Wang's requirements absurd
This letter is in reference to statements by Legislative speaker Wang Jin-pyng (
Wang said there is likely to be a lot of hog wallowing in future sessions over this important piece of law. This is a law long promised, but long denied, to the people. It seems the passage of this law should be on the the top of the list in the next legislative session, but one statement did catch my eye. Wang was quoted as saying,"The referendum should only be held once three conditions have been met: national security is assured, the public concur with the way it will be held and it will benefit cross-strait relations."
I can only say that with such stipulations, Taiwan will never have a referendum law. National security in the US is never assured -- security is only relative to some prior time. Are we more or less secure then yesterday, last week, 50 years ago, or 100 years ago?
The stipulation that the public must concur with the way a referendum is to be held is like saying you will never pass this law as long as 51 percent of the voting public does not agree with the wording. This is why the people inadvertently go the way of representative government: so they don't have to hash out the exact wording for what they need. Their representatives in the legislature will do that for them. But since there is not agreement on even a single sentence of the proposed law, there will be no law.
If a couple hundred legislators can't agree on the wording, how could several million voters agree on it?
Wang's final stipulation is a slap in the face of the public. According to Wang there will be no referendum law until China is ecstatic about the people of Taiwan exercising control over their own future. Enthusiasm by China will never come, thus no referendum law will be passed. This cowardly way of beating around the bush is equal to the US having to get permission from the Soviet Union to amend the US Constitution during the height of the Cold War.
The stipulations drawn by Wang are untenable. The media should forthrightly ask him for a clarification.
Bode Bliss
Cleveland, Ohio
Ignore the opposition
I respectfully disagree with your editorial ("Let's wait to do it legally," July 19, page 9]. There are a few catches here.
One, the Republic of China (ROC) Constitution was never ratified by the people of Tai-wan. Therefore, its binding power on the people is questionable. The first and utmost principal of law is, as a contract between two parties (the people and the law) it has to be mutually agreed upon and therefore mutually binding.
Two, precisely because it is not ratified by the people, the "ROC" Constitution has built-in obstacles to prevent people from taking power as they should. This means that the people have no other recourse but to exercise democracy directly.
Three, failure is no excuse for giving up. Technical failure can serve as a lesson. But the most important lesson is that the opposition will not go down without utilizing all its might to obstruct a referendum. The people of Taiwan can ill afford to drop their drive for a referendum, lest time should run out.
Both Taiwan's democracy and its people, at this point in history, do not have much time to waste on the opposition.
Chen Ming-Chung
Chicago, Illinois
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