During his visit to the disaster areas in the wake of Typhoon Morakot, President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) was quoted as saying, “But I’m here now, aren’t I?” Such a reaction shows the Ma administration’s aloofness and lack of empathy for disaster victims.
Since the typhoon wreaked havoc in southern Taiwan, we have witnessed the incompetence of Ma and his government and their attempts to shirk responsibility on various occasions.
Ma used to be able to easily answer questions from Taiwanese reporters, sometimes throwing in a corny joke. If reporters had the audacity to ask more challenging questions, they would immediately become targets of criticism, as if they had been disrespectful of the great leader.
Ma gave an exclusive interview to a BBC reporter during a visit to Britain a few years ago. When he was bombarded with questions and was unable to hold his own, Ma resorted to telling the well-prepared reporter that he “was not very familiar with Chinese affairs and Taiwanese affairs.” The problem was that not many Taiwanese saw this interview.
During a recent press conference, however, the public finally was able to see the assertiveness of foreign correspondents and Ma’s inability to cope with them.
US sociologist Todd Gitlin’s 1980 book The Whole World is Watching has had a huge influence on mass media and social movements. With the popularity of TV in US households, the public was able to see police brutality on TV as early as the student movements in 1968. Although he criticized media outlets for tending to cover certain stories and promote heroism, which was unfavorable to the development of social movements, Gitlin said the media did help publicize certain issues.
Most people in the world have ready access to news about various unkind, unfair and unjust incidents and individuals through mass media. In 1992, a video clip showing white policemen beating up a black man was widely broadcast in the US, triggering riots in Los Angeles.
We can thus assert that if the media had not shown the footage of the four workers washed way while waiting to be rescued in Bajhang Creek (八掌溪) in July 2000, the Democratic Progressive Party, which had just assumed power, would not have apologized so profusely to the public and replaced its vice premier.
Hundreds of people were washed away in the floods following Morakot because of the indifference, arrogance and incompetence of government officials. Although TV cameras failed to capture footage of Siaolin Township being wiped out by mudslides, the whole world was able to see the hypocrisy of Ma and his subordinates during the international press conference on TV.
Now everyone should yell to Ma: “We’ve all seen your incompetence!”
Chi Chun-chieh is a professor in the Institute of Ethnic Relations at National Dong Hwa University.
TRANSLATED BY TED YANG
China’s recent aggressive military posture around Taiwan simply reflects the truth that China is a millennium behind, as Kobe City Councilor Norihiro Uehata has commented. While democratic countries work for peace, prosperity and progress, authoritarian countries such as Russia and China only care about territorial expansion, superpower status and world dominance, while their people suffer. Two millennia ago, the ancient Chinese philosopher Mencius (孟子) would have advised Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) that “people are the most important, state is lesser, and the ruler is the least important.” In fact, the reverse order is causing the great depression in China right now,
We are used to hearing that whenever something happens, it means Taiwan is about to fall to China. Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) cannot change the color of his socks without China experts claiming it means an invasion is imminent. So, it is no surprise that what happened in Venezuela over the weekend triggered the knee-jerk reaction of saying that Taiwan is next. That is not an opinion on whether US President Donald Trump was right to remove Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro the way he did or if it is good for Venezuela and the world. There are other, more qualified
This should be the year in which the democracies, especially those in East Asia, lose their fear of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) “one China principle” plus its nuclear “Cognitive Warfare” coercion strategies, all designed to achieve hegemony without fighting. For 2025, stoking regional and global fear was a major goal for the CCP and its People’s Liberation Army (PLA), following on Mao Zedong’s (毛澤東) Little Red Book admonition, “We must be ruthless to our enemies; we must overpower and annihilate them.” But on Dec. 17, 2025, the Trump Administration demonstrated direct defiance of CCP terror with its record US$11.1 billion arms
The immediate response in Taiwan to the extraction of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro by the US over the weekend was to say that it was an example of violence by a major power against a smaller nation and that, as such, it gave Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) carte blanche to invade Taiwan. That assessment is vastly oversimplistic and, on more sober reflection, likely incorrect. Generally speaking, there are three basic interpretations from commentators in Taiwan. The first is that the US is no longer interested in what is happening beyond its own backyard, and no longer preoccupied with regions in other
RSS