The recent supplication of Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong (
But we can easily see that Lee's words are empty. He stated that no European or Asian country would recognize an independent Taiwan. How can he know this? Certainly he does not. He was only making the statement to placate the frothy, emotional ultranationalism that has reared its ugly head in Beijing these past few years. That part of Lee's statement, and probably the rest as well, can be relegated to the junkyard of political propaganda.
But if we look at the substance of the situation, we see that Singapore has built facilities to service aircraft carriers, obviously for US use. And Singapore has an agreement to provide logistical support to the US military in times of conflict, without regard to the identity of the other parties in the conflict. Further, both Singapore and the US are basing equipment and supplies in northern Australia for joint use in a Pacific conflict. Singapore has tied its security completely to the US, so if the US defends Taiwan, Singapore will follow.
Although we know that Singapore will help the US defend Taiwan if fighting breaks out, it is nonetheless disappointing that Singapore's freshly crowned prime minister does not have the character to stand by the free and democratic people of Taiwan in words as well as action.
Daniel McCarthy
United States
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
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