With the presidential election drawing close, foreign journalists are washing up on Taiwan's shores in search of stories. They are being greeted with the predictable spin dished out in abundance by the Government Information Office: How out of the ashes of defeat the KMT forged an economic miracle in Taiwan and capped this with a bloodless political revolution that has produced arguably the freest society a Chinese culture has ever known. Most journalists have been there and done that. Then there is the interviewing of notable dissidents such as Shih Ming-teh (
On Monday, this newspaper ran a long article from the New York Times about the KMT's assets, Lien Chan's (
Unfortunately, the free ride Taiwan has enjoyed since the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989 is nearing its end. The world is now well aware that Taiwan is very different from China and is realizing that the correct comparison is not with the dictatorship across the Strait but with the kind of country that Taiwan aspires to be taken for, a reasonably wealthy western-style democracy, a lower-tier EU member for instance. And by such standards, there is much to fault. The fantastic corruption of local politics, the gangsterization of politics at the national level, the KMT's penchant for buying elections, the scam that is the Taiwan stock market, rigged to rip off the savings of the small investor so that the wealthy and powerful can be rewarded for political and other favors; the list of problems is embarrassingly long.
Note that word: embarrassing. Because a lot of this is going to be heaped on Taiwan's head unless it cleans up its act -- and fast. We do not expect much to be accomplished in the next 50-odd days. But whoever is elected on March 18 has to understand that Taiwan is being viewed with a far more critical eye.
It is not just a question of an unusually critical press. It is not even just a question of making Taiwan a better society in which to live. It is a national security issue. Taiwan needs as much support as it can get. But the only reason for other countries to support it verges on the sentimental; since 1938 there has been a reluctance on the part of the West to see small, well-behaved democracies crushed by dictatorships. Even when calculations of realpolitik suggest it would be better to let it happen, an outcry from ordinary voters generally precludes this.
But such sentiment can easily be changed if the received image of the country involves changes from a "bold little democracy" to "corrupt sink-hole." If Taiwan is to continue to receive all the support it can get, it has to do more to live up to what it aspires to be. And it must hurry, because the clock is ticking.
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
Ursula K. le Guin in The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas proposed a thought experiment of a utopian city whose existence depended on one child held captive in a dungeon. When taken to extremes, Le Guin suggests, utilitarian logic violates some of our deepest moral intuitions. Even the greatest social goods — peace, harmony and prosperity — are not worth the sacrifice of an innocent person. Former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), since leaving office, has lived an odyssey that has brought him to lows like Le Guin’s dungeon. From late 2008 to 2015 he was imprisoned, much of this