According to a recent poll, Taipei Mayor Ma Ying-jeou (
Soon after Ma became the chairman of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), he sold some "KMT assets" which are considered national assets by many people. Before this dispute on ownership is settled, he has already put hundreds of millions of US dollars into KMT bank accounts that can be used to finance his 2008 presidential election campaign.
A few years ago, a Harvard alumnus openly accused Ma of being one of the spies monitoring and reporting "dissident" activities and remarks made by overseas Taiwanese students to the KMT totalitarian regime during the "white terror" era. Many students were blacklisted and were not allowed to go back to their own homeland.
Former president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) nominated Ma to run for the mayor of Taipei as "a new Taiwanese." However, Mayor Ma has acted more like "a new Chinese" -- praising China's freedom, flying China's flag and banning Taiwan's own flag, adopting China's transliteration system instead of Taiwan's own, offering unification of Taiwan with China if China apologizes for the Tiananmen incident, keeping silent on the democratic activity in Hong Kong and China's missile buildup against Taiwan, boycotting the arms purchase bill recklessly and asking foreigners to pronounce "Taipei" as "Taibei" in line with Beijing. Ma has become the favorite son of China. But is he the right choice for Taiwan in 2008?
Under Ma's seven-year administration, it's hard to cite major accomplishments in Taipei. Three inexcusable catastrophic incidents did occur: the cover-up of SARS cases, flooding of the rapid transit system and sending a critically injured child to a Taichung hospital.
Charles Hong
Columbus, Ohio
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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
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