Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Chairwoman Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday called the Beijing Olympics a copy of the 1936 Games hosted by Nazi Germany and criticized the International Olympic Committee (IOC) for allowing China to host them.
“On Aug. 1, 1936, [Adolf] Hitler opened the Olympics in Berlin, boosting the morale of Germans. The IOC hoped that letting Germany hold the Olympics could make Germany more democratic and peace-loving, but the result was the opposite,” Tsai said in an article published in the Chinese-language China Times.
“During the Berlin Olympics, Germany suddenly became peace-loving and removed ‘No Jews’ signs. Hitler tried to make the world believe that Germany was the friend of the whole world. But history showed that Hitler told a big lie,” she wrote.
“During the Olympics, Hitler preached peace while building concentration camps. After the Olympics, Germany made the decision to kill millions of Jews,” she said.
The article said that in the run-up to the Beijing Olympics, China has tightened control in Xinjiang and Tibet, arrested dissidents and is said to have installed surveillance equipment in taxis.
“Shops in Beijing are required to report suspicious-looking people to police and apartment windows facing the main street in Beijing must remain shut. China is using the state machine to crush dissidence, so the Beijing Olympics is a celebration held under martial law,” Tsai said in the article.
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
PRECISION STRIKES: The most significant reason to deploy HIMARS to outlying islands is to establish a ‘dead zone’ that the PLA would not dare enter, a source said A High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) would be deployed to Penghu County and Dongyin Island (東引) in Lienchiang County (Matsu) to force the Chinese military to retreat at least 100km from the coastline, a military source said yesterday. Taiwan has been procuring HIMARS and Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) from the US in batches. Once all batches have been delivered, Taiwan would possess 111 HIMARS units and 504 ATACMS, which have a range of 300km. Considering that “offense is the best defense,” the military plans to forward-deploy the systems to outlying islands such as Penghu and Dongyin so that
WHAT WAS ALL THAT FOR? Jaw Shaw-kong said that Cheng Li-wen had pushed for more drastic cuts and attacked him, just for the outcome to be nearly identical to his bill The legislature yesterday passed a supplementary budget bill to fund the purchase of separate packages of US military equipment, with the combined amount of spending capped at NT$780 billion (US$24.8 billion). The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) used their legislative majority to pass the bill, which runs until 2033 and has two main funding provisions. One was for NT$300 billion of arms sales already approved by the US for Taiwan on Dec. 17 last year, the other was for NT$480 billion for another arms package expected to be announced by Washington. The bill, which fell short of the NT$1.25
‘CLEAR MESSAGE’: The bill would set up an interagency ‘tiger team’ to review sanctions tools and other economic options to help deter any Chinese aggression toward Taiwan US Representative Young Kim has introduced a bill to deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan, calling for an interagency “tiger team” to preplan coordinated sanctions and economic measures in response to possible Chinese military or political action against Taiwan. “[Chinese President] Xi Jinping [習近平] has directed the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. China has a plan. America should have one too,” Kim said in a news release on Thursday last week. She introduced the “Deter PRC [People’s Republic of China] aggression against Taiwan act” to “ensure the US has a coordinated sanctions strategy ready should