The ‘Singapore experience’
Dear Johnny,
I totally agree with your article in the Taipei Times last week (“If only Singapore had knick-knacks,” Feb. 14, page 8), especially the critical part about Singapore. I studied at the National University of Singapore last year, but I gradually realized that Singaporeans’ lives are not as idyllic as Taiwanese think.
Many Taiwanese have the wrong impression of Singapore. Your article clarified what I have tried to explain to my friends who believe that the Taiwanese government should copy the “Singapore experience.” Can I share your article with my friends in my blog?
CHEN CHEN-YU
Johnny replies: As it happens, Chen-yu, we are not in Singapore, which means that if I say anything about the government that is sarcastic, unfriendly or contemptuous, I won’t have the Taiwanese equivalent of Minister Mentor Lee Kwan Yew breaking down my door, locking me up, suing my ass and lecturing me on Chinese magnificence. You can do whatever you like on your blog.
Lest I be accused of making a crude attack on that city-state’s smug Armani despots, let me say that some of my best friends come from Singapore. Now, back to the crude attack.
As the economic Leviathan hits the region, it will be interesting to see if Singapore’s working class change their tune on how their government goes about its business.
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,
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
The National Development Council (NDC) on Wednesday last week launched a six-month “digital nomad visitor visa” program, the Central News Agency (CNA) reported on Monday. The new visa is for foreign nationals from Taiwan’s list of visa-exempt countries who meet financial eligibility criteria and provide proof of work contracts, but it is not clear how it differs from other visitor visas for nationals of those countries, CNA wrote. The NDC last year said that it hoped to attract 100,000 “digital nomads,” according to the report. Interest in working remotely from abroad has significantly increased in recent years following improvements in
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