The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT)-dominated legislature is expected to ratify the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) and amendments to related legislation as early as tomorrow after a consensus on how to review the pact was reached yesterday.

The consensus, pending confirmation at the legislature’s plenary session today, is expected to defuse the possibility of a boycott by Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lawmakers should they be denied the right to vote on the agreement article by article.

China’s military thinking is outmoded and should learn from others, especially the US when it comes to modernizing its vast armed forces, a leading armed forces newspaper said yesterday.

A commentary in the People’s Liberation Army Daily said modernizing China’s military was central to reforms which have seen heavy investment in high-tech weapons like advanced fighter jets.

The pages of this newspaper and other liberal publications are filled with beautiful slogans about the need to “protect” Taiwan based on lofty principles such as democracy, justice and human rights. Commendable as these prescriptions may be, in and of themselves they are impotent in the face of the present challenges confronting this nation.

Although the intentions of the opinion writers who propose such measures are undoubtedly honorable, their prose often lacks the rigorous intellectual inquisitiveness that would give them true meaning, leaving us with little more than a constellation of presumptuous abstracts. In fact, more often than not, the ideals they espouse are at best a means to contrast what the authors are trying to protect with the entity that poses the most formidable threat to it — China.