Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

Former vice president Annette Lu (呂秀蓮) yesterday called on members of the pan-green camp to raise money for Hung Mao-kun (洪茂坤), one of the founding members of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), who fell into financial difficulies after requiring expensive targeted therapy for liver cancer.

Hung was hospitalized in November last year to undergo Transarterial Chemoembolization (TACE) surgery to treat a liver tumor, often a precursor to liver cancer.

The surgery was not successful and cancer cells were discovered during hospitalization, said Hung, who left hospital after 97 days.

Many pundits in North America and Asia often talk about Taiwan being the first Chinese democracy in the world, but this way of phrasing it is not correct. What most journalists and opinion-shapers in the West have not yet woken up to is that an important paradigm shift and change of perspective has taken place an Asia, and it is this: Taiwan is not the first Chinese democracy; Taiwan is the first Taiwanese democracy. Give credit where it is due.

This may seem like word play to American readers, but behind it lies their continuing misunderstanding and misinterpretation of Taiwanese history. In that history, Taiwan or parts of the island have been ruled by various colonial powers, including the Dutch, the Spanish, the fleeing Ming diaspora, and the Manchu Qing, among others. Japan, it should be noted, was the first colonial power to rule and control the entire island of Taiwan; that was from 1895 to 1945.