To mark the one year anniversary of the enactment of China's "Anti-Secession" Law, a proposal was recently made during the on-going National People's Congress to designate March 14 as "Protecting Taiwan Day." Democratic Progressive Party caucus whip Chen Chin-jun (陳景峻) yesterday lambasted the proposal as "one of absolute shamelessness," likening the Chinese authorities to gangsters who physically intimidate their victims into paying a "protection fee" or abusers who claim they are the victims. "If China really wants to protect Taiwan, it should remove the 700 missiles targeting the nation, cease to oppose our international participation, and stop persecuting us with psychological and legal warfare," Chen said yesterday. Mainland Affairs Council Chairman Joseph Wu (吳釗燮) said that his council sometimes feels "very frustrated" because so many politicians in Taiwan suffer from what he claimed is "Stockholm syndrome," the psychological term describing the behavior of kidnap victims who, over time, become sympathetic to their captors. "Taiwan has been under the military threat of China and its diplomatic blockade for so long," Wu said, "but despite this, there are people who believe that everything China does is right and everything Taiwan does is wrong.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift