Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

China must sort out HK’s problems

Sin-ming Shaw 邵新明

The massive public demonstrations by students and young members of the middle class that have roiled Hong Kong in recent weeks are ostensibly demands for democracy. However, they actually reflect frustration among a population that has been poorly governed by a succession of leaders picked by China’s central government more for their loyalty than their competence.

In fact, the current near-uprising is the culmination of a long series of demonstrations since Hong Kong’s handover by the UK to China in 1997, after former Hong Kong governor Chris Patten, the last British governor, failed to persuade Beijing to allow Hong Kong to establish a genuine democratic government.

KMT resorts to Potemkin trickery

Taipei Times Editorial

While it is inevitable that incumbent officials have more advantages than their rivals when it comes to campaigning, the amount of resources the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government is throwing into its nominees’ campaigns in the Nov. 29 nine-in-one elections is still astonishing.

In Taiwan or elsewhere in the world, incumbent candidates are typically able to promote themselves through advertisements paid for by the government, and this is usually a gray area that can be tolerated by most people. However, the actions of the KMT in the Taipei mayoral race have gone far beyond the boundaries of this tacit consent.

Piketty’s theories arising in Taiwan

HuangTien-lin 黃天麟

French economist Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century has received rave reviews, with some calling it a masterpiece that might change global capitalism in the 21st century.

The main idea expressed in Piketty’s book is that economic growth represents the rate at which the average wealth of society as a whole increases and that return on capital represents the average rate of increase in capital wealth. If the government allows the rate of return on capital to remain higher than the economic growth rate, the wealth of capitalists grows faster than the average.

Ma would never have card declined

James Wang 王景弘

US President Barack Obama has had some bad luck recently.

First, two former US secretaries of defense and one former secretary of state appointed by him have published their memoirs, in which they accuse him of being indecisive and lacking a clear direction.

Second, his credit card was declined when he tried to pay for a meal at a New York restaurant while attending a meeting of the UN General Assembly.

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