Auric Goldfinger, James Bond's most memorable adversary, said of unfortunate events with a tendency to recur: "The first time is happenstance, the second time coincidence, the third time is enemy action." So who is the enemy responsible for this week's Cabinet near-meltdown, the third in two years? Unfortunately, if the blame is to be pinned on anybody, it is not on the much-questioned motives of those who organized Saturday's protest demonstration by farmers and fishermen. Rather it has to be laid at the door of the president himself. Chen Shui-bian (
It was shocking to hear of Chen protesting last week that he had been misled by the Cabinet as to the real nature of farmers' and fishermen's grievances and the strength of opposition to the Ministry of Finance's restructuring plan. How could the president have been misled? Maybe there is truth in KMT Chairman Lien Chan's (
It would be nice to know exactly where Chen thinks he has been misled. Was it that he was not properly informed about the finance ministry's plan? Then surely it was his job to get informed. He's the president; he just has to ask for a briefing. Was it that he was not informed about the farmers' and fishermen's feelings? The Council of Agriculture should have told him. If it couldn't, he should have demanded better intelligence. And whatever information it did provide, he should have used his own sources -- talks with legislators of party rank and file from rural communities for example -- to cross-check. It was, in fact, just such a meeting which led to his asking the Cabinet a week ago to suspend the financial reform plan. But why didn't Chen initiate something of this sort before the reforms were implemented in the fist place. It is simply unacceptable to be told that a crisis, which has the potential to wreck the Cabinet and has been two months in the making, can catch the president unawares.
The premier is apparently to stay in place. Nevertheless Minister of Finance Lee Yung-san (
We do not yet know who might take the spare Cabinet places. But a wider question has to be: why would anybody want to? First on the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant issue and now on the reform of farmers' and fishermen's credit associations, the president has displayed political incompetence, followed by an ugly tendency to call on ministers to allow ignominy to be heaped upon their heads to save him from the consequences of his own lack of judgement. It is hard to imagine that a job description which revolves around a readiness to be the president's whipping boy is going to attract the sort of expertise the Cabinet really needs.
Chinese agents often target Taiwanese officials who are motivated by financial gain rather than ideology, while people who are found guilty of spying face lenient punishments in Taiwan, a researcher said on Tuesday. While the law says that foreign agents can be sentenced to death, people who are convicted of spying for Beijing often serve less than nine months in prison because Taiwan does not formally recognize China as a foreign nation, Institute for National Defense and Security Research fellow Su Tzu-yun (蘇紫雲) said. Many officials and military personnel sell information to China believing it to be of little value, unaware that
Before 1945, the most widely spoken language in Taiwan was Tai-gi (also known as Taiwanese, Taiwanese Hokkien or Hoklo). However, due to almost a century of language repression policies, many Taiwanese believe that Tai-gi is at risk of disappearing. To understand this crisis, I interviewed academics and activists about Taiwan’s history of language repression, the major challenges of revitalizing Tai-gi and their policy recommendations. Although Taiwanese were pressured to speak Japanese when Taiwan became a Japanese colony in 1895, most managed to keep their heritage languages alive in their homes. However, starting in 1949, when the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) enacted martial law
“Si ambulat loquitur tetrissitatque sicut anas, anas est” is, in customary international law, the three-part test of anatine ambulation, articulation and tetrissitation. And it is essential to Taiwan’s existence. Apocryphally, it can be traced as far back as Suetonius (蘇埃托尼烏斯) in late first-century Rome. Alas, Suetonius was only talking about ducks (anas). But this self-evident principle was codified as a four-part test at the Montevideo Convention in 1934, to which the United States is a party. Article One: “The state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications: a) a permanent population; b) a defined territory; c) government;
The central bank and the US Department of the Treasury on Friday issued a joint statement that both sides agreed to avoid currency manipulation and the use of exchange rates to gain a competitive advantage, and would only intervene in foreign-exchange markets to combat excess volatility and disorderly movements. The central bank also agreed to disclose its foreign-exchange intervention amounts quarterly rather than every six months, starting from next month. It emphasized that the joint statement is unrelated to tariff negotiations between Taipei and Washington, and that the US never requested the appreciation of the New Taiwan dollar during the
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