Taipei Mayor Ma Ying-jeou (
More surprising was that Ma made such a disrespectful and crude comment during a routine weekly Cabinet meeting -- which he attends in his capacity as Taipei mayor -- and where a group of reporters summoned by Ma were waiting for him to give a mini-press conference condemning the supposed illegality of the referendum. Ma is as entitled to freedom of speech as any other citizen -- but one would think that the mayoral role would impose certain restrictions on how freely he could speak his mind in public. Ma is certainly a remarkable role model for civil servants and government officials when it comes to insubordination against government policies or actions they oppose.
Such new-found courage could have certainly been used a decade or two earlier. Just think -- Ma and others, such as People First Party Chairman James Soong (
On second thought, it is probably more accurate to say that Ma was speaking not as mayor but as the head of the campaign headquarters for KMT Chairman Lien Chan (
If Ma and the pan-blue camp have a bone to pick over the legality of the March referendum, they should seek a ruling by the Council of Grand Justices, which many believe may decline to make such a ruling, since the underlying issue -- whether the country is facing sufficient external threats that may jeopardize its sovereignty -- is more a political question to be determined within the executive purview of the president.
Interestingly enough, after Chen refuted French President Jacques Chirac's open denunciation of Taiwan's referendum plan, Lien and Soong rushed to defend Chirac, condemning the referendum as illegal and Chen for thinking that he alone understands democracy. At least Chirac parroted China's line in the presence of visiting Chinese President Hu Jintao (
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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
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