Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

With Beijing’s hostile rhetoric trumpeted and its saber increasingly rattled, Taiwanese are naturally looking to Japan to supplement and complement US military power. The sense of necessity is considerable since the US has experienced serious relative decline vis-a-vis China, now compounded severely by the protracted war in Ukraine and the Gaza conflict.

The US might not be able to cope with three concurrent major regional conflicts in Europe, the Middle East and Northeast Asia, and thus is an increasingly less reliable sole security guarantor for Taiwan.

With three weeks left until the legislative and presidential elections, the political debates are centered around the controversy surrounding presidential candidates’ properties.

The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) have been targeting the gray-zone status of Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) presidential candidate Vice President William Lai’s (賴清德) old family home, while claiming it to be an illegal structure and with wordplay on Lai’s family name calling it a “shameless shack” (賴皮寮).

Built in an old coal mining area of New Taipei City’s Wanli District (萬里), Lai’s family home was originally a coal miner’s shack, as his father and grandfather were coal miners. A wooden shack was built in the early 1900s, which was later reconstructed as a brick house by Lai’s father.