Chinese people are fond of talking about their "vast, great, refined and deep" culture. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Lien Chan (
The KMT's bureaucratic culture continues to paralyze the legislature even though Lien is just a presidential wannabe. It is all about face. The number of people seeing off or welcoming a politician is considered a indicator of power and popularity. If only a handful of people turn out to meet him or her, the politician is seen as unpopular and unfit for high office.
Apart from satisfying vanity, these hail and farewell gatherings are an opportunity to brown-nose one's superiors and seek advancement. Especially if the boss is normally very busy and inaccessible, such opportunities are a chance to remind people who you are and impress the boss so that he or she won't forget you when opportunities for promotion arise.
The large number of people who showed up to greet Lien on Monday sent a clear message: KMT and PFP politicians are quite confident about their parties' chances in next year's presidential election. They are therefore already jockeying for position five months before voting day, vying to kiss up to Lien.
Lien also believes he has already won the election. On the evening of Oct. 12, he met with Taiwanese students studying at Cambridge University's Trinity College. After the talk, he walked to Queen's College to attend a banquet. According to John Chang (
But Lien was apparently uninterested in the scenery. He complained -- via the pan-blue media -- that the government's representative office in the UK had not taken good care of him. He was upset because the office had not arranged a car for him, thereby forcing him to "grope about and walk in the dark" and causing him to get lost on the way.
Diplomats from the office responded they had not arranged a car because Lien's own people had told them that he wanted to walk. They said the office had sent people to accompany Lien during the walk, so how did the talk about being discourteous come about?
Democratic Progressive Party Deputy Secretary-General Lee Ying-yuan (
On Monday, Lien demonstrated that he found nothing wrong in the legislature grinding to a halt so that 60 legislators could be at the airport to welcome him home. Perhaps he wanted to get even with his political enemies for not treating him as an emperor. Such political sychophancy is common in totalitarian societies and banana republics -- it has no place in a modern democracy.
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan. In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new
If you had a vision of the future where China did not dominate the global car industry, you can kiss those dreams goodbye. That is because US President Donald Trump’s promised 25 percent tariff on auto imports takes an ax to the only bits of the emerging electric vehicle (EV) supply chain that are not already dominated by Beijing. The biggest losers when the levies take effect this week would be Japan and South Korea. They account for one-third of the cars imported into the US, and as much as two-thirds of those imported from outside North America. (Mexico and Canada, while
I have heard people equate the government’s stance on resisting forced unification with China or the conditional reinstatement of the military court system with the rise of the Nazis before World War II. The comparison is absurd. There is no meaningful parallel between the government and Nazi Germany, nor does such a mindset exist within the general public in Taiwan. It is important to remember that the German public bore some responsibility for the horrors of the Holocaust. Post-World War II Germany’s transitional justice efforts were rooted in a national reckoning and introspection. Many Jews were sent to concentration camps not