Does US value democracy?
William Lowther’s article on Noah Feldman’s comments (“Professor says Xi signals a ‘respectful’ meeting with Taiwan’s next government,” Nov. 22, page 3) makes one wonder if principle and integrity matter in US policy.
Feldman says nothing about the will of the Taiwanese and instead talks about Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) nationalistic aspirations. Is freedom and democracy no longer of particular concern to people like Feldman and Lowther?
If not, then a warning was sent to all US allies in Asia: Do not rely on the US as an ally.
Taiwanese will, sooner or later, vote for independence. If the US believes in democracy and freedom as it says it does, then it should state clearly that it will support the democratically expressed will of Taiwanese, whether that offends the Chinese Communist Party or not.
Gavan Duffy
Australia
Aiming to be ‘frozen garlic’
There are several interesting phenomena in the campaigns for the Jan. 16 presidential and legislative elections.
The three presidential tickets each involve running mates from opposite sexes, showing that women are gaining political power. There are four party chairpersons, two on one ticket; one party is pan-green and three are pan-blue.
All six candidates have doctorates in different fields. Hopefully, the next administration will be wise in its policymaking and friendly when approaching people.
All three tickets use a circle as a part of their logos. Two tickets use “Taiwan” in their slogans and one ticket uses a circle crossed by a square from the left to form a map of Taiwan. Taiwan is a popular name and symbol in elections. None of the three tickets use the “Republic of China (ROC)” or “Chinese Taipei” in their slogans.
Some legislative candidates hide or minimize their party emblem on their campaign brochures. Two parties have similar emblems, but with different sizes.
Whenever there is a campaign rally, all candidates on the stage stand hand-in-hand, and loudly and repeatedly shout candidates’ names and “Dong-suan,” which means “Be elected” in Taiwanese, but is written in Chinese as “凍蒜” which means “frozen garlic.” What a loss in translation.
Thirty years ago, there was a one-party dictatorship. Now there are a dozen parties competing for 113 legislative seats, including 33 legislators-at-large. Some candidates even cry, kneel, kiss the ground or worship in temples for votes.
Wang Jin-pyng (王金平) is a veteran legislative speaker, but has been discriminated against by some leaders of his own party. He was blocked from running for president, but he remains loyal to the party after he was nominated as the No. 1 candidate on the legislator-at-large list. If possible, he wishes to be the speaker again.
There are some unique election terms as well: “Rubbing dough balls to make soup” means paying off a competitor to drop from the race; a “5:5 wave” means a tight race; an election is described as “an election war”; “painting black” means defaming a competitor; “sweeping the street” means campaigning on streets or in public places.
However, when a candidate wins the election, they become “frozen garlic.”
Charles Hong
Columbus, Ohio
Remember to conserve water
As Taiwan is now into the dry season and will probably not have any significant rainfall until the middle of next year, I feel a need to bring to people’s attention the water restrictions we faced earlier this year.
Many cities and townships had severe water restrictions and Kaohsiung was only a day or two from having water cut off for two days a week. This sent people to the local stores to buy large containers to fill with water, which would defeat the purpose of cutting off the water to conserve it.
I pass over the Gaoping River (高屏溪) daily and already I can see that the water level is low and it is only November. Might I ask what the Taiwan Water Corp (台灣自來水), the national government and local governments are doing to promote water conservation?
I see people wasting water, a very precious resource, on a daily basis. I read that cleaning the silt from reservoirs to improve storage capacity is deemed too costly. What cost would the nation incur when we run out of water? Conservation of our resources is something that should be promoted by all of us.
Although about 70 percent of the Earth’s surface is covered with water, only 1 percent of that water is potable. Water is not an infinite resource and unless we start conserving it now, the taps will be running dry very soon.
Nick Pond
Kaohsiung
When Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) sits down with US President Donald Trump in Beijing on Thursday next week, Xi is unlikely to demand a dramatic public betrayal of Taiwan. He does not need to. Beijing’s preferred victory is smaller, quieter and in some ways far more dangerous: a subtle shift in American wording that appears technical, but carries major strategic meaning. The ask is simple: replace the longstanding US formulation that Washington “does not support Taiwan independence” with a harder one — that Washington “opposes” Taiwan independence. One word changes; a deterrence structure built over decades begins to shift.
The cancelation this week of President William Lai’s (賴清德) state visit to Eswatini, after the Seychelles, Madagascar and Mauritius revoked overflight permits under Chinese pressure, is one more measure of Taiwan’s shrinking executive diplomatic space. Another channel that deserves attention keeps growing while the first contracts. For several years now, Taipei has been one of Europe’s busiest legislative destinations. Where presidents and foreign ministers cannot land, parliamentarians do — and they do it in rising numbers. The Italian parliament opened the year with its largest bipartisan delegation to Taiwan to date: six Italian deputies and one senator, drawn from six
Recently, Taipei’s streets have been plagued by the bizarre sight of rats running rampant and the city government’s countermeasures have devolved into an anti-intellectual farce. The Taipei Parks and Street Lights Office has attempted to eradicate rats by filling their burrows with polyurethane foam, seeming to believe that rats could not simply dig another path out. Meanwhile, as the nation’s capital slowly deteriorates into a rat hive, the Taipei Department of Environmental Protection has proudly pointed to the increase in the number of poisoned rats reported in February and March as a sign of success. When confronted with public concerns over young
Taipei is facing a severe rat infestation, and the city government is reportedly considering large-scale use of rodenticides as its primary control measure. However, this move could trigger an ecological disaster, including mass deaths of birds of prey. In the past, black kites, relatives of eagles, took more than three decades to return to the skies above the Taipei Basin. Taiwan’s black kite population was nearly wiped out by the combined effects of habitat destruction, pesticides and rodenticides. By 1992, fewer than 200 black kites remained on the island. Fortunately, thanks to more than 30 years of collective effort to preserve their remaining
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