‘Disgrace’ in Geneva
After a banquet for World Health Assembly (WHA) delegates at a restaurant in Geneva on Saturday, Department of Health Minister Yeh Ching-chuan (葉金川) was greeted by a group of Taiwanese students who confronted him with tough questions and demanded to know if Taiwan’s sovereignty had been compromised in exchange for being an observer at this year’s WHA conference.
The volley of questions annoyed the minister so much he practically told the students to get lost, calling them a disgraceful bunch. Yeh uttered words that were not befitting someone of his status.
Perhaps realizing that he had behaved childishly and anticipating an inevitable media onslaught, Yeh later held a press conference and shed tears while saying “no one loves Taiwan more than I do.”
The whole melodramatic episode deserves a closer reading. The first question is why the minister lost his cool.
The answer is that Taiwan’s sovereignty has ceased to exist since President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) took office. Yeh knows this and he expected the students who heckled him to be likewise informed.
The second question is why Yeh held a press conference.
On the surface, it was a pre-emptive measure against inevitable criticism from the pan-green camp and the media.
But it could also be read as a child’s cry for a pacifier. This need was satisfied when Ma sent words of support. The pan-blue media also rallied in support, giving Yeh an enormous binky by portraying the students as a reckless and disgraceful bunch.
YANG CHUNHUI
Salt Lake City, Utah
The image was oddly quiet. No speeches, no flags, no dramatic announcements — just a Chinese cargo ship cutting through arctic ice and arriving in Britain in October. The Istanbul Bridge completed a journey that once existed only in theory, shaving weeks off traditional shipping routes. On paper, it was a story about efficiency. In strategic terms, it was about timing. Much like politics, arriving early matters. Especially when the route, the rules and the traffic are still undefined. For years, global politics has trained us to watch the loud moments: warships in the Taiwan Strait, sanctions announced at news conferences, leaders trading
Eighty-seven percent of Taiwan’s energy supply this year came from burning fossil fuels, with more than 47 percent of that from gas-fired power generation. The figures attracted international attention since they were in October published in a Reuters report, which highlighted the fragility and structural challenges of Taiwan’s energy sector, accumulated through long-standing policy choices. The nation’s overreliance on natural gas is proving unstable and inadequate. The rising use of natural gas does not project an image of a Taiwan committed to a green energy transition; rather, it seems that Taiwan is attempting to patch up structural gaps in lieu of
The saga of Sarah Dzafce, the disgraced former Miss Finland, is far more significant than a mere beauty pageant controversy. It serves as a potent and painful contemporary lesson in global cultural ethics and the absolute necessity of racial respect. Her public career was instantly pulverized not by a lapse in judgement, but by a deliberate act of racial hostility, the flames of which swiftly encircled the globe. The offensive action was simple, yet profoundly provocative: a 15-second video in which Dzafce performed the infamous “slanted eyes” gesture — a crude, historically loaded caricature of East Asian features used in Western
The Executive Yuan and the Presidential Office on Monday announced that they would not countersign or promulgate the amendments to the Act Governing the Allocation of Government Revenues and Expenditures (財政收支劃分法) passed by the Legislative Yuan — a first in the nation’s history and the ultimate measure the central government could take to counter what it called an unconstitutional legislation. Since taking office last year, the legislature — dominated by the opposition alliance of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party — has passed or proposed a slew of legislation that has stirred controversy and debate, such as extending
RSS