Empty promises
Not a single person will believe what President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) said in his New Year speech, that “Reviving the nation’s economy is the government’s top priority this year,” (Editorial, Jan. 3, page 8).
This is an empty promise; Ma is a liar and incompetent.
Remember his “6-3-3” campaign pledge, his promise about donating half of his salary and the “golden decade”?
Ma has no credibility.
Politics is Ma’s top priority this year, not the economy.
His priorities are as follows: First, arrange a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) in China.
Next month, Ma is to send Mainland Affairs Council Minister Wang Yu-chi (王郁琦) to China to negotiate the details of a meeting with representatives of the Chinese government.
An announcement of the outcome of the so-called “Xi-Ma meeting” is expected sometime in the summer.
Second, manipulate Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidates for the coming seven-in-one municipal elections.
To stop former Taipei EasyCard Corp chairman Sean Lien’s (連勝文) ascent, Ma is working to promote New Taipei City (新北市) Mayor Eric Chu (朱立倫) to defeat Lien in the Taipei mayoral race.
He is plotting to find a candidate to replace the current Greater Taichung Mayor Jason Hu (胡志強) and trying to persuade Minister of the Interior Lee Hong-yuan (李鴻源) to take over in New Taipei City.
Third, Ma is trying to clear the way for Vice President Wu Den-yi (吳敦義) and Premier Jiang Yi-huah (江宜樺) to form the ticket for the KMT in the 2016 presidential election.
Ma is trying to avoid being indicted after his term as president.
During the New Year’s Day ceremony in front of the Presidential Palace in Taipei, after Ma finished his speech and stepped down from the podium, the master of ceremony announced that: “President Ma is stepping down,” causing a moment of silence in the crowd.
The public’s New Year wish is that Ma would actually step down.
If he did, Taiwan would become a better place.
Ken S. Huang
Murrieta, California
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
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
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
RSS