We Talked With Sisy Chen, Whom Controversy Has Always Followed, About Her Life and How She Reads the Times

"If I go a stretch of time without controversy, I start to wonder whether something is wrong—whether I've lost myself and suddenly started following the crowd."

Last week, at Ding Naizhu's Living Room, the talk series at Shanghai's Theatre Above, the 59-year-old guest Sisy Chen came out in front of the audience wearing sunglasses.

In her twenties, Chen was one of the few "punks" in Taiwan: she wore miniskirts and dyed her hair seven colors. Rarer still, at a time when women in politics almost all presented an androgynous face, she appeared in public bright and glamorous.

"When I met Wenqian, she had just come back to Taiwan from the United States," Ding Naizhu said, recalling their first meeting. "I was at a television station then, and I went with a manager from the news department to see her. I had never imagined a political figure could be like that—she met me in such a romantic way. I thought she was extraordinary."

People who know Chen also call her brilliant. She was editor-in-chief of the literary supplement of China Times while still in her twenties. Li Ao called her the smartest woman he had ever met. Ding Naizhu said that simply talking with Chen was enough to tell her what was going on in the world.

Chen's most conspicuous identity is the one politics gave her.

She entered politics while still a student at National Taiwan University, helping out at Hsu Hsin-liang's campaign headquarters. When the Formosa Incident broke out—the moment Taiwan is generally seen to have begun its turn from a closed society toward democracy—Chen watched one of her law professors get arrested. At 21, she began speaking in defense of the prisoners jailed over the incident. After graduating, she took a job at Taiwan's China Times, busy with newspaper work by day and making campaign flyers by night, helping members of the tangwai—the opposition movement outside the ruling Kuomintang—run for legislator and city councilor. Having become supplement editor so young, she was for a time suspected of getting there on her looks.

In 1986, the year the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) was founded, Chen left for the United States to pursue a doctorate. Back in Taiwan, she advised the DPP on strategy. By organizing things like a campaign squad of glamorous young women, she helped the party shed its stiff, aggrieved image and win support. She became a political star herself, holding posts such as director of the DPP's Culture and Information Department and spokesperson for its central headquarters.

As pro-independence forces spread inside the DPP, Chen's views parted from the party's, and in 1999 she left it to sit as an independent. Sick of the infighting, she announced in 2004 that she was quitting politics altogether—which did not mean she was done with politics. Chen went back to the media and used it to broadcast her view of the world. Around the same time, the media's grip on Taiwanese politics became impossible to ignore. Many of the DPP corruption cases after 2005 were exposed by reporters, to the point that Taiwan settled into a pattern of prosecutors following the media's lead. Intellectuals began using the media to extend their reach too: Chen's close friend Li Ao started working with Phoenix TV in 2004 on the show Li Ao Has His Say 《李敖有话说》.

"Politics gives you far more standing than the media does, but the price behind it is one I'm not willing to pay," Chen said of the move from politics to media. "If what I care about is the reach of the platform, then media probably beats politics. Politics gives me more personal limelight. But if what I care about is using the platform to change how a great many people see things, then media's reach beats politics."

Today she puts out her reading of current events through shows like Sisy's World Weekly 《文茜的世界周报》 and Sisy's Big Sister Show 《文茜大姐大》. She takes the present apart with the past. Merkel took in Syrian refugees and held an idealistic vision for them, and got no support for it. To Chen, that follows perfectly: short-sighted voters usually cannot see a far-sighted act. History has shown it before. Schröder's debt reforms left Germany with the strength to ride out the euro-zone debt crisis, but because he raised the retirement age and raised various benefit standards, he lost the public and was beaten by Merkel at the polls.

Chen's family history can be read as an extension of her politics. Her great-grandfather Chen Chunjing was, under Japanese rule in Taiwan, the first head of Luodong Street in Luodong District, Taipei Prefecture. He turned Luodong into the timber distribution hub for the Taipingshan forestry area, laying the ground for the town's later commercial growth. Her maternal grandfather, He Jibi, once fled to mainland China to escape Japanese rule, then returned to Taiwan and founded the Taiwan Cultural Association, before being seized by the government during the February 28 Incident. Her father's family was also prominent in Luodong.

Chen was not close to any of them. As a child she was raised entirely by her grandmother; her parents divorced when she was small. When she was 17 the grandmother who doted on her died, and she went to live with her mother, He Xinxin, who favored Chen's younger brother. For a long time a gap sat between mother and daughter that nothing could close, and Chen sometimes felt she was living under someone else's roof. Watching her mother's life shaped her own view of it. Her mother was successful in business and unhappy.

