I must disagree with the conclusions made in your article about the airport scuffles ("Analysts say scuffles show Taiwan's weaknesses," April 27, page 3). The analyst quoted in the story obviously takes a single point of view and doesn't take his own advice of trying to understand the point of view of others.
Those people who went to the airport and scuffled with Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Lien Chan's (
This is not an irrational statement made with the purpose of encouraging such behavior, it is only a recognition that there are many people in Taiwan that are willing to put their own lives on the line for the cause of independence.
Lien should have been more rational and understanding of these forces in Taiwanese society before he agreed to this trip. He should expect more of the same everywhere he goes, because in the eyes of many Taiwanese he is a traitor, and under the law traitors deserve hefty prison sentences or more.
There is no democracy on earth which has a completely civil and peaceful coexistence of opposition parties. To say that Taiwan's democracy is not mature because there are passionate opposing beliefs is completely wrong.
To say that Taiwan's democracy is mature because there are passionate opposing beliefs and that neither side has the power to obliterate the other is accurate. If democracy was a pretty, organized and quiet affair, then the communists in China would already have adopted it. It is the appearance of social discord and anarchy that can be promoted in the exact same way that your article has done that serves as the PRC's justification for not accepting democracy.
Gregory Lloyd
Maryland
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
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
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
RSS