Eighteen US-based Taiwanese-American organizations issued a joint statement yesterday accusing the government of President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) of sacrificing Taiwan’s democracy and human rights to cater to China during last week’s visit by Association for Relations Across the Strait Chairman Chen Yunlin (陳雲林).
“In an attempt to kiss up to Beijing, the Ma administration prohibited public display of [Republic of China items] on the streets. It was a dark moment in Taiwan’s democracy,” Central News Agency (CNA) quoted the statement as saying.
Taiwanese Association of America chairman Ron Hsieh (謝榮峻) said that almost all Taiwanese-American organizations felt “extreme sadness, worry and anger” at Ma’s handling of the visit, which he said had caused much social disharmony in Taiwan.
The statement said that to welcome the Chinese Communist Party representative, the Ma administration not only stripped the people of their right to wave their country’s flag, play Taiwanese songs and wear whatever they choose to wear, it also mobilized more than 7,000 police officers to secure the safety of one person.
Barbed wire was erected, people waving Tibetan flags were apprehended and applications to stage a protest were denied — all actions, the statement said, that were undertaken by the Ma administration to “make Chen feel like a revered guest.”
“Taiwan has become a police state as can only exist in a totalitarian regime,” the CNA report quoted the statement as saying, adding that Taiwan’s hard-won democracy and rule of law, realized through blood and tears, were all destroyed in just a few short days.
All Taiwanese, the statement added, must stand in solidarity. The US-based Taiwanese groups promised to urge the mainstream US media, political sector and academics to take notice of Taiwan’s recent regression and to publicly support its democracy in international settings.
The organizations that signed the statement also include the Formosan Association for Public Affairs, the North American Taiwan Professors’ Association, the World Taiwanese Congress and the Taiwan Association for Human Rights.
AGING: As of last month, people aged 65 or older accounted for 20.06 percent of the total population and the number of couples who got married fell by 18,685 from 2024 Taiwan has surpassed South Korea as the country least willing to have children, with an annual crude birthrate of 4.62 per 1,000 people, Ministry of the Interior data showed yesterday. The nation was previously ranked the second-lowest country in terms of total fertility rate, or the average number of children a woman has in her lifetime. However, South Korea’s fertility rate began to recover from 2023, with total fertility rate rising from 0.72 and estimated to reach 0.82 to 0.85 by last year, and the crude birthrate projected at 6.7 per 1,000 people. Japan’s crude birthrate was projected to fall below six,
US President Donald Trump in an interview with the New York Times published on Thursday said that “it’s up to” Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) what China does on Taiwan, but that he would be “very unhappy” with a change in the “status quo.” “He [Xi] considers it to be a part of China, and that’s up to him what he’s going to be doing, but I’ve expressed to him that I would be very unhappy if he did that, and I don’t think he’ll do that. I hope he doesn’t do that,” Trump said. Trump made the comments in the context
SELF-DEFENSE: Tokyo has accelerated its spending goal and its defense minister said the nation needs to discuss whether it should develop nuclear-powered submarines China is ramping up objections to what it sees as Japan’s desire to acquire nuclear weapons, despite Tokyo’s longstanding renunciation of such arms, deepening another fissure in the two neighbors’ increasingly tense ties. In what appears to be a concerted effort, China’s foreign and defense ministries issued statements on Thursday condemning alleged remilitarism efforts by Tokyo. The remarks came as two of the country’s top think tanks jointly issued a 29-page report framing actions by “right-wing forces” in Japan as posing a “serious threat” to world peace. While that report did not define “right-wing forces,” the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs was
PREPAREDNESS: Given the difficulty of importing ammunition during wartime, the Ministry of National Defense said it would prioritize ‘coproduction’ partnerships A newly formed unit of the Marine Corps tasked with land-based security operations has recently replaced its aging, domestically produced rifles with more advanced, US-made M4A1 rifles, a source said yesterday. The unnamed source familiar with the matter said the First Security Battalion of the Marine Corps’ Air Defense and Base Guard Group has replaced its older T65K2 rifles, which have been in service since the late 1980s, with the newly received M4A1s. The source did not say exactly when the upgrade took place or how many M4A1s were issued to the battalion. The confirmation came after Chinese-language media reported
RSS