"I think my mother was pitiful, and pathetic too. Her whole life she measured achievement by worldly standards; what she wanted was to rise—rank, wealth, glory," Chen said. "My father managed a Japanese-run factory, with a car and housing provided; his was one of the families in eastern Taiwan that lived well. My mother's hunger for wealth and rank ran too high and too deep. Not only did she never get it, her marriage broke down later as well. Her whole sense of social values was wrong. In the end, whether her life counted as a success or not, she pinned all of it on my father. To her, everything was counted in money. A person who falls completely into step with society's values leads a very unhappy life."

The rift with her mother has since closed, but Chen took a road through life utterly unlike her mother's. Rebellious by nature, she has stirred controversy in every role she has appeared in. Asked how she sees the criticism aimed at her, Chen answered: "There has rarely been a stretch of my life without controversy. If I go a stretch of time without controversy, I start to wonder whether something is wrong—whether I've lost myself and suddenly started following the crowd."

More From Our Conversation

Q = QDaily

A = Sisy Chen

Q: You've said you went into politics out of a sense of righting wrongs. Later you stepped back from the front line and moved into media. Was that righting wrongs in another guise, or had what you wanted to do changed?

A: I moved into the role of a media person because I thought at the time that the media could build up some of the ideas I cared about. The most important thing for a person, and for a society, is how it perceives and thinks about problems. On perceiving and thinking, you can speak to a crowd in a political setting or speak to the public through the media. They are really the same thing. The difference is that inside power, you have to form a faction to survive, and once there's a faction, self-dealing follows. A faction is not a group bound by shared ideals; it's a shared carve-up of interests. Politics slides into that easily. It grew especially bad in Taiwan's political alliances later on. Not 100% of politics worldwide is like this—there are always exceptions, like the Germany I just mentioned, or France's Macron, who does hold some ideals; Churchill had ideals all his own, and so did Thatcher. There are always exceptions. But in Taiwan I can hardly find one. My feeling is that I've reached an age where I can't waste what's left of my life running around with those people. So I stopped. For some people that position in politics may look glamorous, front-of-stage. But those days are only the surface. The real thing is what you see when the painted actor takes the makeup off: running to endless weddings and funerals, hammering out deals with township and city mayors, all to buy the halo you saw from the front. I am not spending my life on that.

So-called social engagement—anything can be a platform. The media is a platform, Weibo is a platform, online video is a platform. You don't need to turn it into politics; any platform will do. Writing is a platform, video is a platform, performance art is a platform. They're all the same. You don't have to be bound by the platform. The reason you feel bound is that you want something the platform gives you. Politics, for instance, gives you far more standing than the media does, but the price behind it is one I'm not willing to pay. If what I care about is the reach of the platform, then media probably beats politics. Politics gives me more personal limelight. But if what I care about is using the platform to change how a great many people see things, then media's reach beats politics.

On a show like World Weekly, or the ones I used to do on Phoenix TV, I have always been putting across certain ideas: don't assume your love, or your solidarity, is a great thing. Because that is exactly what is tearing the world apart. Everyone is building themselves up out of an exclusionary kind of love.

Q: You hold to a rationalist method, building your understanding of the world out of history and numbers. You've described the political changes in the world as the world "going crazy." So how should we, living in it, face an age of such violent change?

A: First, stay away from the mental hospital. There's no use arguing with the people inside. It isn't only about not stooping to their level—keep your distance entirely. Inside the "cuckoo's nest"—that's what Americans call a mental hospital—reason gets you nowhere. They need to go crazy.

What matters most, I think, is knowing where this age is heading and what is going on in it right now. Here's an example I often use. A boy in Brazil is out playing soccer, having a wonderful time, planning to open a little shop one day, figuring that he and his mother will live decently enough; he feels happy. Now suppose you sit him down and say: boy, let me tell you something. You are a boy from Brazil, from the Third World. However well you play, you'll never make an international squad; the best you can hope for is a place on Brazil's own national team. However good you are, you won't be picked by the best American universities, because a third of the places at American universities go to local students, while Americans are less than a third of the world's population. So your chances have already been stripped away. And you could tell him too: you feel happy now, but in this world you will always be at the bottom. Do you think telling him any of that is meaningful, or of any help? Today I was talking to someone who does teaching support in remote villages, and I told him he absolutely has to build programming education out there—coding. You have to give the children in those villages a chance, a skill they can carry into the future, and that skill is coding. MIT, Stanford, Harvard—especially MIT and Stanford—have put out an enormous number of open courses, made so that anyone can take them, free. At Stanford an 8-year-old can take them. Of the 700 people MIT gave scholarships to this year, 40 came up through those courses. MIT's president is Venezuelan, first generation, barely spoke English, did terribly on the TOEFL—but he was a math genius, so both MIT and Stanford offered him a scholarship, and he chose Stanford. Later he went to MIT, and MIT eventually chose him as its president. The vice president in charge of their open courses is Indian. The director of their famous Media Lab is Japanese, and this Japanese man doesn't hold a single university certificate. He was expelled three times. He worked as a DJ in Chicago clubs, met a lot of people, and turned out to be very good with people. My point is that all of them came from outside the United States, some from very poor countries in the Third World. The head of MIT's most important artificial intelligence center is a refugee who fled from Romania to America. They are full of passion, and what they want is for the people and children of the Third World, as long as they have internet, to get the same educational chance without discrimination. So do you tell the boy to go learn this right away and keep playing his soccer—or do you tell him what I said before?

