The US-based Citibank's subsidiary, Sycamore Ventures, has entered a bid to buy shares of China Television Company (CTV), Broadcasting Corporation of China (BCC), Central Daily News and other media outlets from the Chinese Nationalist Party's (KMT) Huahsia Investment Holding Company. The plan has caused a political struggle between the KMT and the Government Information Office (GIO). From a legal, political, and commercial standpoint, the KMT is like a trapped beast putting up a desperate fight.
Taiwan's terrestrial frequencies belong to the Taiwanese people, and television and radio stations only have the government's special permission to use them. The Broadcasting and Television Law (
The KMT finds itself at a legal, political and moral disadvantage. Its reliance on special privileges to monopolize the broadcast media was already a source of social discontent. The DPP government is well within its rights when it calls for reinstating order in the broadcasting industry.
Foreign investment in the KMT-run media may influence the media environment. This would be to the dismay of local media outlets, which already operate in an excessively competitive market. The DPP government gains further when it highlights the KMT's interest in foreign investment.
The timing of the bid may prove an even greater test for the KMT. The party is in urgent need of funds in order to pay for campaigning in the year-end legislative elections. The party may therefore not be able hold out until the end of next year, when the Broadcasting and Television Law (
The KMT believes that selling party assets to foreign firms is the best way of preventing them from becoming "green." This is ironic, considering that the Broadcasting and Television Law was enacted by a legislature controlled by the KMT. They have nobody to blame but themselves. Any inadequately prepared foreign investor who fails to realize that this is not a simple business acquisition, but an intimately connected struggle between media and political forces, will likely find itself in deep trouble.
The dissolution of the KMT's media empire is a necessary part of Taiwan's democratization, for the force represented by the KMT-owned media is not in accordance with fair play or justice. That this political force is now being applied to loosen the KMT's grip on broadcast frequencies obtained through political means is a step in the right direction. But regardless of whether the government obtains the wireless frequencies from BCC, or the television frequencies from CTV, the transition process must be in accordance with the public good.
If this is not the case, we will simply be breaking up one monolithic media group to replace it with another. For Taiwanese society, replacing a blue group with a green group does not rid the country of political involvement in the media.
Because much of what former US president Donald Trump says is unhinged and histrionic, it is tempting to dismiss all of it as bunk. Yet the potential future president has a populist knack for sounding alarums that resonate with the zeitgeist — for example, with growing anxiety about World War III and nuclear Armageddon. “We’re a failing nation,” Trump ranted during his US presidential debate against US Vice President Kamala Harris in one particularly meandering answer (the one that also recycled urban myths about immigrants eating cats). “And what, what’s going on here, you’re going to end up in World War
Earlier this month in Newsweek, President William Lai (賴清德) challenged the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to retake the territories lost to Russia in the 19th century rather than invade Taiwan. He stated: “If it is for the sake of territorial integrity, why doesn’t [the PRC] take back the lands occupied by Russia that were signed over in the treaty of Aigun?” This was a brilliant political move to finally state openly what many Chinese in both China and Taiwan have long been thinking about the lost territories in the Russian far east: The Russian far east should be “theirs.” Granted, Lai issued
On Tuesday, President William Lai (賴清德) met with a delegation from the Hoover Institution, a think tank based at Stanford University in California, to discuss strengthening US-Taiwan relations and enhancing peace and stability in the region. The delegation was led by James Ellis Jr, co-chair of the institution’s Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region project and former commander of the US Strategic Command. It also included former Australian minister for foreign affairs Marise Payne, influential US academics and other former policymakers. Think tank diplomacy is an important component of Taiwan’s efforts to maintain high-level dialogue with other nations with which it does
On Sept. 2, Elbridge Colby, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development, wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal called “The US and Taiwan Must Change Course” that defends his position that the US and Taiwan are not doing enough to deter the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from taking Taiwan. Colby is correct, of course: the US and Taiwan need to do a lot more or the PRC will invade Taiwan like Russia did against Ukraine. The US and Taiwan have failed to prepare properly to deter war. The blame must fall on politicians and policymakers