I have been watching the endless protests since the election on March 20. The pan-blues are demanding a recount, a new election, a state of emergency, a special task force to investigate the election-eve assassination attempt and so on.
It is hard to say what the protests are about because the protesters keep changing their demands all the time, leaving us confused about what they really want. From my point of view, President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) has given reasonable explanations for all the doubts the pan-blues have raised, but they keep coming up with something new to keep the protests going.
I listened to the press conference that Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Lien Chan (
I read that there were no reasonable facts to support what Lien and Soong have been saying -- they only kept saying the election was unfair, that the election was rigged and that the assassination was staged. When asked if they had any particular evidence to support the allegations, they could not give a satisfactory answer.
So, what do the pan-blues really want? They have been rejecting any proposal that tries to resolve the problem peacefully. It is evident that they want to keep these endless protests going until Lien and Soong are declared unconditionally the winners. Otherwise, they are going to harass our lives forever.
But the question is, are Taiwanese that blind? Are people really so easily cheated with these allegations?
Maybe the protests will have some effect in the beginning, but for a long-term battle, unless you come up with something real, the pan-blues will certainly have to pay big for what they are doing.
I hope that Lien and Soong and their lawmakers will stop using their supporters as a weapon and keep the battle between politicians and the courts. Please let us live our lives in peace again!
S.A. Matsuyama
Sao Paulo, Brazil
The conflict in the Middle East has been disrupting financial markets, raising concerns about rising inflationary pressures and global economic growth. One market that some investors are particularly worried about has not been heavily covered in the news: the private credit market. Even before the joint US-Israeli attacks on Iran on Feb. 28, global capital markets had faced growing structural pressure — the deteriorating funding conditions in the private credit market. The private credit market is where companies borrow funds directly from nonbank financial institutions such as asset management companies, insurance companies and private lending platforms. Its popularity has risen since
The Donald Trump administration’s approach to China broadly, and to cross-Strait relations in particular, remains a conundrum. The 2025 US National Security Strategy prioritized the defense of Taiwan in a way that surprised some observers of the Trump administration: “Deterring a conflict over Taiwan, ideally by preserving military overmatch, is a priority.” Two months later, Taiwan went entirely unmentioned in the US National Defense Strategy, as did military overmatch vis-a-vis China, giving renewed cause for concern. How to interpret these varying statements remains an open question. In both documents, the Indo-Pacific is listed as a second priority behind homeland defense and
Every analyst watching Iran’s succession crisis is asking who would replace supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Yet, the real question is whether China has learned enough from the Persian Gulf to survive a war over Taiwan. Beijing purchases roughly 90 percent of Iran’s exported crude — some 1.61 million barrels per day last year — and holds a US$400 billion, 25-year cooperation agreement binding it to Tehran’s stability. However, this is not simply the story of a patron protecting an investment. China has spent years engineering a sanctions-evasion architecture that was never really about Iran — it was about Taiwan. The
In an op-ed published in Foreign Affairs on Tuesday, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) said that Taiwan should not have to choose between aligning with Beijing or Washington, and advocated for cooperation with Beijing under the so-called “1992 consensus” as a form of “strategic ambiguity.” However, Cheng has either misunderstood the geopolitical reality and chosen appeasement, or is trying to fool an international audience with her doublespeak; nonetheless, it risks sending the wrong message to Taiwan’s democratic allies and partners. Cheng stressed that “Taiwan does not have to choose,” as while Beijing and Washington compete, Taiwan is strongest when
RSS