Former US president George Bush once said, "Read my lips, no new taxes." But he later reneged on his words and raised taxes anyway. In the eyes of many, President Chen Shui-bian
It was Lee Teng-hui
Those against Chen's taking the chair believe he has already made too many concessions toward Beijing. By becoming NUC chairman before China makes any positive response to any of his earlier olive branches, Chen may encourage Beijing to ratchet up pressure on Taiwan. His chairmanship would give legitimacy to the idea of unification and might embolden China. Taking the job would also indicate that Chen has abandoned his campaign platform and the voters who supported him.
But then, perhaps Chen is looking at the job from a different perspective. Perhaps the harsh reality of being president is so overwhelming that he can hardly follow his own will. Even though Chen does not accept the one China principle, he announced at his June 20 press conference that he would not abolish the NUC nor the Guidelines for National Unification
However, if Lee did not gain much in the way of trust from the Beijing authorities for setting up the NUC and announcing the guidelines in the first place, why should they give Chen any special treatment for taking over as NUC chairman?
The cross-party task force was meant to replace the council, but if the latter continues to operate, with Chen in the chairman's seat, then there will simply be little point for the cross-party task force, convened by Lee Yuan-tseh (李遠哲) to continue. Given the superior resources available to the council and its official status, what role could the task force play?
Above all, while Chen's act may not necessarily appease the 60 percent of the electorate who did not vote for him, it will be a definite disappointment to the 40 percent who did.
Perhaps Chen has no choice but to play along with Lee's unfinished cross-strait plan. And that, perhaps, was the most tragic aspect to Joshua's following in Moses' footsteps: he never had a plan of his own.
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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