Nine years ago one of this newspaper's editorial board members was fired from a paper for committing the heresy -- according to the newspaper's Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) old-guard owner -- of suggesting that the KMT was intellectually bankrupt and was overcoming this by first denouncing then adopting the policies of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). As the editorial pointed out, anybody who had been following the fortunes of various reform proposals -- abolition of the Temporary Provisions, the re-election of the National Assembly and the legislature, the end of the black list and direct presidential elections -- could see a clear pattern where the DPP would start a campaign, the KMT would thunderously denounce it, then about two years later it would push through the proposal itself and reap kudos for its liberalizing vision.
Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose. On Saturday the KMT, with much fanfare, came up with its vision for constitutional change after, we assume, a debate over just how much of the DPP's program it could adopt without incurring derision. Of the 10 major elements to the plan announced by Lien Chan (
It is interesting to note just how many of these policies the KMT has until very recently opposed. It has thundered against referendums like an evangelist against sin; it has tried to use the "semi-presidential" system to manipulate power in the legislature into a grasp on the reins of government; it showed no interest in changing the voting system when it had the power to do so nor in lowering the voting age, largely because the current system benefits the KMT's corrupt money politics and the party has always believed that young people are fodder for the green camp.
But just because we have heard these ideas before, elsewhere, doesn't mean that nothing happened on Saturday. But what? That depends how charitable you want to be. We could deride the KMT as being intellectually vacuous. And we could sneer at the party's idea of rolling policy unveilings to put some oomph into its campaign. If the KMT is just going to copy the DPP, then why bother with what it has to say? But let us instead be a little charitable. For what Saturday really told us is that the KMT is beginning to realize that, to win power, it cannot rely on the contemptible canaille who thrill to the memory of Chiang Ching-kuo (
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
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
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