The suicide of taxi driver Chen Tsai-fu (
What added to the anxiety the Peng Wan-ju case caused was that it came just days after the murder of Taoyuan county commissioner Liu Pang-you (
As for the Liu and Peng killings, since the police announced late yesterday that blood and fingerprint evidence showed that the hapless Chen was not Peng's killer, both cases remain unsolved.
The Liu-Peng-Pai cases were interpreted by many as showing that society was becoming unacceptably violent and dangerous. Eventually massive demonstrations occurred demanding the ouster of Lien Chan(
Yesterday's brief resurrection of the Peng case served to remind us of the absurd gestures that Taiwan cops seem prepared to make to prove they are on top of high profile cases. The problem is that when they don't follow through on these promises, as they invariably don't, they compound the impression of bad police work by appearing to have a regrettable lack of personal integrity. And if the top cops can't be trusted, what can be said about the small fry? The problem these cases showed up two years ago was how unprofessional Taiwan's police were since the force, for 40 years under martial law an adjunct to the military, was versed almost entirely in crowd and traffic control. What worries us is that, as these cases are now almost forgotten, so is the need for change.
“History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes” (attributed to Mark Twain). The USSR was the international bully during the Cold War as it sought to make the world safe for Soviet-style Communism. China is now the global bully as it applies economic power and invests in Mao’s (毛澤東) magic weapons (the People’s Liberation Army [PLA], the United Front Work Department, and the Chinese Communist Party [CCP]) to achieve world domination. Freedom-loving countries must respond to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), especially in the Indo-Pacific (IP), as resolutely as they did against the USSR. In 1954, the US and its allies
Mainland Affairs Council Deputy Minister Shen You-chung (沈有忠) on Thursday last week urged democratic nations to boycott China’s military parade on Wednesday next week. The parade, a grand display of Beijing’s military hardware, is meant to commemorate the 80th anniversary of Japan’s surrender in World War II. While China has invited world leaders to attend, many have declined. A Kyodo News report on Sunday said that Japan has asked European and Asian leaders who have yet to respond to the invitation to refrain from attending. Tokyo is seeking to prevent Beijing from spreading its distorted interpretation of wartime history, the report
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrived in China yesterday, where he is to attend a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) and Russian President Vladimir Putin today. As this coincides with the 50 percent US tariff levied on Indian products, some Western news media have suggested that Modi is moving away from the US, and into the arms of China and Russia. Taiwan-Asia Exchange Foundation fellow Sana Hashmi in a Taipei Times article published yesterday titled “Myths around Modi’s China visit” said that those analyses have misrepresented India’s strategic calculations, and attempted to view
When Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) stood in front of the Potala Palace in Lhasa on Thursday last week, flanked by Chinese flags, synchronized schoolchildren and armed Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) troops, he was not just celebrating the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the “Tibet Autonomous Region,” he was making a calculated declaration: Tibet is China. It always has been. Case closed. Except it has not. The case remains wide open — not just in the hearts of Tibetans, but in history records. For decades, Beijing has insisted that Tibet has “always been part of China.” It is a phrase