It has been less than six months since Taipei Mayor Ma Ying-jeou (
On Tuesday Ma announced that the KMT is in "extremely dire financial straits" and could not pay its employees their year-end bonuses.
The party backtracked late on Tuesday night and announced that it would pay bonuses amounting to half-a-month's salary -- thanks to a front page story in the Liberty Times (the Taipei Times' sister newspaper) -- sometime next month. While KMT union director Liu Chien-sung (
That is the first question that Ma should be made to answer. The second question is if Ma, who prides himself on being a party reformer, can't resolve the KMT financial puzzle, then why should anyone believe that he is either willing or able to clean up the party's stained reputation by eradicating its "black gold" problem?
Maybe the party really does have financial difficulties. KMT spokeswoman Cheng Li-wen (
Yet it is business as usual for the party's top brass. Despite forcing early retirement on many people, and delaying the miserly bonus it grudgingly agreed to pay, the KMT headquarters had the gall to ask its staffers to entertain the top-ranking party officials at last night's year-end party.
This meshes with the continued deafness of both Ma and the party to calls to return those stolen assets that once belonged to the government -- either transferred to the party at no cost by the KMT government when the Republic of China took over Taiwan at the end of World War II, or purchased later by the KMT with money provided by the government.
Who else is too blind to see the motive behind the pan-blue camp's long-running boycott of a proposed statute on the disposal of assets improperly obtained by political parties?
"Nothing so conclusively proves a man's ability to lead others as what he does from day to day to lead himself," IBM founder Thomas Watson once said.
If ambiguity and mendacity are the way Ma conducts himself with regard to the KMT's financial affairs, and insensitivity and callousness inform his treatment of party staffers, perhaps pan-blue supporters should reconsider their belief that Ma is the man who will lead a return to the promised land -- the Presidential Office -- in 2008.
As strategic tensions escalate across the vast Indo-Pacific region, Taiwan has emerged as more than a potential flashpoint. It is the fulcrum upon which the credibility of the evolving American-led strategy of integrated deterrence now rests. How the US and regional powers like Japan respond to Taiwan’s defense, and how credible the deterrent against Chinese aggression proves to be, will profoundly shape the Indo-Pacific security architecture for years to come. A successful defense of Taiwan through strengthened deterrence in the Indo-Pacific would enhance the credibility of the US-led alliance system and underpin America’s global preeminence, while a failure of integrated deterrence would
The Executive Yuan recently revised a page of its Web site on ethnic groups in Taiwan, replacing the term “Han” (漢族) with “the rest of the population.” The page, which was updated on March 24, describes the composition of Taiwan’s registered households as indigenous (2.5 percent), foreign origin (1.2 percent) and the rest of the population (96.2 percent). The change was picked up by a social media user and amplified by local media, sparking heated discussion over the weekend. The pan-blue and pro-China camp called it a politically motivated desinicization attempt to obscure the Han Chinese ethnicity of most Taiwanese.
On Wednesday last week, the Rossiyskaya Gazeta published an article by Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) asserting the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) territorial claim over Taiwan effective 1945, predicated upon instruments such as the 1943 Cairo Declaration and the 1945 Potsdam Proclamation. The article further contended that this de jure and de facto status was subsequently reaffirmed by UN General Assembly Resolution 2758 of 1971. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs promptly issued a statement categorically repudiating these assertions. In addition to the reasons put forward by the ministry, I believe that China’s assertions are open to questions in international
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