The Washington Post has published a letter criticizing President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九). Written in response to a Post interview with Ma published on Feb. 18, the letter said that the earlier story revealed, “perhaps inadvertently,” inconsistencies in Ma’s position.
From Gerrit van der Wees, a senior policy adviser at the -Formosan Association for Public Affairs, the letter said that Ma is seeking more US arms, in particular F-16 fighter jets.
“We should wholeheartedly support that,” Van der Wees said.
He added: “But why did Ma vociferously oppose the same arms sales from 2000 to 2008, when his predecessor, [then-president] Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), was in power? That the new F-16s are still not -flying in Taiwan’s airspace is largely due to Ma playing politics under the previous government.”
The letter said that another inconsistency was that Ma declared in the interview that Taiwan “is a sovereign state.”
Van der Wees said: “This is indeed a fact, something the previous government, led by the Democratic Progressive Party, attempted to emphasize. However, since 2008, Ma and his Kuomintang [Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT)] government have directly and indirectly undermined Taiwan’s sovereignty by pushing Taiwan into China’s sphere of influence and by eroding Taiwan’s hard-won freedom and democracy.”
Van der Wees wrote that Ma’s “sovereign state” was not Taiwan, but the old “Republic of China [ROC],” which he said was “brought over from China by the authoritarian Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石).”
He added: “The constitution Ma refers to is the anachronistic 1947 ROC Constitution, which stipulates that his ROC still holds sovereignty over China, Tibet, Mongolia, etc. It would be desirable if Taiwan would ditch this Constitution and move forward with a new one based on the reality of a free and democratic Taiwan.”
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching