Stating the obvious
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) policies should state a few very simple principles:
We don’t suck, as President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) government does; we don’t lie, as said government does; we are Taiwanese and not Chinese, despite a certain cultural link.
Taiwan has come a long way from what it used to be. I wouldn’t live here under martial law.
In the past three years, I have seen Taiwan being denigrated by China over and over again. I don’t find this difficult to understand or swallow. What I find incredulously insane is the fact that the Ma administration keeps reiterating that it has upheld Taiwan’s sovereignty.
It has not. China will keep at its tricks and always try to convince the world of its “one China” principle.
Normal people however, know that between the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the DPP, the DPP gets much more upset when certain things happen.
I wonder how a DPP administration would have handled the fiasco with the film festival in Japan, the taekwondo debacle and other such examples in which China is repeatedly allowed to “expletive” on Taiwan or Taiwanese. I can’t for the life of me think of any other nationality that allows itself to be bullied and its status to be sullied. Chinese officials keep at it and most of them are brainwashed idiots, so it’s not fair to say it’s their fault.
However, they still remain a threat to this country because they insist Taiwan is a part of China.
Yet, short of a war or surrender, they can’t actually come to Taipei and tell me I’m wrong.
They have passports from the People’s Republic of China (PRC), not from Taiwan. This is a fact that Chinese Communist Party (CCP) members won’t ever bother to mention.
Tsai might score a few brownie points by pointing some of these things out. Namely, Chinese use the yuan; we use the New Taiwan dollar. They have PRC passports; Taiwanese have Republic of China passports. Moreover, China’s flag is completely different from Taiwan’s.
The best example though is that if you speak Taiwanese to any CCP member, they would have no clue of what is being said.
HARRY ADAMOPOULOS
Taipei
Beware Internet “quotes”
Jessie Lin’s letter regarding Osama bin Laden’s death (Letters, May 5, page 8) was very well written and contained many nuggets of wisdom.
While I disagree with a few things Lin said, I basically agree with much of how the letter was framed and salute the young writer. Except for her last paragraph, which appeared in the original print edition of the Taipei Times — although I see that it has been corrected online now — which repeated, innocently on Lin’s part, I am sure, an alleged “quote” from Martin Luther King that was circulating on the Internet recently. Due to a typing gaffe by an English teacher in Japan posting a Facebook update, the false quote attributed to King on the social network site got picked up on Twitter and went viral, and it appears that even Lin got taken in.
Lin wrote: “Let me end [my letter to the editor] with a quote from Martin Luther King Jr: ‘I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.’”
However, the thing is, King never said the first part of that quote.
It seems that Lin copied that quote from the Internet without checking its accuracy.
What King really said was: “Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
The first sentence of Lin’s false King quote was from a Facebook post by Jessica Dovery, a 24-year-old woman who teaches English in Japan and who apparently put quotation marks around her own first sentence, which made them seem as they were part of the original King quote. They weren’t supposed to be and she has apologized online after her “misquote” went viral.
By the way, the correct King quote can be found in his book, Strength to Love and it seems to have been said originally in a 1957 sermon he gave on loving your enemies.
I am glad to see that this newspaper has now corrected Lin’s letter on its Web site and I hope she has learned a good lesson about quoting Internet posts.
ARRON BECK
Kenting
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