The Lunar New Year cross-strait charter flights got off the ground on Jan. 29. The headline in the Taiwan Daily said "Regular cross-strait flights around the corner," while the China Times used nine pages to cover every aspect of the event. Airports on both sides of the Taiwan Strait arranged a series of events, and the red Chinese flag was raised at Taoyuan International Airport, as if Taiwan was going through yet another "retrocession." \n"This is a historic moment," said an excited Billy Chang (張國政), director-general of the Civil Aeronautics Administration. \nThe younger generations didn't experience a similar historic moment 60 years ago, when 6 million people were welcoming new arrivals. Then it was the 62nd Army, and now it is Taiwanese doing business in China. The 62nd Army brought the 228 Incident and 38 years of martial law. I wonder what the businesspeople will bring? \nIt is true that history keeps repeating itself, maybe because of an innate human inability to learn from it. In 1987, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government followed up on a Democratic Progressive Party initiative and lifted the ban on people from Taiwan visiting relatives in China. The government stressed that the lifting of the ban was restricted only to visiting relatives, and that using that as a pretext for any other activity would be met with severe punishment. \nBut many things that were not allowed in Taiwan were permitted abroad, and so opening a small door was in fact tantamount to opening the floodgates: Visiting relatives soon developed into tourism, and tourism developed into investment -- China fever is a fact. \nSimilarly, although the Mainland Affairs Council said that the charter flights would only be open to Taiwanese businesspeople, even Filipino housemaids were able to board. Council officials can't be so stupid that they did not anticipate this result. The reasoning of travellers was, "If it is OK for Taiwanese businesspeople, then why wouldn't it also be OK for overseas students; if it is OK for overseas students, then why wouldn't it be OK for Filipino housemaids?" \nFollowing this line of reasoning, if Lunar New Year's charter flights are OK, then why wouldn't flights on other holidays be OK? If flights on holidays are OK, then why not flights on normal days? Like Chang said: "Regular cross-strait flights are just around the corner." \nThere were reports that when the China Southern flight landed in Taoyuan at 9:27am on Jan. 29, applause and shouts of welcome broke out in the waiting room, where everyone present celebrated these ice-breaking flights. \nBut we should not let anyone forget that when the 2,160m-long bridge on Penghu Island was opened 37 years ago (connecting Hsiyu with the two other main islands of Penghu, cutting travel time from Hsiyu to Makung to half an hour), both the government and public celebrated, saying that the project would open the door for the development of Hsiyu. \nToday the island is as desolate as ever, and the population has been reduced by half. \nIn August 1979, the opening of Makung airport was met with anticipation by residents and businesspeople alike. The champagne flowed and it was said to be a historic moment for Penghu. From that moment on, Penghu residents could fly directly to Taipei and Tainan, and everyone thought that Penghu's becoming the Pearl of the Taiwan Strait was just around the corner. \nPenghu, however, has met with the same fate as Hsiyu. No matter how hard Penghu County commissioners have worked to attract businesses, Penghu's money and talent have kept flowing toward Taiwan. \nTwenty-six years have gone by, and although the population of Taiwan has almost doubled, Penghu's population has dwindled, falling from 110,000 to a bit over 90,000. International examples of bigger economic entities absorbing smaller economic entities are too numerous to mention. \nI sincerely hope that this part of history will not be repeated in Taiwan. But if we listen to our economic officials and the theories of unificationist scholars, then "market forces are unstoppable." Taiwan will follow in the wake of Penghu, and a repeat of history will be unavoidable. \nNo matter what, it is too late to change. Only history will tell what significance the historic moment on Jan. 29 held for the future development of Taiwan. We will know in 10 or 20 years' time. \nHuang Tien-lin is a national policy adviser to the president. \n Translated by Perry Svensson
Criticisms of corruption, a poorly managed bureaucracy and uninformed, unprincipled or unaccomplished policy in China are often met with harsh punishments. Many protesters in the “blank paper movement,” for example, have been disappeared by the authorities. Meanwhile, the WHO has asked China to provide data on its COVID-19 situation, with the Chinese government choosing to disseminate propaganda instead. The first amendment of the US Constitution, written in 1791, prohibits the US government from abridging the freedom of speech, press, assembly, petition, or religion. More than 200 years later, China, the world’s second-largest economy, still lacks the freedoms of speech and the press,
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC), the pride of the nation, has recently become a villain to residents of Tainan’s Annan District (安南). In 2017, TSMC announced plans to build the world’s first 3-nanometer fab in Anding District (安定). While the project was once welcomed by residents of Tainan, it has since become a source of controversy. The new fab requires a huge amount of electricity to operate. To meet TSMC’s surging electricity demand, plans are under way to construct a 1.2 gigawatt gas power station near a residential area in Annan District. More than 10,000 Annan residents have signed a petition
As the People’s Republic of China (PRC) constantly strives to rewrite the Taiwan narrative, it is important to regularly update and correct the stereotypes that the PRC tries to foist on Taiwan and the world. A primary stereotype is that Taiwan has always been a part of China and its corollary that Taiwan has been a part of China since time immemorial. Both are false. Taiwan has always been a part of the vast Austronesian empire, which stretched from Madagascar in the west to Easter Island in the east and from Taiwan in the north to New Zealand in the south. That
I first visited Taiwan in 1985, when I was deputed by His Holiness the Dalai Lama to start a dialogue with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). I spent three days talking to officials, the end result being the signing of an agreement where the Republic of China (ROC) recognized the right to self-determination of Tibetans. According to official KMT records in Nanking, Tibet never paid taxes to the ROC government. In 1997, the Dalai Lama made his first ever visit to Taiwan on the invitation of then-president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝). Lee took the bold step of opening Taiwan’s doors to
RSS