You ask me what should be done now. Honestly, I think China has done very well in artificial intelligence. The other thing is the wealth gap. Closing the wealth gap isn't about cursing the rich; the way to do it is to move fast on education in remote areas, and to spread that education far enough that these children have a chance at work in artificial intelligence later on.

Q: Where do you get new knowledge, and your understanding of the world?

A: I studied economic history, and international politics before that. That's my background. So it accumulates. The advantage is that when you see Merkel fail to form a coalition government, you think back to how she rose in the first place: she "killed" her mentor—betrayed him first. She replaced Chancellor Schröder because he had pushed through debt reform. But it was precisely that reform that made Germany the strongest country in the euro-zone debt crisis. Schröder pushed the retirement age to 67, cut pensions hard, and sharply raised the standards for unemployment benefits. Naturally he lost the public. So he lost the election, losing a seat to Merkel. Merkel got first crack at forming a government. Her power came from luck to begin with—from someone else having ideals. The moment she had ideals about Syrian refugees was the moment she was on her way out. That's politics: everything that looks like misfortune inside the arena of power is where the drama is.

Anyone can get information from the news; what counts is forming a coherent line of understanding. Kohl, the former German chancellor, was voted out because he pushed for German reunification. To bring it off he did something bold: he set the exchange rate between the mark and East Germany's currency at 1:1. Imagine how that could possibly work—it's as if the U.S. and China merged and you swapped dollars for Chinese yuan one for one. The gap between the two sides then was enormous. West German voters were very unhappy about it. But East Germany at the time had a great many skilled workers, and they went straight into the West German labor market and made up the labor shortage—what we call a demographic dividend—which left German manufacturing extremely strong. When a man acts with foresight, though, short-sighted voters can't see it. So by 1998 the after-effects of reunification were plain while the benefits were not yet, and he was voted out. He was replaced by another man, Schröder, who found that many East Germans would rather live on welfare than work. So he raised the bar for welfare, and as a result lost a seat to Merkel. Yet people say those two men were the ones who made Germany strong, and that Merkel contributed nothing—she only carried on their policies. So she succeeded on luck alone. Her idealism about Syria was more of the same, because she knew that the Syrians able to reach Germany were the highly educated ones. They would be the workforce that made up for Germany's aging population later. Then everyone got consumed by the Cologne sexual assaults. Do you know the truth of it? Sexual assaults at night-time parties happen in Germany every year. It's just that that year, 2016, the people involved were from the Middle East. It's like the Shanghai stampede—something that had happened before—and if the one time you open the door to immigrants they happen to be Burmese, people say Burmese shouldn't be let in, when the real problem is that you failed to manage it. Human nature is deeply xenophobic and cannot see what serves a country over the long run. That's also what a lot of people are arguing about now: that under traditional Western democratic governance, voters' selfishness and short-sightedness at the ballot box actually hurt a country. Great political undertakings are often weeded out inside the arena of power. So politics keeps growing more vulgar.

Q: You've said you still hold some ideals rooted in liberalism. Do you feel they conflict with the way the world is now?

A: I basically don't believe in any "-ism." What liberalism gave me was independent thinking. Independent thinking is also why I don't swallow liberalism whole, including its economic claim that everything should be settled by the market. I've watched certain things in the West, including the way direct democracy can turn into a Hitler, including the way direct democracy produced Brexit... So what Hu Shih and his generation influenced in me wasn't a doctrine but an attitude of independent thinking.

Q: In your view, is there a country whose politics or political system is heading somewhere good right now?

