Hon Hai Precision Industry Co founder Terry Gou (郭台銘), former Taipei mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲), New Taipei City Mayor Hou You-yi (侯友宜) and former legislator Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) have promised to attend a housing justice and judicial reform rally on Sunday on Ketagalan Boulevard in front of the Presidential Office Building in Taipei.
It is ironic that the four men are to attend a rally to protest housing unaffordability.
Gou is one of the richest people in Taiwan; Ko was the mayor of the most unaffordable city in terms of housing prices; while Hou and Huang have large real-estate holdings.
Hou ’s 103 studios close to Chinese Culture University in Taipei’s Shilin District (士林) have earned him a lot of money in rent. For each studio, Hou can charge NT$16,000 (US$512) per month, which means he can bring in more than NT$1.6 million per month without doing any work. Huang’s family owns 15 plots of land and eight properties totaling 6,650m2. Huang says they are small plots of land for growing vegetables.
However, one of the plots has been converted into a parking lot, from which the family is estimated to be earning NT$60,000 to NT$70,000 per month.
Seeing this band of four at the rally is likely to trigger outrage at their supposed “support” of housing justice. Their participation is a ploy to gain recognition they do not deserve. They are like mafiosas protesting how bad social security is. In China, they would be described as “waving the red flag against the red flag.”
Some analogies might help describe their involvement:
Some Chinese people drive their beloved Japanese vehicles while they join Beijing-endorsed rallies against Japanese products; the director of a Chinese national Buddhist association sexually abused female disciples, practicing Buddhism and sexual assault at the same time; corrupt Chinese officials enter government agencies with cash in their hands, demonstrating the hypocrisy of Chinese officialdom and bureaucracy.
This kind of person proves that corruption would not be opposed seriously and would not be fought on a large scale.
Are Gou, Ko, Hou and Huang like this? They know that housing justice should be supported, but would they support it seriously? Would they back a large-scale effort to address it?
The realization of housing justice would shatter their lives.
It remains to be seen what this band of four would do for ordinary people. Nothing can be hidden from discerning eyes.
Yu Kung is a Taiwanese entrepreneur working in China.
Translated by Emma Liu
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
RSS