Chinese people are fond of talking about their "vast, great, refined and deep" culture. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Lien Chan (
The KMT's bureaucratic culture continues to paralyze the legislature even though Lien is just a presidential wannabe. It is all about face. The number of people seeing off or welcoming a politician is considered a indicator of power and popularity. If only a handful of people turn out to meet him or her, the politician is seen as unpopular and unfit for high office.
Apart from satisfying vanity, these hail and farewell gatherings are an opportunity to brown-nose one's superiors and seek advancement. Especially if the boss is normally very busy and inaccessible, such opportunities are a chance to remind people who you are and impress the boss so that he or she won't forget you when opportunities for promotion arise.
The large number of people who showed up to greet Lien on Monday sent a clear message: KMT and PFP politicians are quite confident about their parties' chances in next year's presidential election. They are therefore already jockeying for position five months before voting day, vying to kiss up to Lien.
Lien also believes he has already won the election. On the evening of Oct. 12, he met with Taiwanese students studying at Cambridge University's Trinity College. After the talk, he walked to Queen's College to attend a banquet. According to John Chang (
But Lien was apparently uninterested in the scenery. He complained -- via the pan-blue media -- that the government's representative office in the UK had not taken good care of him. He was upset because the office had not arranged a car for him, thereby forcing him to "grope about and walk in the dark" and causing him to get lost on the way.
Diplomats from the office responded they had not arranged a car because Lien's own people had told them that he wanted to walk. They said the office had sent people to accompany Lien during the walk, so how did the talk about being discourteous come about?
Democratic Progressive Party Deputy Secretary-General Lee Ying-yuan (
On Monday, Lien demonstrated that he found nothing wrong in the legislature grinding to a halt so that 60 legislators could be at the airport to welcome him home. Perhaps he wanted to get even with his political enemies for not treating him as an emperor. Such political sychophancy is common in totalitarian societies and banana republics -- it has no place in a modern democracy.
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) trip to China provides a pertinent reminder of why Taiwanese protested so vociferously against attempts to force through the cross-strait service trade agreement in 2014 and why, since Ma’s presidential election win in 2012, they have not voted in another Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate. While the nation narrowly avoided tragedy — the treaty would have put Taiwan on the path toward the demobilization of its democracy, which Courtney Donovan Smith wrote about in the Taipei Times in “With the Sunflower movement Taiwan dodged a bullet” — Ma’s political swansong in China, which included fawning dithyrambs