While China is enjoying an economic boom, it is also faced with a great deal of depressing news. In fact, its dictators are exasperated because more than 12 million people have quit the Chinese Communist Party since the launch of the "Nine Commentaries" on the party. Hundreds of thousands of angry peasants have rioted on the streets and we have seen the shocking exposure of large-scale organ harvesting targeting Falun Gong practitioners.
Among the chaos, there is suddenly a new campaign to reinforce the party. Chinese President Hu Jintao's (
I call it desperation. It is pretty safe to assume that this euphoria is not shared by everyone. In the West, Jiang will always be remembered as the butcher from Beijing who cleverly orchestrated the Tiananmen Square Massacre just to get ahead. He also began the persecution of the Falun Gong to gain more power.
His hands are stained with the blood of countless innocent people.
He has put humanity to shame -- why revere him?
Marie Beaulieu
Victoria, British Columbia
When Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) sits down with US President Donald Trump in Beijing on Thursday next week, Xi is unlikely to demand a dramatic public betrayal of Taiwan. He does not need to. Beijing’s preferred victory is smaller, quieter and in some ways far more dangerous: a subtle shift in American wording that appears technical, but carries major strategic meaning. The ask is simple: replace the longstanding US formulation that Washington “does not support Taiwan independence” with a harder one — that Washington “opposes” Taiwan independence. One word changes; a deterrence structure built over decades begins to shift.
The cancelation this week of President William Lai’s (賴清德) state visit to Eswatini, after the Seychelles, Madagascar and Mauritius revoked overflight permits under Chinese pressure, is one more measure of Taiwan’s shrinking executive diplomatic space. Another channel that deserves attention keeps growing while the first contracts. For several years now, Taipei has been one of Europe’s busiest legislative destinations. Where presidents and foreign ministers cannot land, parliamentarians do — and they do it in rising numbers. The Italian parliament opened the year with its largest bipartisan delegation to Taiwan to date: six Italian deputies and one senator, drawn from six
Recently, Taipei’s streets have been plagued by the bizarre sight of rats running rampant and the city government’s countermeasures have devolved into an anti-intellectual farce. The Taipei Parks and Street Lights Office has attempted to eradicate rats by filling their burrows with polyurethane foam, seeming to believe that rats could not simply dig another path out. Meanwhile, as the nation’s capital slowly deteriorates into a rat hive, the Taipei Department of Environmental Protection has proudly pointed to the increase in the number of poisoned rats reported in February and March as a sign of success. When confronted with public concerns over young
Taipei is facing a severe rat infestation, and the city government is reportedly considering large-scale use of rodenticides as its primary control measure. However, this move could trigger an ecological disaster, including mass deaths of birds of prey. In the past, black kites, relatives of eagles, took more than three decades to return to the skies above the Taipei Basin. Taiwan’s black kite population was nearly wiped out by the combined effects of habitat destruction, pesticides and rodenticides. By 1992, fewer than 200 black kites remained on the island. Fortunately, thanks to more than 30 years of collective effort to preserve their remaining
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