South Korean President Lee Myung-bak’s latest gesture, which keeps one of his campaign promises, puts President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) in a bad light.
On Monday, Lee announced that he would donate 33.1 billion won (US$26 million) — more than 80 percent of his total personal wealth — to a scholarship foundation to help “those who really need it.” Prior to this latest donation, in March last year — a month after taking office — Lee donated the entire salary for his five-year presidency to help low-income households amid the global economic downturn.
In contrast, Ma, in an obvious attempt to ride on the coat tails of newly elected Lee’s presidential victory, tried on several occasions to draw a parallel between himself and Lee. Aside from using South Korea as an economic example in his campaign speeches, and that the country could serve as a model for Taiwan, he also borrowed Lee’s “7-4-7” policy by proposing a “6-3-3” economic policy of his own that promised to raise GDP growth to 6 percent, trim unemployment to 3 percent and boost per capita income to US$30,000 a year.
Following his election victory, however, Ma has all but ceased comparing Taiwan to South Korea, nor himself to the South Korean president.
The reason is obvious.
The Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics in May trimmed the nation’s GDP forecast for this year to minus 4.25 percent. Meanwhile, the nation’s unemployment rate in May was a record high of 5.82 percent, which translated to 633,000 people out of work.
Prior to these disappointing numbers, Ma had already admitted — a mere three months into his presidency — that the realization of his “6-3-3” economic goals would take until the final year of a possible second term as president.
Aside from showing any remorse for failing to honor his campaign promises, as well as the arrogance of delaying delivery of his campaign promise until 2015, by attaching it to a second term, there is still no sign of the donation that Ma promised to make should he fail to deliver on his “6-3-3” policy.
Granted, earlier this year Ma donated NT$360,000 of his year-end bonus to charity groups. That amount, however, was a drop in the ocean compared with the numbers of people in the country suffering from unemployment and increased commodity prices spearheaded by state-run companies.
Some may argue that Ma, like most politicians, should not be taken at his word, but when a head of state repeatedly fails to rise above the usual politicking, it is the public who suffer and this cannot help the nation’s competitiveness.
Ma has the public to thank, because everyone seems to have either forgiven of forgotten the promise. But that doesn’t mean Ma should get away with deceiving people so easily.
Lee’s generosity and compassion should serve to remind us how disingenuous Ma can be.
On May 7, 1971, Henry Kissinger planned his first, ultra-secret mission to China and pondered whether it would be better to meet his Chinese interlocutors “in Pakistan where the Pakistanis would tape the meeting — or in China where the Chinese would do the taping.” After a flicker of thought, he decided to have the Chinese do all the tape recording, translating and transcribing. Fortuitously, historians have several thousand pages of verbatim texts of Dr. Kissinger’s negotiations with his Chinese counterparts. Paradoxically, behind the scenes, Chinese stenographers prepared verbatim English language typescripts faster than they could translate and type them
More than 30 years ago when I immigrated to the US, applied for citizenship and took the 100-question civics test, the one part of the naturalization process that left the deepest impression on me was one question on the N-400 form, which asked: “Have you ever been a member of, involved in or in any way associated with any communist or totalitarian party anywhere in the world?” Answering “yes” could lead to the rejection of your application. Some people might try their luck and lie, but if exposed, the consequences could be much worse — a person could be fined,
Taiwan aims to elevate its strategic position in supply chains by becoming an artificial intelligence (AI) hub for Nvidia Corp, providing everything from advanced chips and components to servers, in an attempt to edge out its closest rival in the region, South Korea. Taiwan’s importance in the AI ecosystem was clearly reflected in three major announcements Nvidia made during this year’s Computex trade show in Taipei. First, the US company’s number of partners in Taiwan would surge to 122 this year, from 34 last year, according to a slide shown during CEO Jensen Huang’s (黃仁勳) keynote speech on Monday last week.
When China passed its “Anti-Secession” Law in 2005, much of the democratic world saw it as yet another sign of Beijing’s authoritarianism, its contempt for international law and its aggressive posture toward Taiwan. Rightly so — on the surface. However, this move, often dismissed as a uniquely Chinese form of legal intimidation, echoes a legal and historical precedent rooted not in authoritarian tradition, but in US constitutional history. The Chinese “Anti-Secession” Law, a domestic statute threatening the use of force should Taiwan formally declare independence, is widely interpreted as an emblem of the Chinese Communist Party’s disregard for international norms. Critics
RSS