"Of the dead say nothing but good," Plutarch advises. The problem is that in the case of Soong Mayling (
Soong learned to speak like a Western democrat during her years of schooling in the US, but her psychology was utterly feudal. Her hypocrisy and mendacity were astonishing, perhaps best represented by her convincing Henry Luce, the powerful boss of Life and Time magazines, that she and her husband Chiang Kai-shek (
Like old-fashioned bandits holding a village for ransom in a martial-arts novel, the Soong-Chiang-Kung clique saw China as nothing more than an area of operation for their depredations. Soong Mayling's brother, T.V. Soong (
Soong Mayling was feted in the US during World War II as exemplifying the spirit of Chinese resistance. Actually Luce's power and T.V. Soong's bribery bought Soong Mayling her moment of fame before the US Congress in 1943. What has been portrayed as a triumph for Mayling's charm was in fact a triumph of money politics.
The 1943 speech was to encourage the US to throw more money into the cesspit that was the KMT's anti-Japanese war effort. Most of the materiel that the US supplied was sold by Chiang and his cronies to the very Japanese they were supposed to be fighting. After the war US president Harry Truman calculated that the Chiang clique had filched US$750 million (as a proportion of US GDP this would be US$35 billion today) from the aid that was sent to them as a result of Mayling's efforts. "They're all thieves," he said, "every damn one of them."
Eventually the people of China got sick of the banditry of the Soongs, Kungs and Chiangs, and threw their lot in with the communists to kick the bandits out of China.
To Taiwan's sorrow they fled here, establishing a colonial regime depriving Taiwanese of political power and suppressing dissent with great brutality. They also continued their robberies, albeit slightly more circumspectly.
Soong Mayling's particular money spinner was the military welfare tax (
Soong valued only money and power, tried to secure Taiwan as a fiefdom for her awful family and left in a huff when she failed. The only good thing she ever did for Taiwan was to leave it. Now this evil and corrupt woman is where she belongs -- in Hell. The world is a cleaner, better place for that.
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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