So former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) chairman Lien Chan (
Chinese President Hu Jintao's (
Besides that, the communists tossed a few more crumbs onto the table in the guise of help for Taiwanese fishermen, farmers and other groups, in a blatant attempt to erode the DPP's support base. It's certain that there will be no positive achievements from Lien's trip. After all, what government would honor an agreement that their traitorous opposition had signed with a country that has 800 missiles trained on it?
One thing Lien's trip has achieved, however, is to drive yet another stake through the heart of Taiwan's already faltering democratic system. Sharp divisions have long festered under the surface of Taiwanese society, but since Lien's first visit to China last year, these divisions have resurfaced with a vengeance. By teaming up with the dictatorship across the Taiwan Strait to oppose Taiwanese who believe in democracy, Lien has done untold damage to this nation. It is hard to believe that this is a man who spent years both studying and teaching political science at some of the best universities in the self-styled "home of democracy," when it is apparent to all that he has not one iota of respect for that political system.
Why doesn't he just apply for membership in China's KMT -- the Revolutionary Committee of the Kuomintang, which split from the KMT in the 1940s -- and take a seat in the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference? He would feel much more at home there, since the one-party authoritarian system still employed in China would remind him of the good old days under KMT rule in Taiwan, when he didn't need to rely on the support of the people.
But having been rejected by the people of Taiwan not once, but twice, he decided to sell his soul to the devil, and turned to the only place where he knew he would be guaranteed a red-carpet reception. Indeed, looking at the pictures of the reception at the economic forum with hundreds of prominent businesspeople would impress anyone -- except that many of those people had been threatened, coerced and press-ganged into coming.
In his bid to satisfy his vanity, Lien and the KMT have merely become tools of the Chinese Communist Party's "united front" campaign. Lien is like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, and the pro-unification media his pipe, as he leads Taiwan's democracy into the dark reaches of Beijing's cavern. The question is: Do the Taiwanese people want to follow him?
Chinese agents often target Taiwanese officials who are motivated by financial gain rather than ideology, while people who are found guilty of spying face lenient punishments in Taiwan, a researcher said on Tuesday. While the law says that foreign agents can be sentenced to death, people who are convicted of spying for Beijing often serve less than nine months in prison because Taiwan does not formally recognize China as a foreign nation, Institute for National Defense and Security Research fellow Su Tzu-yun (蘇紫雲) said. Many officials and military personnel sell information to China believing it to be of little value, unaware that
Before 1945, the most widely spoken language in Taiwan was Tai-gi (also known as Taiwanese, Taiwanese Hokkien or Hoklo). However, due to almost a century of language repression policies, many Taiwanese believe that Tai-gi is at risk of disappearing. To understand this crisis, I interviewed academics and activists about Taiwan’s history of language repression, the major challenges of revitalizing Tai-gi and their policy recommendations. Although Taiwanese were pressured to speak Japanese when Taiwan became a Japanese colony in 1895, most managed to keep their heritage languages alive in their homes. However, starting in 1949, when the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) enacted martial law
“Si ambulat loquitur tetrissitatque sicut anas, anas est” is, in customary international law, the three-part test of anatine ambulation, articulation and tetrissitation. And it is essential to Taiwan’s existence. Apocryphally, it can be traced as far back as Suetonius (蘇埃托尼烏斯) in late first-century Rome. Alas, Suetonius was only talking about ducks (anas). But this self-evident principle was codified as a four-part test at the Montevideo Convention in 1934, to which the United States is a party. Article One: “The state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications: a) a permanent population; b) a defined territory; c) government;
The central bank and the US Department of the Treasury on Friday issued a joint statement that both sides agreed to avoid currency manipulation and the use of exchange rates to gain a competitive advantage, and would only intervene in foreign-exchange markets to combat excess volatility and disorderly movements. The central bank also agreed to disclose its foreign-exchange intervention amounts quarterly rather than every six months, starting from next month. It emphasized that the joint statement is unrelated to tariff negotiations between Taipei and Washington, and that the US never requested the appreciation of the New Taiwan dollar during the
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