Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

US port calls benefit Taiwan

Taipei Times Editorial

The Ministry of National Defense on Wednesday confirmed that a US warship had earlier in the week sailed through the Taiwan Strait, the ninth such transit this year.

The US Seventh Fleet said that the transits were part of “operations in support of security and stability in the Indo-Pacific region,” while analysts suggested that the transits might be in response to China’s increased pressure on Taiwan.

Reading between the lines

Taipei Times Editorial

The US-China Economic and Security Review Commission on Thursday published its Annual Report to Congress, which should make for interesting reading not only in Washington, but also in Taipei — in the Presidential Office, the ministries of foreign affairs and national defense, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and elsewhere — especially chapters 5 and 6, which cover Taiwan and Hong Kong.

The commission’s members are not wearing the West’s decades-old blinders — that engagement with China could lead to meaningful reform — but see that Beijing has become a clear threat to democracy not just in Asia, but around the world.

Slavery on China’s plantations

Taipei Times Editorial

The Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 set into motion the liberation of slaves from the shackles of forced labor in US cotton plantations. It almost beggars belief that 156 years later, the cotton industry has again become mired in slavery — but this time on another continent, in China’s Xinjiang.

The Wall Street Journal in May reported on forced labor in Xinjiang’s cotton sector, lifting the lid on the industry’s dirty secret and implicating some of the world’s largest fashion brands, including H&M, Esprit and Adidas, in modern-day slavery.

Protests ‘blossom everywhere,’ HK facing ‘collapse’

Taipei Times

Riot police run down a road covered with bricks in the Central business district of Hong Kong yesterday.
Photo: Bloomberg

Pro-democracy protesters yesterday stepped up a “blossom everywhere” campaign of road blocks and vandalism across Hong Kong that has crippled the territory this week and ignited some of the worst violence in five months of unrest.

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