If there were any upside to the passage of Typhoon Fung-wong earlier this week, it was its exposure of the manner in which taxpayers’ money is being spent by Taitung County Commissioner Kuang Li-chen (鄺麗貞).
Despite forecasts that the typhoon would sweep through Taiwan from the east coast, Kuang went ahead with her scheduled trip to Europe last Wednesday.
Coming to Kuang’s defense, the Taitung County Government argued that the delegation had departed days before the Central Weather Bureau issued a typhoon alert.
This explanation is disingenuous, however, because it was already known at the time that a serious storm was headed toward Taitung. And it is the role of a commissioner to be there when locals need her or, to use President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) words, “to feel the pain of the people.”
With the typhoon behind us, we must now turn to what Kuang has been doing with government coffers and how she has spent money on her overseas “business” trips.
While the Taitung County Government faces a deficit of NT$6.1 billion (US$200 million) and lacks the budget to even update its tourism brochures, Kuang has spent millions in the past two years on overseas trips inspecting other countries’ municipal development.
Since her election as county commissioner in April 2006 — with the endorsement of then Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) chairman Ma — Kuang has made eight “overseas business trips.”
In 2006, taxpayers footed the bill for her trip to Japan, followed by visits to Greece and Egypt, at a total cost of NT$2.49 million in taxpayers’ money. Kuang made trips to Japan and Hong Kong the following year, followed by an eight-day trip to the UK before she embarked on another visit, this time to Thailand. Taxpayers then paid NT$1.3 million for her trip to New Zealand in April this year, as well as NT$1.5 million for her ongoing 13-day tour in Europe.
And that’s not all. After she comes back, the flight-attendant-turned-commissioner is expected to embark on a trip to Beijing next month for the Beijing Olympics, with a separate trip to Zhejiang Province being planned for September.
Given all this globetrotting, Kuang would be better positioned to write for Lonely Planet than to pen a revised tourism brochure for her county.
The numbers speak for themselves. In the past two years, the county has hosted two large-scale tourism fairs, which brought in some 200,000 tourists and generated NT$400 million. Those numbers, however, pale in comparison with Hualien County, which during the same period hosted more than 10 large-scale tourism fairs and attracted 1 million tourists, who spent an estimated NT$2.1 billion.
Kuang and the Taitung County Government maintain that her trips are meant to better equip her to promote Taitung as a fun tourism destination.
However one looks at it, it is she who seems to be having all the fun.
In their recent op-ed “Trump Should Rein In Taiwan” in Foreign Policy magazine, Christopher Chivvis and Stephen Wertheim argued that the US should pressure President William Lai (賴清德) to “tone it down” to de-escalate tensions in the Taiwan Strait — as if Taiwan’s words are more of a threat to peace than Beijing’s actions. It is an old argument dressed up in new concern: that Washington must rein in Taipei to avoid war. However, this narrative gets it backward. Taiwan is not the problem; China is. Calls for a so-called “grand bargain” with Beijing — where the US pressures Taiwan into concessions
The term “assassin’s mace” originates from Chinese folklore, describing a concealed weapon used by a weaker hero to defeat a stronger adversary with an unexpected strike. In more general military parlance, the concept refers to an asymmetric capability that targets a critical vulnerability of an adversary. China has found its modern equivalent of the assassin’s mace with its high-altitude electromagnetic pulse (HEMP) weapons, which are nuclear warheads detonated at a high altitude, emitting intense electromagnetic radiation capable of disabling and destroying electronics. An assassin’s mace weapon possesses two essential characteristics: strategic surprise and the ability to neutralize a core dependency.
Chinese President and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Chairman Xi Jinping (習近平) said in a politburo speech late last month that his party must protect the “bottom line” to prevent systemic threats. The tone of his address was grave, revealing deep anxieties about China’s current state of affairs. Essentially, what he worries most about is systemic threats to China’s normal development as a country. The US-China trade war has turned white hot: China’s export orders have plummeted, Chinese firms and enterprises are shutting up shop, and local debt risks are mounting daily, causing China’s economy to flag externally and hemorrhage internally. China’s
US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) were born under the sign of Gemini. Geminis are known for their intelligence, creativity, adaptability and flexibility. It is unlikely, then, that the trade conflict between the US and China would escalate into a catastrophic collision. It is more probable that both sides would seek a way to de-escalate, paving the way for a Trump-Xi summit that allows the global economy some breathing room. Practically speaking, China and the US have vulnerabilities, and a prolonged trade war would be damaging for both. In the US, the electoral system means that public opinion
RSS