Questions for the media
The upcoming meeting between Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait Chairman Chen Yunlin (陳雲林) and Straits Exchange Foundation Chairman Chiang Pin-kung (江丙坤) has brought dozens of international reporters to Taiwan.
Over the past five months, I have realized that President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) prefers making policy announcements to the international media to facing Taiwanese media, which is why I hope the international media can ask Ma these 10 questions on behalf of the Taiwanese people:
According to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, pandas can only travel in China. When Taiwan accepts two pandas from China, does that imply that the Ma government accepts the notion that Taiwan is part of China? How can he state that he will not budge an inch on sovereignty, but actually take risky action which might give China the wrong impression?
If Ma is the president of Taiwan, and China is another country, international custom dictates that Taiwan should present the national flags of both Taiwan and China during Chen’s visit. So why are hardly any Taiwanese flags being displayed in Taiwan?
If the four agreements to be signed by Chen and Chiang are supported by the majority of Taiwanese, why does the government refuse to grant demonstration and protest rights to the opposition? Ma should not worry about this small group of opposition supporters, right?
The four agreements have not been presented or approved by the Legislative Yuan. If these agreements are for the benefit of Taiwan, why did Ma not present them to the Legislative Yuan? The chair of the Mainland Affairs Council stated that the agreements would be presented to the Legislative Yuan after being signed.
But what would happen if the agreements are rejected by the Legislative Yuan? Why is Ma taking this risk?
Ma stated that he will not sell out Taiwan and that he only wants to sell fruit to China. Doesn’t Ma know that Taiwanese fruit shops in China have closed? Chinese consumers cannot afford it. Expanding shelf life cannot solve this problem.
The Dalai Lama recently said that his faith in China is dwindling. Can Ma identify any concrete proof that China will treat Taiwan differently than Tibet?
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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