Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

During his visit to Shanghai last week, Greater Tainan Mayor William Lai (賴清德) broke out of the constraints imposed by China on its relations with Taiwan by openly talking about Taiwanese independence and the 1989 Tiananmen Square student movement. Lai dared to do so because he adheres to Taiwan-centric values and has always been concerned about human rights issues.

President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) has done many things to sell the nation out, leading to the outbreak of the student-led Sunflower protest movement. As young people in Taiwan take matters into their own hands and come forward to salvage the nation’s prospects, Lai has had the courage to seize the opportunity by speaking out in China, confident that there is a strong current of public opinion to back him up.

The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) are like identical twins. They think the same way, use the same methods and say the same things.

When local civic organizations began to push for a referendum on the construction of the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant in Gongliao District (貢寮), New Taipei City, among the communities in the plant’s evacuation zone — Taipei, New Taipei City, Keelung, and Yilan City — the KMT tried to play down the scale of the opposition by saying that it is a national rather than a local issue, and that a referendum should be national. The hope was that regardless of how much opposition there was in the communities included in the evacuation zone, they would be outvoted at the national level.