According to a recent poll, Taipei Mayor Ma Ying-jeou (
Soon after Ma became the chairman of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), he sold some "KMT assets" which are considered national assets by many people. Before this dispute on ownership is settled, he has already put hundreds of millions of US dollars into KMT bank accounts that can be used to finance his 2008 presidential election campaign.
A few years ago, a Harvard alumnus openly accused Ma of being one of the spies monitoring and reporting "dissident" activities and remarks made by overseas Taiwanese students to the KMT totalitarian regime during the "white terror" era. Many students were blacklisted and were not allowed to go back to their own homeland.
Former president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) nominated Ma to run for the mayor of Taipei as "a new Taiwanese." However, Mayor Ma has acted more like "a new Chinese" -- praising China's freedom, flying China's flag and banning Taiwan's own flag, adopting China's transliteration system instead of Taiwan's own, offering unification of Taiwan with China if China apologizes for the Tiananmen incident, keeping silent on the democratic activity in Hong Kong and China's missile buildup against Taiwan, boycotting the arms purchase bill recklessly and asking foreigners to pronounce "Taipei" as "Taibei" in line with Beijing. Ma has become the favorite son of China. But is he the right choice for Taiwan in 2008?
Under Ma's seven-year administration, it's hard to cite major accomplishments in Taipei. Three inexcusable catastrophic incidents did occur: the cover-up of SARS cases, flooding of the rapid transit system and sending a critically injured child to a Taichung hospital.
Charles Hong
Columbus, Ohio
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
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) trip to China provides a pertinent reminder of why Taiwanese protested so vociferously against attempts to force through the cross-strait service trade agreement in 2014 and why, since Ma’s presidential election win in 2012, they have not voted in another Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate. While the nation narrowly avoided tragedy — the treaty would have put Taiwan on the path toward the demobilization of its democracy, which Courtney Donovan Smith wrote about in the Taipei Times in “With the Sunflower movement Taiwan dodged a bullet” — Ma’s political swansong in China, which included fawning dithyrambs