The United Nations, Tai Ji Men, and the Limits of the State

As the Tai Ji Men case demonstrates, when states claim absolute power, injustice follows.

by Marco Respinti*

*A paper presented at the webinar “International Forum on the 1219 Incident, The Truth That the Taiwanese Government Refuses to Face: Persecution and Violations of Tai Ji Men’s Freedom of Religion or Belief Enter Their 29th Year,” Taipei, December 19, 2024.

Despite being a fairly recent Western institution, virtually all countries of the world are politically and juridically organized in the institutional form that we today call the “state”.

That emerged from a long process of increasing concentration of political power from the early modern period of European history to the so-called “age of revolutions” in the 19th century. This development had important junctions at the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453), the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) and the French Revolution (1789–1799), whose military and political events shaped the basic characteristic of a state: sovereignty.

This is the unquestionable rule that authorities exert within a given territory, based on their exclusive power of taxing people, their ultimate administration of justice, and their monopolistic right to the use of force. Of course, in a democracy representative institutions work as a balance, but history teaches that elections too have not been enough to control power. In some cases, dictatorships and totalitarianisms came in after the free vote of citizens.

It is precisely for this reason that, after two catastrophic world wars in the 20th century, the time came to bind the omnipotence of the state within some sort of international structure that could function as a moderator. Many multinational or international organizations rose to perform this decisive task and the United Nations is the most universal and loaded with expectations.

Whether the United Nations succeeds or not in this task, it was born out of the conviction that, while it can serve the public good with immense energy, the state can also easily turn against people and cause giant damages. This is evident when a state assaults its neighbors and wages war against other countries. But it is even more blatant a case when a state harasses its own people. A state persecuting the people it should protect is in fact something we always find hard to believe, even if we have seen it happening so many times. There is something particularly disturbing in it. It is like a mother tormenting its own children, a father turning its back against his heirs, or a school that, instead of instructing, educating, and uplifting pupils for a better future, pester and exasperate them creating a continuous nightmare.

Probably, the sense of special evil that we all get in the case of the state, which is supposed to perform its duty for the benefit of the people and instead does the contrary, derives from the fact that one of the main features of the organized political and juridical community that we call the state is to grant justice to its citizens, particularly in a democracy. What other reason should one in fact have for living in a society regulated by a state if not the fact that a superior authority can secure justice for all in an equal way and serve the common good far better than individuals can do if left to their own devices?

But, unfortunately, even democracies can do the opposite, being instrumental to injustice.

Tai Ji Men is a menpai (similar to a school) of qigong, martial arts and self-cultivation in Taiwan. Since 1996, Tai Ji Men endures an absurd case of false accusations, in particular of tax evasion. Their leaders and several of its members experienced detention, the movement’s property was nationalized and the basic right to freedom of religion or belief of its adherents was denied. All levels of Taiwanese justice have repeatedly cleared Tai Ji Men from all charges, yet the movement is still burdened by the consequences of this fabricated lie.

In the meantime, Tai Ji Men has not renounced to its vocation of building a better world for all through peace and mutual understanding. It is precisely for this reason that the movement has proposed an International Day Against Judicial Persecution by State Power on December 19.

This is quite important. Tai Ji Men is in fact convinced that no one should suffer what the movement has suffered for more that a quarter of a century. It is convinced that the state has no power to harass its own citizens. It is convinced that democracy should be synonym of justice.

I am convinced as well, and I hope the United Nations will soon welcome Tai Ji Men’s proposal and preside over its implantation.