The legislative elections appear to be not so much a contest between President Chen Shui-bian (
There is good reason for the DPP to be pessimistic about its prospects in next month's elections. The party has been in power for more than seven years; consequently it has few issues to explore with a fresh voice. The legislative elections -- which require strong policy initiatives and local campaigns -- have been neglected as a consequence.
The new single-district, two-ballot system is also unlikely to benefit the DPP, which will struggle to garner anywhere near half of the seats in the legislature. But there is some interest over which DPP candidates can take advantage of the largely irrelevant issue of mausoleums containing the tyrants of yesteryear.
Firm KMT resistance to changing the name of the former Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall and the wording on the front gate's plaques seems to be consistent with a DPP strategy of making the KMT appear fanatical and beholden to peripheral causes.
This appearance has been reinforced by the KMT's response to the removal of military guards from the mausoleums of Chiang and his son, former president Chiang Ching-kuo (
The DPP government's decision to remove guards from the mausoleums and have the Taoyuan County Government take over their management are eminently reasonable -- and from the perspective of the victims of the White Terror, absolutely necessary.
When Chiang Fang Chih-yi (
The Cabinet had planned to move the Chiangs to the Wuchihshan Military Cemetery, which the Chiang family had agreed to, and the government allocated nearly US$1 million for renovations.
But because KMT Legislator John Chiang (
The KMT was a foreign government that considered itself temporarily based in Taiwan. It wanted to rule all of China. Such sentiment still exists in the party; no wonder that the fourth-generation Demos Chiang (
The family matters of the Chiangs have become KMT matters on the eve of national elections for the legislature and the presidency. This shows that the Chiang family is still intimately connected to the KMT's vision for Taiwan.
The DPP surely must be congratulating itself that, after all this time, it still has Chiang Kai-shek to thank for exposing the KMT's hollow core -- and obscuring its own inability to develop a substantial legislative campaign.
With each passing day, the threat of a People’s Republic of China (PRC) assault on Taiwan grows. Whatever one’s view about the history, there is essentially no question that a PRC conquest of Taiwan would mark the end of the autonomy and freedom enjoyed by the island’s 23 million people. Simply put, the PRC threat to Taiwan is genuinely existential for a free, democratic and autonomous Taiwan. Yet one might not know it from looking at Taiwan. For an island facing a threat so acute, lethal and imminent, Taiwan is showing an alarming lack of urgency in dramatically strengthening its defenses.
As India’s six-week-long general election grinds past the halfway mark, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s messaging has shifted from confident to shrill. After the first couple of phases of polling showed a 3 percentage point drop in turnout, Modi and his party leaders have largely stopped promoting their accomplishments of the past 10 years — or, for that matter, the “Modi guarantees” offered in the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) manifesto for the next five. Instead, making the majority Hindu population fear and loathe Muslims seems to be the BJP’s preferred talking point. Modi went on the offensive in an April 21
The people of Taiwan recently received confirmation of the strength of American support for their security. Of four foreign aid bills that Congress passed and President Biden signed in April, the bill legislating additional support for Taiwan garnered the most votes. Three hundred eighty-five members of the House of Representatives voted to provide foreign military financing to Taiwan versus only 34 against. More members of Congress voted to support Taiwan than Ukraine, Israel, or banning TikTok. There was scant debate over whether the United States should provide greater support for Taiwan. It was understood and broadly accepted that doing so
Every day since Oct. 7 last year, the world has watched an unprecedented wave of violence rain down on Israel and the occupied Palestinian Territories — more than 200 days of constant suffering and death in Gaza with just a seven-day pause. Many of us in the American expatriate community in Taiwan have been watching this tragedy unfold in horror. We know we are implicated with every US-made “dumb” bomb dropped on a civilian target and by the diplomatic cover our government gives to the Israeli government, which has only gotten more extreme with such impunity. Meantime, multicultural coalitions of US