If former Democratic Progressive Party chairman Shih Ming-teh (
Shih should also stage a massive demonstration against China for deploying some 800 ballistic missiles in an attempt to destroy Taiwan and for diplomatically isolating Taiwan from the rest of the world.
If Shih sincerely opposed greediness and corruption, he would not keep quiet about the KMT's possession of questionable "partisan assets" worth nearly US$20 billion, as reported in Wealth Magazine in 1998. Shih has not raised any questions about Ma having sold some US$200 million of these assets. As a wild hunter, Shih tries to shoot at the cat but leaves the tiger alone.
If Shih truly cherished democracy, he should let the Constitution and the judiciary decide President Chen Shui-bian's (
A one-day silent sit-in is reasonable. A prolonged, round-the-clock, noisy sit-in or nationwide strike is an abuse of democracy and a nuisance to the general public. Let the Constitution do its job. If it does not do the job, let's amend it or scrap it and make a new one.
If Shih honestly respected ethnic harmony, he would not add a pan-red camp to the existing pan-green and pan-blue camps in Taiwan. Also, Sept. 8, the anniversary of the signing of the San Francisco Peace Treaty, would have been a better choice than Sept. 9, the anniversary of Mao Zedong's (
One should be smart enough "to scratch the itchy skin and not scratch the non-itchy skin to bleeding," as a Taiwanese saying goes.
Charles Hong
Columbus, Ohio
After Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) met Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) in Beijing, most headlines referred to her as the leader of the opposition in Taiwan. Is she really, though? Being the chairwoman of the KMT does not automatically translate into being the leader of the opposition in the sense that most foreign readers would understand it. “Leader of the opposition” is a very British term. It applies to the Westminster system of parliamentary democracy, and to some extent, to other democracies. If you look at the UK right now, Conservative Party head Kemi Badenoch is
From the Iran war and nuclear weapons to tariffs and artificial intelligence, the agenda for this week’s Beijing summit between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is packed. Xi would almost certainly bring up Taiwan, if only to demonstrate his inflexibility on the matter. However, no one needs to meet with Xi face-to-face to understand his stance. A visit to the National Museum of China in Beijing — in particular, the “Road to Rejuvenation” exhibition, which chronicles the rise and rule of the Chinese Communist Party — might be even more revealing. Xi took the members
A Pale View of Hills, a movie released last year, follows the story of a Japanese woman from Nagasaki who moved to Britain in the 1950s with her British husband and daughter from a previous marriage. The daughter was born at a time when memories of the US atomic bombing of Nagasaki during World War II and anxiety over the effects of nuclear radiation still haunted the community. It is a reflection on the legacy of the local and national trauma of the bombing that ended the period of Japanese militarism. A central theme of the movie is the need, at
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) on Friday used their legislative majority to push their version of a special defense budget bill to fund the purchase of US military equipment, with the combined spending capped at NT$780 billion (US$24.78 billion). The bill, which fell short of the Executive Yuan’s NT$1.25 trillion request, was passed by a 59-0 margin with 48 abstentions in the 113-seat legislature. KMT Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文), who reportedly met with TPP Chairman Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) for a private meeting before holding a joint post-vote news conference, was said to have mobilized her
RSS