The Chinese writer Lu Xun (
Undoubtedly, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has made some significant achievements during the past fifty years. However, it has also brought unprecedented miseries and sufferings to the Chinese people. According to the estimation of a number of scholars, a total of 30-40 million Chinese died during this past fifty years as a result of man-made famines, score settling and political struggles. Without external enemies or civil war, these people died at the hands of their own fellow countrymen. Surely history can have no other example of a country so amazingly self destructive. The Chinese people, however, even now do not dare to examine their painful past or question their government. Where else are people so submissive? North Korea perhaps.
China is a great nation in terms of its population, territory, economy, military strength and diplomatic clout -- though it should be said that much of the world's perception of China's strength comes from the inflated figures China itself provides. Nevertheless Western countries have fallen under the spell of such massaged statistics. Executives of multinationals remain spell-bound by China's vast market, even though reality proves that, just like de Gaulle's famouse comment about Brazil, China remains a classic case of "the triumph of hope over experience."
The truth of the matter is statistics and figures do not necessarily speak in favor of China. China with a population five time greater then the US, has a GDP only 20 percent as large. The average per capita GNP is about US$730 which ranks 81st among all countries in the world. In the UN's human development index, China's ranking falls outside of the top 100.
China contributed merely 3 percent of the total world trade volume in 1997, about the same as South Korea and less than the Netherlands. Despite the hype about the Chinese market, less than 2.54 percent of US exports go to China, about the same as the US exports to Australia and Belgium -- and less than the US exports to Taiwan. Japan sends only 5.1 percent of its exports to China, about 25 percent less than Japanese exports to Taiwan.
The ancient Greek and Roman cultures have submerged and vanished in the current of time. Among the ancient cultures, only the Chinese culture remains. However, the Chinese have thoroughly and brutally devastated their own culture, only fragments have survived. In terms of philosophy, literature, films and art, the vitality exhibited by Taiwan and Hong Kong -- small in size and limited in human resources -- far surpass China today. All that is left of Chinese culture today to celebrate the fiftieth birthday of the PRC is a skeletal ruin and old men's memories.
In recent years, China's society and economy have both undergone significant changes. However, the Chinese government system remains unchanged. Such a gigantic and complicated country is still run by a small group of people through a secretive policy-making process. The Chinese leaders maintain a power equilibrium through endless political struggle. It is something of a miracle that this kind of anachronistic Leninist party is still capable of remaining in power. But it can only be a fantasy to expect this party to turn China into a demoractic modernized country.
Monday was the 37th anniversary of former president Chiang Ching-kuo’s (蔣經國) death. Chiang — a son of former president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), who had implemented party-state rule and martial law in Taiwan — has a complicated legacy. Whether one looks at his time in power in a positive or negative light depends very much on who they are, and what their relationship with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is. Although toward the end of his life Chiang Ching-kuo lifted martial law and steered Taiwan onto the path of democratization, these changes were forced upon him by internal and external pressures,
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁) has caused havoc with his attempts to overturn the democratic and constitutional order in the legislature. If we look at this devolution from the context of a transition to democracy from authoritarianism in a culturally Chinese sense — that of zhonghua (中華) — then we are playing witness to a servile spirit from a millennia-old form of totalitarianism that is intent on damaging the nation’s hard-won democracy. This servile spirit is ingrained in Chinese culture. About a century ago, Chinese satirist and author Lu Xun (魯迅) saw through the servile nature of
In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.” Moreover, the two authors observe that those who denounce such legal threats to democracy are often “dismissed as exaggerating or
The National Development Council (NDC) on Wednesday last week launched a six-month “digital nomad visitor visa” program, the Central News Agency (CNA) reported on Monday. The new visa is for foreign nationals from Taiwan’s list of visa-exempt countries who meet financial eligibility criteria and provide proof of work contracts, but it is not clear how it differs from other visitor visas for nationals of those countries, CNA wrote. The NDC last year said that it hoped to attract 100,000 “digital nomads,” according to the report. Interest in working remotely from abroad has significantly increased in recent years following improvements in
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