President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) has once again demonstrated his preference for style over substance with the launch of his own Facebook page yesterday.
There’s not much on the site yet, just two videos, some personal information like his birth date, the address of the Presidential Office Building, a brief biography and a short statement about how he hopes to use the site to share views with the public. Oh, and he listed jogging and swimming under “interests.” These details are hardly earth-shattering or informative, yet by yesterday afternoon, 62,551 netizens had clicked on the “like” button on Ma’s page.
Presidential Office spokesman Lo Chih-chiang (羅智強) said on Thursday it was natural that in such a wired society as Taiwan the government would use the Internet for heart-to-heart talks with the public.
The good news is that now Ma is on Facebook, he can join the millions of his countrymen and countrywomen (on both sides of the Taiwan Strait) who play Happy Farm. The game, in which players grow crops, trade and sell their produce or just steal it from others, could provide him with useful skills for cross-strait negotiations — or it might have, if he had started playing it before the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement was signed, a pact that basically gave away the farm as far as many Taiwanese are concerned.
However, spoilsport Lo was also at pains to reassure the public that Ma would not spend too much time on his new Facebook account, noting that his boss was good at time management and would only be posting messages occasionally.
Well, so much for the idea of Ma keeping in touch with public opinion and sharing views.
One can only hope that Ma does a better job communicating via his Facebook page than he has done with his much-touted online video addresses (Weekly Journal on Governing the Country) on Saturdays, which if memory serves was also meant to be a platform for two-way communication with netizens. The idea was for Ma to comment on events occurring each week, a plan that spectacularly backfired on him in July 2009 when a far more technically savvy netizen than the average Presidential Office staffer realized that Ma had recorded at least three weeks worth of speeches.
Ma has frequently shown himself impervious to outside advice and that would appear to be the case here, for just a few weeks ago one of his presidential advisers said successful people don’t spend too much time on Facebook. Lee Chia-tung (李家同) also said people should spend more time learning about things and engaging in more meaningful activities.
Of course the real reason Ma has launched a Facebook page has little to do with exchanging views and much to do with next year’s presidential election. The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) appears to be of the belief that young voters are more inclined to favor the Democratic Progressive Party and so it is trying to develop a hipper image to make up for the lack of substantial and effective policies on issues of concern to young people.
Issues such as the lack of jobs for graduates and vocational school leavers — as well as many middle-aged workers — declining pay scales, grossly inflated housing prices, profligate government spending on fireworks and anniversary events to the detriment of social programs and a government that appears unwilling to defend the nation it is supposed to represent, all of these and so much more cannot be tackled with a few words on Facebook.
Ma has yet to live up to the campaign promises he made ahead of the 2008 election. He and his administration should make more of an effort to make those come true before they focus on next year’s polls. Then he might really have something to brag about on Facebook.
What began on Feb. 28 as a military campaign against Iran quickly became the largest energy-supply disruption in modern times. Unlike the oil crises of the 1970s, which stemmed from producer-led embargoes, US President Donald Trump is the first leader in modern history to trigger a cascading global energy crisis through direct military action. In the process, Trump has also laid bare Taiwan’s strategic and economic fragilities, offering Beijing a real-time tutorial in how to exploit them. Repairing the damage to Persian Gulf oil and gas infrastructure could take years, suggesting that elevated energy prices are likely to persist. But the most
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文), during an interview for the podcast Lanshuan Time (蘭萱時間) released on Monday, said that a US professor had said that she deserved to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize following her meeting earlier this month with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平). Cheng’s “journey of peace” has garnered attention from overseas and from within Taiwan. The latest My Formosa poll, conducted last week after the Cheng-Xi meeting, shows that Cheng’s approval rating is 31.5 percent, up 7.6 percentage points compared with the month before. The same poll showed that 44.5 percent of respondents
Taiwan should reject two flawed answers to the Eswatini controversy: that diplomatic allies no longer matter, or that they must be preserved at any cost. The sustainable answer is to maintain formal diplomatic relations while redesigning development relationships around transparency, local ownership and democratic accountability. President William Lai’s (賴清德) canceled trip to Eswatini has elicited two predictable reactions in Taiwan. One camp has argued that the episode proves Taiwan must double down on support for every remaining diplomatic ally, because Beijing is tightening the screws, and formal recognition is too scarce to risk. The other says the opposite: If maintaining
India’s semiconductor strategy is undergoing a quiet, but significant, recalibration. With the rollout of India Semiconductor Mission (ISM) 2.0, New Delhi is signaling a shift away from ambition-driven leaps toward a more grounded, capability-led approach rooted in industrial realities and institutional learning. Rather than attempting to enter the most advanced nodes immediately, India has chosen to prioritize mature technologies in the 28-nanometer to 65-nanometer range. That would not be a retreat, but a strategic alignment with domestic capabilities, market demand and global supply chain gaps. The shift carries the imprimatur of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, indicating that the recalibration is
RSS