Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

China’s centuries of humiliation

Jerome Keating

Anyone who has been in Asia for any length of time cannot avoid having heard China’s oft-repeated canard of its “century of humiliation.” It is an ironic canard that usually comes up to defend China’s current hegemony. The century referred to, of course, is the 19th century, when from the Opium Wars on up to the Boxer Rebellion, foreign powers pressured the weakening Manchu Qing government to open treaty ports and allow spheres of influence within major Chinese cities. The irony increases when it is used to garner sympathy, which works until one begins to examine more closely the surrounding details, where the anomalies begin.

Pact brings little benefit: US academic

Taipei Times

The cross-strait service trade agreement is a “perfect political agreement” to bring Taiwan into China’s fold and presents no economic benefits to Taiwan, US academic John Tkacik said.

Tkacik, senior fellow at the Virginia-based International Assessment and Strategy Center, made the remarks on Saturday at a forum in Taipei hosted by the World Taiwanese Congress and the Taiwan National Alliance.

Thousands of Chinese ‘missing’ in Taiwan

Taipei Times

Taiwan Solidarity Union lawmakers yesterday called into question the effectiveness of the government’s border control measures, accusing authorities of being lax in keeping tabs on Chinese visitors entering the country.

Without identifying their source, the legislators said that since 1988, a total of 2,768 Chinese nationals have overstayed their permits to visit Taiwan, while 2,327 others entered the nation and are unaccounted for.

Nuclear waste will waste Taiwan

Gloria Hsu 徐光蓉

It has been three years since the Tohoku earthquake struck Japan on March 11, 2011. If the resulting damage had been limited to that caused by the quake and ensuing tsunami, Japan would have finished rebuilding long ago, but the meltdown at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant caused by the natural disasters means that reconstruction efforts are far from done.

The Fukushima meltdown was not the first time that several nuclear reactors have gone out of control at once and it was later discovered that an even greater danger was posed by the plant’s interim storage facility and the highly radioactive spent fuel rods being kept there.

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