During Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Lien Chan's (
It's hard not to laugh when reading such reports, which seem to suggest that all Chinese tourists visiting Taiwan will be high-rollers. The whole prospect has been wildly exaggerated. If such reports were to be believed, the Chinese are the richest people in the world.
It is true that some of the Chinese tourists are big spenders. The government is formulating strict policies to regulating the visits of Chinese tourists. Except for people who are visiting their relatives and working in this country or traveling with organized groups, most of these travellers are Chinese government officials or employees of China's state-run enterprises. Since they do not have to spend their own money while travelling here, it is hardly surprising that they spend freely.
The government should not allow unrestricted Chinese tourism. Leaving aside China's political and military threats against Taiwan, Chinese tourists remaining in this country after their visas expire or using tourism as a pretext to find work and other issues will lead to social and legal problems. Since Taiwan is a small nation it would only take a wave of a few hundred thousand illegal workers and immigrants to cause social order in Taiwan to collapse.
As for the political and security risks, who does not believe that Beijing would use the door opened by legal tourism to build a more far-reaching and comprehensive spy network in this country? If China were to launch an attack, this fifth column could attack the national defense network.
The issue of Chinese tourism has considerable economic implications as well. Given China's huge population, 2 million visits a year would not be at all impossible. This presents a bright prospect for Taiwan's airline, tourism and restaurant industries, with the probability of massive construction to meet increased demand. The result of this would be to put Taiwan's neck more firmly than ever in China's noose, because Beijing could just as easily halt the flow of tourists to this country and these industries would bear the brunt of such a blow.
After China announced that it would permit tourism to Taiwan, reports from Shanghai revealed that the Publicity Department of the Chinese Communist Party's Central Committee had ordered the media to refrain from reporting on this matter. There has been no further word from Beijing about how tourism to Taiwan is to be handled, further raising suspicion as to the motives behind China's proposal.
The whole Chinese tourism offer is likely a ploy by Beijing to use Taiwan's pro-China forces to assist it in further deepening the domestic rifts over cross-strait policy. The government should give China the same answer to its offer of tourists as it did its offer of pandas -- thanks, but no thanks.
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
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,
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus in the Legislative Yuan has made an internal decision to freeze NT$1.8 billion (US$54.7 million) of the indigenous submarine project’s NT$2 billion budget. This means that up to 90 percent of the budget cannot be utilized. It would only be accessible if the legislature agrees to lift the freeze sometime in the future. However, for Taiwan to construct its own submarines, it must rely on foreign support for several key pieces of equipment and technology. These foreign supporters would also be forced to endure significant pressure, infiltration and influence from Beijing. In other words,
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