Questions for the media
The upcoming meeting between Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait Chairman Chen Yunlin (陳雲林) and Straits Exchange Foundation Chairman Chiang Pin-kung (江丙坤) has brought dozens of international reporters to Taiwan.
Over the past five months, I have realized that President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) prefers making policy announcements to the international media to facing Taiwanese media, which is why I hope the international media can ask Ma these 10 questions on behalf of the Taiwanese people:
According to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, pandas can only travel in China. When Taiwan accepts two pandas from China, does that imply that the Ma government accepts the notion that Taiwan is part of China? How can he state that he will not budge an inch on sovereignty, but actually take risky action which might give China the wrong impression?
If Ma is the president of Taiwan, and China is another country, international custom dictates that Taiwan should present the national flags of both Taiwan and China during Chen’s visit. So why are hardly any Taiwanese flags being displayed in Taiwan?
If the four agreements to be signed by Chen and Chiang are supported by the majority of Taiwanese, why does the government refuse to grant demonstration and protest rights to the opposition? Ma should not worry about this small group of opposition supporters, right?
The four agreements have not been presented or approved by the Legislative Yuan. If these agreements are for the benefit of Taiwan, why did Ma not present them to the Legislative Yuan? The chair of the Mainland Affairs Council stated that the agreements would be presented to the Legislative Yuan after being signed.
But what would happen if the agreements are rejected by the Legislative Yuan? Why is Ma taking this risk?
Ma stated that he will not sell out Taiwan and that he only wants to sell fruit to China. Doesn’t Ma know that Taiwanese fruit shops in China have closed? Chinese consumers cannot afford it. Expanding shelf life cannot solve this problem.
The Dalai Lama recently said that his faith in China is dwindling. Can Ma identify any concrete proof that China will treat Taiwan differently than Tibet?
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
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,
“I compare the Communist Party to my mother,” sings a student at a boarding school in a Tibetan region of China’s Qinghai province. “If faith has a color,” others at a different school sing, “it would surely be Chinese red.” In a major story for the New York Times this month, Chris Buckley wrote about the forced placement of hundreds of thousands of Tibetan children in boarding schools, where many suffer physical and psychological abuse. Separating these children from their families, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) aims to substitute itself for their parents and for their religion. Buckley’s reporting is
As Taiwan’s domestic political crisis deepens, the opposition Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) have proposed gutting the country’s national spending, with steep cuts to the critical foreign and defense ministries. While the blue-white coalition alleges that it is merely responding to voters’ concerns about corruption and mismanagement, of which there certainly has been plenty under Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and KMT-led governments, the rationales for their proposed spending cuts lay bare the incoherent foreign policy of the KMT-led coalition. Introduced on the eve of US President Donald Trump’s inauguration, the KMT’s proposed budget is a terrible opening
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