For years, an allegation has circulated that Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) presidential candidate Ma Ying-jeou (
Vice President Annette Lu (
As absurd as it might sound, under the rule of presidents Chiang Kai-shek (
As a result of a defamation lawsuit filed by Ma on Tuesday against Government Information Office Minister Shieh Jhy-wey (
But given that Ma could be elected president next year, he has a responsibility to come clean on the subject now. Why wait for the result of litigation that could drag on for a long time when a statement for the record could put his supporters at ease?
This country's democracy was made possible by the sacrifices of countless people, including the many courageous overseas students who braved the watchful gaze of "professional students" to take part in protests against the authoritarian KMT regime.
This resulted not only in students being banned from returning, but also in mysterious disappearances. Worse still, there are cases such as Carnegie Mellon University professor Chen Wen-chen (
At the time, the KMT government claimed Chen had committed suicide. A Carnegie Mellon team, however, concluded that the professor had been murdered.
Given the extent of the suffering caused by the KMT's student informers, the public has the right to know if Ma was one of them. Where there is smoke, there is sometimes fire, and this haze has lingered for years. It's time to resolve the matter based on material evidence and sworn testimony.
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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