Taiwan's 228 Incident and the Tiananmen Square Incident share a number of similarities. Both derived from movements for reform, rather than outright revolts. In the former, the Settlement Committee, consisting of community leaders from all major cities in Taiwan, had asked for an end to official corruption and the establishment of local autonomy. In the latter, the students in the square merely petitioned for the elimination of corruption and freedom of the press, speech and assembly.
\nIn both cases, however, the government deliberately mis-represented the nature of the protest. General Chen Yi
Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, was “amazed” and “enthralled” by Chinese who rise at 3am for work. He praised it as a manifestation of talent and a good work ethic. Truthfully, that praise and statement about China, no matter its motivation, is nothing more than a round of applause for the atrocities inflicted by dictators and the spiritual anesthesia of their victims. “There’s just a lot of super-talented, hard-working people in China that strongly believe in manufacturing,” Musk said in an interview with the Financial Times on Tuesday. “And they won’t just be burning the midnight oil, they’ll be
“There’s going to be a new world order out there, and we’ve got to lead it,” US President Joe Biden said after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine upended global geopolitics. Far from Earth, that transition is already happening. Just like in the era of Sputnik and Apollo more than half a century ago, world leaders are again racing to achieve dominance in outer space — but there is one big difference: Whereas the US and the Soviet Union hashed out a common set of rules at the UN, this time around the world’s top superpowers cannot even agree on basic principles to govern
With a Taiwan contingency increasingly more plausible, Taiwanese lobbies in Japan are calling for the government to pass a version of the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA), emulating the US precedent. Such a measure would surely enable Tokyo to make formal and regular contact with Taipei for dialogue, consultation, policy coordination and planning in military security. This would fill the missing link of the trilateral US-Japan-Taiwan security ties, rendering a US military defense of Taiwan more feasible through the support of the US-Japan alliance. Yet, particular caution should be exercised, as Beijing would probably view the move as a serious challenge to
As the Soviet Union was collapsing in the late 1980s and Russia seemed to be starting the process of democratization, 36-year-old US academic Francis Fukuyama had the audacity to assert that the world was at the “end of history.” Fukuyama claimed that democratic systems would become the norm, and peace would prevail the world over. He published a grandiose essay, “The End of History?” in the summer 1989 edition of the journal National Interest. Overnight, Fukuyama became a famous theorist in the US, western Europe, Japan and even Taiwan. Did the collapse of the Soviet Union mark the end of an era as