The new Cabinet is only a few days old and already the competence of the premier is under scrutiny over his brief, but bizarre, trip to Hong Kong. Ostensibly a fact-finding trip on landslide prevention technology, it turns out that Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) spent a good proportion of his time meeting Chinese powerbrokers in the Special Administrative Region — and, believe it or not, taking time out to accompany his son on a spot of fortune telling.
Fittingly, none of this augurs well. Whatever initial period of grace existed for the new premier has expired with this sloppily executed slice of cross-strait diplomacy. With Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) legislators howling over reports by the Apple Daily in Hong Kong and Taiwan on Wu’s unannounced itinerary, President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) must be wondering what he has to do to find a politically astute person to run the Executive Yuan.
Ma has previously “delegated responsibility” — let’s be euphemistic — to the Cabinet on sensitive domestic issues based on what he perceives to be a constitutional separation of powers.
It would be intriguing, therefore, if Wu was serving as Ma’s emissary. From Ma’s and China’s perspective, what does Wu have that Ma’s other negotiators and party colleagues lack?
As Ma prepares to take over the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) chairmanship next month, party and legislative tensions over how things are being run are in check — just. Even the discordant voices that exist on the pan-blue side of politics — KMT Legislator Lo Shu-lei (羅淑蕾) is a good example — remain largely supportive of the president.
This may not last much longer. Typhoon Morakot, the Deaflympics, the World Games in Kaohsiung, the swine flu outbreak and the trial of former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) and his co-accused have helped to obscure this government’s struggle to make an impression in the more mundane aspects of day-to-day policy development and implementation.
There is, indeed, much about the way that this country is being run that is crying out for critique and overhaul. However, when a government is on the back foot, as this one is, more provocative reforms tend to be traded for the comfort of vulnerable legislators.
With the Ma administration, there is a significant deviation from this pattern. Cross-strait detente demands ongoing negotiations that please China, regardless of what anyone thinks back home. To continue along this road, it is essential that Ma’s Cabinet deliver results across all portfolios to ensure that DPP accusations of domestic neglect are neutralized.
Perhaps this is what Ma was getting at yesterday when he asked that civil servants bear the rights of ordinary people in mind. If the government cannot attract public support on issues as fundamental as basic policy, parity, respectful treatment and due process, then what hope will trade-offs with China have?
Ma’s problem — and it has always been his problem — is that his pretty language has rarely been backed by action when it comes to reforming the behavior of people under his command. His challenge now is not to reform the lowest ranking people on the civil servant scale, but to make something competent out of the people at the very top.
US aerospace company Boeing Co has in recent years been involved in numerous safety incidents, including crashes of its 737 Max airliners, which have caused widespread concern about the company’s safety record. It has recently come to light that titanium jet engine parts used by Boeing and its European competitor Airbus SE were sold with falsified documentation. The source of the titanium used in these parts has been traced back to an unknown Chinese company. It is clear that China is trying to sneak questionable titanium materials into the supply chain and use any ensuing problems as an opportunity to
It’s not every month that the US Department of State sends two deputy assistant secretary-level officials to Taiwan, together. Its rarer still that such senior State Department policy officers, once on the ground in Taipei, make a point of huddling with fellow diplomats from “like-minded” NATO, ANZUS and Japanese governments to coordinate their multilateral Taiwan policies. The State Department issued a press release on June 22 admitting that the two American “representatives” had “hosted consultations in Taipei” with their counterparts from the “Taiwan Ministry of Foreign Affairs.” The consultations were blandly dubbed the “US-Taiwan Working Group on International Organizations.” The State
The Chinese Supreme People’s Court and other government agencies released new legal guidelines criminalizing “Taiwan independence diehard separatists.” While mostly symbolic — the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has never had jurisdiction over Taiwan — Tamkang University Graduate Institute of China Studies associate professor Chang Wu-ueh (張五岳), an expert on cross-strait relations, said: “They aim to explain domestically how they are countering ‘Taiwan independence,’ they aim to declare internationally their claimed jurisdiction over Taiwan and they aim to deter Taiwanese.” Analysts do not know for sure why Beijing is propagating these guidelines now. Under Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), deciphering the
Many local news media last week reported that COVID-19 is back, citing doctors’ observations and the Centers for Disease Control’s (CDC) statistics. The CDC said that cases would peak this month and urged people to take preventive measures. Although COVID-19 has never been eliminated, it has become more manageable, and restrictions were dropped, enabling people to return to their normal way of life due to decreasing hospitalizations and deaths. In Taiwan, mandatory reporting of confirmed cases and home isolation ended in March last year, while the mask mandate at hospitals and healthcare facilities stopped in May. However, the CDC last week said the number