Fentanyl ploy will backfire
In a recent report, the US Congress pointed out that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been subsidizing the production of fentanyl and other synthetic drugs through measures such as tax incentives. The CCP government’s practice contributes to the international trade in fentanyl and other synthetic drugs, it said.
Although the CCP’s security agencies reached an agreement with the US to jointly combat the trade of the drug, they notified the targets of the investigation in advance so they could avoid repercussions. As a result, the smuggling and sales of fentanyl have become rampant.
The report said that despite the drug being banned in China, the CCP has blocked information about it and failed to strictly scrutinize exports of it.
Fentanyl functions as a synthetic opiate painkiller and is commonly used to deal with severe pain. Compared with heroin, fentanyl is more likely to be fatal, because it is 50 times more potent.
The flood of the drug into the US is having serious effects.
Ninety-seven percent of fentanyl production is in China, which is why Washington asked Beijing to help stop the continuous production.
However, China only cooperates with the US on the surface, while supporting manufacturers and factories to produce large quantities of the drug behind the scenes.
China seems to believe that exports of fentanyl can make the people of the US and other countries addicted to it. Then it would be able to take control of the world in the long run.
However, China’s approach is unwise.
Although it has blocked Chinese in its territory from learning about fentanyl, it fails to consider that this approach would harm others without benefiting itself.
With the development of the Internet, people can learn about the drug by breaching the Great Firewall of China.
Moreover, overseas Chinese are in contact with people at home at all times.
Once the drug starts to spread in China, its own people would be in danger as well.
Such an approach that is harmful to others and to itself is undesirable indeed.
Lin Hui
Taipei
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
Last week, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), together holding more than half of the legislative seats, cut about NT$94 billion (US$2.85 billion) from the yearly budget. The cuts include 60 percent of the government’s advertising budget, 10 percent of administrative expenses, 3 percent of the military budget, and 60 percent of the international travel, overseas education and training allowances. In addition, the two parties have proposed freezing the budgets of many ministries and departments, including NT$1.8 billion from the Ministry of National Defense’s Indigenous Defense Submarine program — 90 percent of the program’s proposed
RSS