During a press conference Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Alex Fai (費鴻泰) announced that he was ready to commit suicide if KMT presidential candidate Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) is not elected after KMT lawmakers intruded on DPP candidate Frank Hsieh's (謝長廷) Taipei campaign office.
What does this statement reveal? It shows KMT members do not really care about social order. Fai's statement shows that the KMT is not about maintaining and enforcing modes of relating and behaving. It is not about conserving social structures, institutions and practices. All that matters is to get the post, make Ma the president. It is all about the crown.
During the campaign, the KMT has tried to convince us that the increasing number of suicides is the result of the erroneous policies of the present government and that the new government and the new president can somehow fix it.
Fai's statement that he would consider suicide is nothing but a farce. A politician must be able to face the ups and downs of the profession he or she is voluntarily engaged in and must take full responsibility for his or her actions and words.
The lack of integrity shown by these KMT politicians casts doubts on whether a KMT victory would really be "a change that Taiwanese people should believe in."
Hanna Shen
Taipei
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
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
The military is conducting its annual Han Kuang exercises in phases. The minister of national defense recently said that this year’s scenarios would simulate defending the nation against possible actions the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) might take in an invasion of Taiwan, making the threat of a speculated Chinese invasion in 2027 a heated agenda item again. That year, also referred to as the “Davidson window,” is named after then-US Indo-Pacific Command Admiral Philip Davidson, who in 2021 warned that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) had instructed the PLA to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. Xi in 2017
RSS