A: It isn't a good example, but it looks like the most successful one at the moment, and the answer, of all things, is Singapore. It doesn't apply to large countries; it's a city-state. But in the way it's run there seems to be a degree of openness and free speech, and the state itself has a sovereign wealth fund, looks after welfare, stays ahead of the times, and makes a great deal of policy without rallying people through nationalism. Lee Kuan Yew was thrown out of Malaysia in 1967. Singapore then was 70% Chinese, 20% Malay and 10% Indian. At the time a group at Nanyang Technological Institute who opposed Lee Kuan Yew held that Chinese should obviously be the national language. Lee looked at the many countries that won independence after the Second World War—most of them around 1947 or 1948—and saw that these Third World leaders, once they worked the nationalism lever, could keep their countries from progressing at all. He decided Singapore could not take the road of exclusionary nationalism. So he made English the national language. The institute's people said he had forgotten his own ancestors and kept attacking him, and events proved his foresight. They even said they would compile a dictionary of Singapore's own particular Mandarin, because their Mandarin was so distinctive. They had a few theaters putting on Singaporean plays, and this special language and way of life of theirs was very popular, so they went ahead and compiled it. Lee Kuan Yew hit back bluntly: what's so great about that? At most a million or two people will read that dictionary, while Singapore is setting out to take on the whole world, several billion people. I read a line like this in his memoir: to understand Singapore, you first have to understand one thing—this country had no business existing in the first place.

Second, when it comes to running a country, the moment you work it through nationalism, it's finished. Because then a leader doesn't need economic progress or sound public policy in order to lead; he can mobilize you with symbols instead. North Korea is the obvious case. Saudi Arabia is doing it now. It is mobilizing the public against Iran's Shiites, using the idea of being the Sunni world's leading power, hoping the standoff between the two will cover over Saudi Arabia's own contradictions. Those contradictions are that oil prices keep falling and that the oil war it launched lost to American shale oil and gas. With prices this low, the welfare it has been paying for can't be sustained. In September Saudi Arabia arrested a great many clerics. Almost nobody paid attention. In fact, Saudi political stability rests on the unity of the clergy and the royal family, and that unity rests on distribution—on handing privileges to these men out of the country's vast oil revenues. The result of that distribution is that these clerics, whom the public trusts deeply, tell the public to back the royal family.

When Saudi Arabia launched its war on American shale oil and gas, I said on the Sisy's Big Sister Show video that Saudi Arabia was certain to lose and America certain to win. Hardly anyone agreed with me. Why? It costs only two dollars to pump a barrel of Saudi oil, while American shale oil and gas costs at least 40 a barrel on average. So of course Saudi Arabia wins and America loses—that's what everyone thought. I said no. Because I saw a different arithmetic: Saudi Arabia pumps a barrel for two dollars, but add in the social welfare, all the benefits it has to pay the various clerics, and the cost reaches 70 dollars a barrel. Saudi police drive Porsches; to keep everyone satisfied enough to keep their support, the price per barrel has to be 70. By this year, after waging the oil war, the treasury was out of money—so what did they do? They strung the princes up and made them hand the money over. Now Saudi Arabia is squaring off directly against Iran's Shiites and forming an alliance with Israel. So the Saudi public thinks highly of the current crown prince, the one who deposed the cousin who was supposed to have the title. It's really very like the Xuanwu Gate Incident. This is about consolidating his own power, but once you see it you know Saudi Arabia is finished. One day the unrest will start in Saudi Arabia.

And once you see this, you also see that American shale oil and gas output in 2018 is projected at five times what it is now, because after a run of consolidation the cost of extraction keeps falling—it now takes only a bit over 30 dollars to pump a barrel—so output keeps climbing. Before 1970, all the oil in the Middle East was controlled by BP, the French oil company and the American oil companies. OPEC was founded in 1970. In 1972—this is why they hated Libya's Gaddafi so much—Gaddafi confiscated 50% of BP's shares, and BP's people responded by dumping everything and walking out, leaving the Arabs without a drop of oil. Gaddafi then called on Arab engineers working in Europe to come and pump it successfully, and only then did the Arabs have a say over oil. What capitalist society calls the first oil crisis was in fact the Arabs' first oil breakthrough. So they negotiated, and the price per barrel went from two dollars to 12. America seized the moment and made pricing oil in dollars the condition, and that is how America steadied itself.

Between 1970 and 1972 the world went through a great deal of upheaval: the Vietnam War halted, Asia strategy shifted, the United States recognized the normalization of relations with China, Nixon visited China, the dollar hit a crisis, and de Gaulle, who had meant to go back to the gold standard, abandon the dollar and pull France's gold home, was forced out in 1968—America used that moment to lock the dollar's position in and let oil prices rise. Those years make wonderful history. I have a real passion for the knowledge of that period. Beyond the passion, it also tells people not to look at problems so simply.

As it stands, I already know this is only the first act of the play. You see them stringing Arab princes up, which looks outrageous, and then you'll see upheaval across the whole Arab world, especially over the next 20 to 30 years.

The cover image and the photographs in this article are provided by Theatre Above.