The 2023 Taipei-Shanghai Twin-City Forum is scheduled for next month in Shanghai. It will be the 14th forum since it was launched in 2010, and also the first in which Chiang Wan-an (蔣萬安) participates as Taipei mayor.
It is unclear exactly how beneficial the twin-city forum has been to the residents of Taipei over the course of the past decade or so. By all appearances, it has become little more than a stage for the Taipei mayor to build personal relations with the other side of the Taiwan Strait.
Before he left office last year, then-Taipei mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) went against the Taipei City Council’s resolution by insisting on holding the 13th twin-city forum despite the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) constant threat against Taiwan with warplanes and warships.
As a result, Ko saddled the Taipei City Government with a debt of nearly NT$1 million (US$31,857) for the cost of the forum that has remained unresolved.
If the twin-city forum was really for the city’s and its residents’ benefit, would the council have opposed it? Ko’s wife claimed that the Ko family would pay the debt out of its own pocket if necessary, but as it would later emerge, it only talked the talk. It did not walk the walk.
This year’s twin-city forum is set to take place late next month, which is very close to the 65th anniversary of the “823 Artillery Bombardment” launched by China against Taiwan’s Kinmen on Aug. 23, 1958, during the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis. On this day of great significance, as a descendant of then-president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), the mayor should stay in Taiwan just to observe the Chiang family’s spirit of “gentlemen and thieves cannot coexist” (漢賊不兩立).
How ironic it is that he is going instead to meet with top CCP officials for a merry shindig in Shanghai, instead of paying respects to the brave Taiwanese troops who died resisting the Chinese People’s Liberation Army in Kinmen.
Huang Wei-ping is a former think tank researcher.
Translated by Eddy Chang
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
RSS