Demonic possession, typhoid, infantile convulsions and impotence. These are some of the ailments traditional Chinese medical practitioners in Taiwan and China believed ground rhinoceros horn could cure, which helped push the animal to the brink of extinction in the 1980s.
At the time, Taiwanese officials and doctors ignored calls from the international community to ban the sale of rhinoceros horns, using as an excuse the fact that Taiwan wasn’t a member of the international organization calling for its prohibition.
For Calvin Wen (溫炳原), a member of Green Party Taiwan’s central executive committee, the above example is useful as an analogy when discussing climate change.
“Most of global society has a target [to reduce climate change]. Because Taiwan is not a UN member it is very common for government officials and even some scholars to say they don’t have to take any measures to reduce [carbon] emissions,” he said.
Taiwan’s refusal to eliminate the importation of rhinoceros horns led the Clinton administration to impose sanctions on Taiwan — the first time the US had used trade sanctions to protect the environment. Wen fears that if Taiwan’s business and political leaders don’t act to reduce the island’s carbon emissions, a similar scenario might play out.
A group of civic organizations including the Green Party are organizing a march and festival tomorrow to highlight the need for Taiwan to reduce carbon emissions. The march begins at 1:30pm at Taiwan Democracy Hall’s Liberty Square (自由廣場) and will proceed first to the Presidential Office and then to Da-an Forest Park (大安森林公園), where a music concert is scheduled to start at 3pm.
“Civil society has done a lot to cut carbon emissions,” he said. “But we still think that the government should do more with their policy.”
Taiwan’s Environmental Protection Agency, meanwhile, has sent a delegation to Poznan, Poland, to take part in an intergovernmental meeting for drawing up a new agreement to reduce global warming to succeed the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.
Wen, however, remains skeptical. He cites a litany of examples that illustrate how the government puts business interests before the environment, with the Suhua Highway project, Formosa Plastics steel plant and, most recently, the consumer voucher scheme being the most glaring examples.
“They could have at least encouraged green consumption,” he said of the vouchers.
The Climate Change, Taiwan Cares march and festival (對抗地球暖化－台灣行動) begins tomorrow at 1:30pm at Taiwan Democracy Hall’s Liberty Square (自由廣場) and will proceed first to the Presidential Office and then to Da-an Forest Park (大安森林公園) where a concert will be held. For more information, visit tw-climatecampaign.blogspot.com.
Taiwanese chip-making giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) plans to invest a whopping US$100 billion in the US, after US President Donald Trump threatened to slap tariffs on overseas-made chips. TSMC is the world’s biggest maker of the critical technology that has become the lifeblood of the global economy. This week’s announcement takes the total amount TSMC has pledged to invest in the US to US$165 billion, which the company says is the “largest single foreign direct investment in US history.” It follows Trump’s accusations that Taiwan stole the US chip industry and his threats to impose tariffs of up to 100 percent
From censoring “poisonous books” to banning “poisonous languages,” the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) tried hard to stamp out anything that might conflict with its agenda during its almost 40 years of martial law. To mark 228 Peace Memorial Day, which commemorates the anti-government uprising in 1947, which was violently suppressed, I visited two exhibitions detailing censorship in Taiwan: “Silenced Pages” (禁書時代) at the National 228 Memorial Museum and “Mandarin Monopoly?!” (請說國語) at the National Human Rights Museum. In both cases, the authorities framed their targets as “evils that would threaten social mores, national stability and their anti-communist cause, justifying their actions
In the run-up to World War II, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of Abwehr, Nazi Germany’s military intelligence service, began to fear that Hitler would launch a war Germany could not win. Deeply disappointed by the sell-out of the Munich Agreement in 1938, Canaris conducted several clandestine operations that were aimed at getting the UK to wake up, invest in defense and actively support the nations Hitler planned to invade. For example, the “Dutch war scare” of January 1939 saw fake intelligence leaked to the British that suggested that Germany was planning to invade the Netherlands in February and acquire airfields
The launch of DeepSeek-R1 AI by Hangzhou-based High-Flyer and subsequent impact reveals a lot about the state of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) today, both good and bad. It touches on the state of Chinese technology, innovation, intellectual property theft, sanctions busting smuggling, propaganda, geopolitics and as with everything in China, the power politics of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). PLEASING XI JINPING DeepSeek’s creation is almost certainly no accident. In 2015 CCP Secretary General Xi Jinping (習近平) launched his Made in China 2025 program intended to move China away from low-end manufacturing into an innovative technological powerhouse, with Artificial Intelligence
RSS