a cram school but a traditional “menpai,” or an organization teaching martial arts, Qigong, and self-cultivation. Gifts from dizi to Shifu in a menpai are not taxable under Taiwanese law.
Since this is a problem very much debated in the West, however, I asked the question why exactly religious and spiritual organizations should be tax-exempt. Some may argue that this exemption, although prescribed by the law, is unfair. I quoted the U.S. Supreme Court 1970 “Walz” decision, which argued that tax exemptions are needed to protect religions from interferences from the governments, and they thus affirm rather than denying the principle of separation of religion and state, at least as it is interpreted in American law. In Europe, the main argument for tax exemption is that religions offer at their own expenses cultural and charitable services that benefit the state. This is also true for Tai Ji Men, I concluded, a benevolent movement whose domestic and international activities benefits society as a whole, promote a positive image of Taiwan, and does not cost any money to Taiwanese taxpayers as all dizi are volunteers and their activities and trips are self-funded.
Local Sicilian media, including the largest local TV network, Tele One, covered the event, and interviewed both the dizi and the undersigned.