President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) touts himself as being thrifty — as vouched for by his long-time barber and a cobbler, who in a recent campaign advertisement extolled Ma’s thriftiness.
In the TV spot, the barber described Ma as an easy customer who never makes special demands on how he’d like his hair styled.
The cobbler spoke of Ma’s frugality, saying he has been patching Ma’s worn-out shoes for more than two decades, adding that he had repaired some of Ma’s shoes five or six times, and that he had also repaired Ma’s swimming trunks.
Being thrifty is indeed a virtue, so the campaign ad was designed to depict Ma as a politician who does not waste money and is down-to-earth.
However, when politicians are portrayed as overly virtuous and eulogized by certain media outlets, they tend to strike the wrong chord with voters.
How often does one hear stories of a person wearing the same suit for 10 years and using the same blanket for 34 years, as Ma recently claimed on his Facebook page?
Any ordinary person would have at least two suits to alternate, or more for people who are better off, not to mention Ma, who — according to a report on the assets of public figures released by the Control Yuan in March — has bank deposits of NT$70.62 million (US$2.33 million), among other assets.
Is there really a need for a person of Ma’s affluence and status to propagandize compliments on his thriftiness?
However, after spending NT$215 million (US$7.1 million) to produce a two-night run of the rock musical Dreamers and millions more on fireworks to celebrate the Republic of China’s centennial, as well as NT$10 billion on the Taipei International Flora Expo, it appears the Ma administration is not quite so thrifty when it comes to spending taxpayers’ money.
The president made that clear last month when he footed the bill — using money from the state affairs fund, not from his own pocket — for a purchase of about 5 tonnes of persimmons, ostensibly to help the ailing agricultural industry.
Ma’s so-called “thriftiness” is selective: He is a penny-pincher when it comes to spending his own money, but a spendthrift when it comes to taxpayers’ money.
Moreover, despite the nation’s financial plight, the Presidential Office, saying it needed to give the president “more space to help the disadvantaged,” increased his discretionary fund from NT$30 million to NT$40 million a year after he was inaugurated.
With Ma’s support rates slumping according to several recent media polls, it appears the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) has launched yet another campaign aimed at eulogizing Ma’s thrifty traits.
The Taiwanese public does not care how many old pairs of shoes the president repairs and swimming trunks he has patched; what people care about is whether Ma, as a national leader, has what it takes to give them a better standard of living.
And how brazen is Ma’s re-election campaign office to paint the president as being frugal when the nation’s debt has doubled from NT$1.2 trillion when the Democratic Progressive Party governmnet left office in 2008 to NT$2.4 trillion three years later?
In Chinese author Lu Xun’s (魯迅) novella The True Story of Ah Q (阿Q正傳) — one of the earliest works of modern Chinese fiction, first serialized in 1921 — the story’s hapless protagonist, Ah Q (阿Q), is a poor itinerant worker from China’s peasant class, living during the part-feudal, part-colonial dying embers of the Qing Dynasty. Ah Q is a feeble and psychologically flawed individual who bullies the meek and cowers before the powerful. Despised and regularly mocked by villagers, after every episode of public ridicule and failure, Ah Q consoles himself that he has won a “spiritual victory.” Utterly
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) chairman Mark Liu (劉德音) said in an interview with CNN on Sunday that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would render the company’s plants inoperable, and that such a war would produce “no winners.” Not only would Taiwan’s economy be destroyed in a cross-strait conflict, but the impact “would go well beyond semiconductors, and would bring about the destruction of the world’s rules-based order and totally change the geopolitical landscape,” Liu said in the interview, according to the Central News Agency. Bloomberg columnist Hal Brands wrote on June 24: “A major war over Taiwan could create global economic
Washington’s official position on US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan is that nothing has changed: The US government says it is maintaining its “one China” policy, that Pelosi is free to arrange international trips with congressional delegations independent of the government and that she is not the first US official to visit Taiwan even this year. Yet there is no denying that the fact and the optics of the second-in-line to the US presidency speaking with lawmakers at the Legislative Yuan about inter-parliamentary discussions and learning from each other as equals are hugely significant, as were
Amid a fervor in the global media, US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her congressional delegation made a high-profile visit to Taipei. President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) awarded a state honor to her at the Presidential Office. Evidently, the occasion took on the aspect of an inter-state relationship between the US and the Republic of China (ROC) on Taiwan, despite no mutual state recognition between the two. Beijing furiously condemned Pelosi’s visit in advance, with military drills in the waters surrounding coastal China to check the move. Pelosi is a well-known China hawk, and second in the line of succession to
RSS