If there is criticism to be made of President Chen Shui-bian (
To show to what degree the story has developed a life of its own, having nothing to do with either the known facts or common sense, the Associated Press' story of the day from Taiwan yesterday led with this paragraph: "President Chen Shui-bian has pledged to fight corruption and financial crimes as his ruling political party struggles to clean itself of allegations that it took illegal donations from a bankrupt former real-estate tycoon."
Where does one start debunking this nonsense -- apart from remarking that Tuntex was a petro-chemical company? Perhaps with pointing out that, since there is no law regulating donations, no donation, in and of itself, can be illegal. What can be illegal is the purpose for which the donation is made or accepted or the purpose to which the money is put. For example, pan-blue vice presidential candidate James Soong's (宋楚瑜) pocketing of the NT$100 million that Chen Yu-hao gave to the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) in 1991 and which made its way into the private bank accounts of Soong's family members is an obviously illegal use of a legal donation.
At first the blue camp was trying to suggest that President Chen had done a Soong and trousered Chen Yu-hao's largesse. When the DPP showed copies of the "thank you" notes they had given the Tuntex boss, the pan-blues changed their tune and asserted that Chen Yu-hao's pittance of a donation -- NT$10 million, hardly enough to buy a small apartment in downtown Taipei -- had gained him favorable financial attention from the DPP; in particular that it was in return for this pocket change that the DPP granted him low-interest loans in 2001. These accusations actually conflict with what Chen Yu-hao claims, which is that he gave the money to the DPP to secure financial help for the ailing Tuntex -- which was, nevertheless, not forthcoming.
If the DPP did take the money promising special financial treatment as a quid pro quo, that is an example of the other kind of illegality mentioned above. But did they? There is absolutely no evidence to suggest that they did. It is true that the government did help Tuntex in 2000 to 2001. But that was part of the continuation of a policy that the KMT itself had started in 1997, when finding many of its cronies -- prominent among whom was Chen Yu-hao -- hard-hit by the Asian financial crisis, the KMT ordered banks to roll over their loans, rather than turn off their credit. Indeed it is exactly because of this policy that Chen Yu-hao's depredations, when they came to light, had become so massive.
What needs attention, in fact, is not the Tuntex chief's donations to the DPP but his entire relationship to the KMT: Chen Yu-hao donated hundreds of million of NT dollars to the KMT in return for which the government kept the credit taps of the state-run banks open for him. How cozy.
Perhaps we can expect this story to die down now we know how it came about in the first place -- as an attempt by officials in Beijing's Taiwan Affairs Office to interfere in the election in the pan-blue camp's favor. As for Chen Yu-hao, he survives in China on the government's favor, praying, like so many other fugitives from Taiwan's justice, for a blue-camp victory so he can come home.
Taiwan stands at the epicenter of a seismic shift that will determine the Indo-Pacific’s future security architecture. Whether deterrence prevails or collapses will reverberate far beyond the Taiwan Strait, fundamentally reshaping global power dynamics. The stakes could not be higher. Today, Taipei confronts an unprecedented convergence of threats from an increasingly muscular China that has intensified its multidimensional pressure campaign. Beijing’s strategy is comprehensive: military intimidation, diplomatic isolation, economic coercion, and sophisticated influence operations designed to fracture Taiwan’s democratic society from within. This challenge is magnified by Taiwan’s internal political divisions, which extend to fundamental questions about the island’s identity and future
The narrative surrounding Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s attendance at last week’s Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit — where he held hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin and chatted amiably with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) — was widely framed as a signal of Modi distancing himself from the US and edging closer to regional autocrats. It was depicted as Modi reacting to the levying of high US tariffs, burying the hatchet over border disputes with China, and heralding less engagement with the Quadrilateral Security dialogue (Quad) composed of the US, India, Japan and Australia. With Modi in China for the
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) has postponed its chairperson candidate registration for two weeks, and so far, nine people have announced their intention to run for chairperson, the most on record, with more expected to announce their campaign in the final days. On the evening of Aug. 23, shortly after seven KMT lawmakers survived recall votes, KMT Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) announced he would step down and urged Taichung Mayor Lu Shiow-yen (盧秀燕) to step in and lead the party back to power. Lu immediately ruled herself out the following day, leaving the subject in question. In the days that followed, several
The Jamestown Foundation last week published an article exposing Beijing’s oil rigs and other potential dual-use platforms in waters near Pratas Island (Dongsha Island, 東沙島). China’s activities there resembled what they did in the East China Sea, inside the exclusive economic zones of Japan and South Korea, as well as with other South China Sea claimants. However, the most surprising element of the report was that the authors’ government contacts and Jamestown’s own evinced little awareness of China’s activities. That Beijing’s testing of Taiwanese (and its allies) situational awareness seemingly went unnoticed strongly suggests the need for more intelligence. Taiwan’s naval
RSS