At a campaign rally last Sunday presidential advisor Alice King (
The white sun and blue background motif was a logo adopted by Sun Yat-sen's (
So let it be clear, the flag the ROC uses is not a sacred symbol of the Chinese revolution -- and of course we might argue what the revolution itself has to do with Taiwan, at that time a Japanese colony -- it is a sacred symbol of the KMT. Is it fitting to have such a symbol in a democracy? Imagine if the US Republicans sought to replace the Stars and Stripes with a large elephant in a red white and blue background. It seems laughable; actually it's contempt-ible, and it is the reality of Taiwan's so-called national symbol. Actually the message of the current flag is quite clear, and that is that the ROC was meant to be a one-party state, ruled forever by the Leninist KMT. How in these democratic days can anyone countenance such a thing?
Of course the ROC flag is one of the world's more unusual -- in that it is rarely allowed to be flown outside of the ROC. Such is Taiwan's international isolation that all it usually gets to show is the equally ridiculous plum-blossom flag, which is also, incidentally, adorned with the repulsive KMT symbol.
If the flag wasn't bad enough the national anthem is even more of a disgrace. One gags on the first line: "The Three Principles of the People is the goal of our party." Of course it's not surprising that the anthem sounds like a KMT party song; it is is a KMT party song, adopted as such in 1928.
The assumption behind the flag and anthem, as the luckless Presidential Office Secretary-General Chen Shih-meng (
Countries do, of course, change their flags when their circumstances change. Many of the countries of Eastern Europe remodeled their flags after emerging from Soviet domination. Russia itself changed its flag when the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991. Should Scotland ever separate from the UK, no doubt the Union flag -- one of the world's most readily identifiable -- will also change.
Yesterday TSU Legislator Chien-Lin Hui-chun (
In this light it is a wretched shame that the president in his lack of wisdom saw fit to stamp down hard on the debate that Chen Shih-meng opened up this week. The longer this administration lasts the more it feels like a KMT administration in all but name.
Taiwan stands at the epicenter of a seismic shift that will determine the Indo-Pacific’s future security architecture. Whether deterrence prevails or collapses will reverberate far beyond the Taiwan Strait, fundamentally reshaping global power dynamics. The stakes could not be higher. Today, Taipei confronts an unprecedented convergence of threats from an increasingly muscular China that has intensified its multidimensional pressure campaign. Beijing’s strategy is comprehensive: military intimidation, diplomatic isolation, economic coercion, and sophisticated influence operations designed to fracture Taiwan’s democratic society from within. This challenge is magnified by Taiwan’s internal political divisions, which extend to fundamental questions about the island’s identity and future
The narrative surrounding Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s attendance at last week’s Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit — where he held hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin and chatted amiably with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) — was widely framed as a signal of Modi distancing himself from the US and edging closer to regional autocrats. It was depicted as Modi reacting to the levying of high US tariffs, burying the hatchet over border disputes with China, and heralding less engagement with the Quadrilateral Security dialogue (Quad) composed of the US, India, Japan and Australia. With Modi in China for the
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) has postponed its chairperson candidate registration for two weeks, and so far, nine people have announced their intention to run for chairperson, the most on record, with more expected to announce their campaign in the final days. On the evening of Aug. 23, shortly after seven KMT lawmakers survived recall votes, KMT Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) announced he would step down and urged Taichung Mayor Lu Shiow-yen (盧秀燕) to step in and lead the party back to power. Lu immediately ruled herself out the following day, leaving the subject in question. In the days that followed, several
The Jamestown Foundation last week published an article exposing Beijing’s oil rigs and other potential dual-use platforms in waters near Pratas Island (Dongsha Island, 東沙島). China’s activities there resembled what they did in the East China Sea, inside the exclusive economic zones of Japan and South Korea, as well as with other South China Sea claimants. However, the most surprising element of the report was that the authors’ government contacts and Jamestown’s own evinced little awareness of China’s activities. That Beijing’s testing of Taiwanese (and its allies) situational awareness seemingly went unnoticed strongly suggests the need for more intelligence. Taiwan’s naval
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