Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

The Next Step: Taiwan Needs New Leadership for 2012

Jerome F. Keating Ph.D.

The January 2012 presidential elections draw near and Taiwan's citizens must do some serious soul searching. As they look back at the past four years under Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) president Ma Ying-jeou, basic questions must be asked. "Is Taiwan better off now than it was back in 2008? Has the economy and overall status of the nation improved significantly since Ma's infamous 6-3-3 promise?" No president could have stepped into office with a better position and with better support than Ma. Not only did he receive some 58 per cent of the vote, but also by disproportionate representation in the Legislative Yuan (the pan-blue alliance had only 54 per cent of the vote), Ma was able to get an unstoppable 76 per cent majority of the seats. With this majority Ma should have achieved anything he wanted; he could have established any desired progressive programs. What more could a president ask for? This was the ticket for great achievement. Progress would be a walk in the park for an average president; for a competent president it would mean fantastic strides for Taiwan, so what happened? Instead of four years of wished for progress, Taiwan has had four years of mediocre stagnation.

Memorial held for Chen Wen-cheng at NTU site

Taipei Times

More than 100 people gathered yesterday evening at National Taiwan University (NTU) in memory of former Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) assistant professor Chen Wen-cheng (陳文成), whose death 30 years ago remains a mystery to this day.

Chen, a graduate of NTU’s Department of Mathematics, went to study in the US and later became an assistant professor at CMU’s Department of Statistics.

He was called by the Taiwan Garrison Command — a military state security agency during the Martial Law era — for interrogation on July 2, 1981, when he returned to Taiwan to visit his family, because of his support for the pro-democracy movement.

Lee dismisses corruption charges

Taipei Times

Former president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) yesterday said he was innocent and dismissed the corruption charges against him as groundless.

In a speech made one day after being indicted on charges of embezzling state funds, the 88-year-old said he did not want to go into details of the case as they “simply came out of the prosecutors’ own heads,” adding that as an old man, “I don’t fear death, let alone these oppression tactics.”

Lee, the nation’s first democratically elected president, is the second former president to be charged with corruption and money laundering after Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) was found guilty by the Supreme Court last year.

A nation, a democracy kidnapped by the KMT

James Wang 王景弘

In defiance of democracy and public opinion, deep-blue forces advocate that there is only one China and eventual unification is inevitable, that the Republic of China (ROC) Army and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) are both China’s armies, that cross-strait relations are domestic affairs involving international factors and that without the ROC Constitution it would be very difficult to advance cross-strait relations. These dark-blue opinions display a kidnapper mentality.

The deep-blue supporters mainly come from the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) Huang Fu-hsing (黃復興) branch, a special branch of the KMT whose members are military veterans or their family members. The implied meaning of the name is “descendants of the Yan and Yellow emperors; revive China.” From its inception, Huang Fu-hsing consisted mostly of key players from the army’s KMT party headquarters, popularly known as the Wang Shih-kai (王師凱) headquarters, which had an even more imperial ring to it and was specifically established to ensure loyalty to the party. They fled to Taiwan together with Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), proudly carrying the anti-communist banner, eventually became the rulers of Taiwan, and rapidly rose in rank and status. Now, as they approach old age, they wish to abduct Taiwan and accept China’s annexation of the nation.

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