The race for the post of Kaohsiung mayor appears to be getting vicious months before the start of the official campaign -- at least within the KMT.
James Chen (
Suspicions have arisen within the KMT that Lien is willing to sacrifice the party's candidate to placate PFP Chairman James Soong (
Lien and Soong have agreed to jointly nominate a candidate for the Kaohsiung race. Given that PFP Vice Chairman Chang Chao-hsiung (
hsiung deputy mayor, would be a shoo-in. Huang was chosen by the KMT through consensus. The party wasn't even worried about angering Kaohsiung Council Speaker Huang Chi-chuan (
In late June, however, Chang Po-ya announced her candidacy, throwing a monkey wrench into the pan-blue camp's plans. The KMT headquarters kept telling Huang not to give up and he believed what he was hearing, unaware that Lien and Soong had secretly listed Chang as a candidate.
The PFP wants to participate in elections, but it lacks talent and resources. The PFP's strategy for both the Taipei and Kaohsiung mayoral races has been to maintain pan-blue cooperation and use public opinion polls to resolve inter-camp disputes over who is the best candidate. It will support anyone who can block a DPP victory and has some chance of winning. But the PFP has never had confidence in Haung Jun-ying as a candidate. So it was happy to see former DPP chairman Shih Ming-te (
Now that it looks like Lien is dumping Huang in favor of Soong's choice, the KMT leader will have a hard time complaining about how former president Lee Teng-hui (
The KMT now appears willing to take a wait-and-see attitude over the rivalry between Huang and Chang. Such an irresolute attitude shows Lien's
policy-making style as well as the confusion of values within the KMT. To resolve the dispute, the KMT will have to prioritize its objectives -- does it want to win the race or save face, does it want to cultivate talent for the party or pave the way for the 2004 presidential elections? The KMT will have to come up with a clear objective if it wants to ensure party cohesiveness, enhance KMT-PFP cooperation and create the possibility of winning the election.
Shilly-shallying over candidates is hardly the kind of behavior that creates a winning campaign. What it does do is plant the seeds for a defeat.
In their recent op-ed “Trump Should Rein In Taiwan” in Foreign Policy magazine, Christopher Chivvis and Stephen Wertheim argued that the US should pressure President William Lai (賴清德) to “tone it down” to de-escalate tensions in the Taiwan Strait — as if Taiwan’s words are more of a threat to peace than Beijing’s actions. It is an old argument dressed up in new concern: that Washington must rein in Taipei to avoid war. However, this narrative gets it backward. Taiwan is not the problem; China is. Calls for a so-called “grand bargain” with Beijing — where the US pressures Taiwan into concessions
The term “assassin’s mace” originates from Chinese folklore, describing a concealed weapon used by a weaker hero to defeat a stronger adversary with an unexpected strike. In more general military parlance, the concept refers to an asymmetric capability that targets a critical vulnerability of an adversary. China has found its modern equivalent of the assassin’s mace with its high-altitude electromagnetic pulse (HEMP) weapons, which are nuclear warheads detonated at a high altitude, emitting intense electromagnetic radiation capable of disabling and destroying electronics. An assassin’s mace weapon possesses two essential characteristics: strategic surprise and the ability to neutralize a core dependency.
Chinese President and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Chairman Xi Jinping (習近平) said in a politburo speech late last month that his party must protect the “bottom line” to prevent systemic threats. The tone of his address was grave, revealing deep anxieties about China’s current state of affairs. Essentially, what he worries most about is systemic threats to China’s normal development as a country. The US-China trade war has turned white hot: China’s export orders have plummeted, Chinese firms and enterprises are shutting up shop, and local debt risks are mounting daily, causing China’s economy to flag externally and hemorrhage internally. China’s
During the “426 rally” organized by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party under the slogan “fight green communism, resist dictatorship,” leaders from the two opposition parties framed it as a battle against an allegedly authoritarian administration led by President William Lai (賴清德). While criticism of the government can be a healthy expression of a vibrant, pluralistic society, and protests are quite common in Taiwan, the discourse of the 426 rally nonetheless betrayed troubling signs of collective amnesia. Specifically, the KMT, which imposed 38 years of martial law in Taiwan from 1949 to 1987, has never fully faced its
RSS