The legislative elections are fewer than 80 days away, so we might have expected the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) would have come up with something bold in policy to sway those voters who have, under Lien Chan's (
What might we make of this? For a start, let us note that trying to scare people with threats of war is a piece of nonsense that didn't work in the presidential election in 2000 (remember the sonar commercial) -- nor has it worked in any election since. Lien, like the Bourbons, has learned nothing and forgotten nothing.
It is hard to know what China's negotiating "on a basis of equality" would mean. For China to see Taiwan as an equal would be to admit either that Taiwan is a sovereign state, or that the PRC is not the successor state to the ROC it claims to be and that the civil war was not in fact decisively won. There is nothing to suggest that Beijing will favor either of those positions. And why 30 years? Why a time limit? This sounds suspiciously like the adoption of the notorious "interim agreement" strategy, where Taiwan is guaranteed peace for a certain period of time on the understanding that it will then open serious negotiations about unification at the end of that period. Since Taiwan's walking out of such negotiations would probably result in war, the interim agreement strategy means buying peace for yourself at the expense of leaving your children to submit to tyranny. From Lien we would expect no better.
But from whom might we expect more? Yesterday's conference came on the heels of last weekend's two-day think-in by the Taiwan New Hope Link, a group of younger KMT members trying to thrash out what, in the absence of any meaningful leadership from the top, their party should stand for. This badly needs doing, so it was sad that the ideas on display made a beauty pageant contestant's wish for world peace seem profound by comparison. Wang Jin-pyng (
Our favorite moments, however, were when academic Hsu Yung-ming (
We think they understood the "significance" very well -- as another indication of the KMT's contempt for voters, its reliance on immoral demagoguery and its utter ethical and intellectual bankruptcy. And nothing has changed yet. The KMT reminds one of an anencephalic baby; that is, a baby that is born with most of its brain missing. One of the telltale signs of anencephaly is that a light shone on the back of such a baby's head will project through its eyes -- there is simply nothing in between. Put the KMT in the media spotlight and you get the same result, for the same reason.
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
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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
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