Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

Court ruling leaves a bad taste

Taipei Times Editorial

The Taiwan High Court decision this week to uphold a 30-day jail sentence given to a blogger for criticizing a restaurant is a chilling reminder of how young the concept of free speech and a free press is in this country.

The court’s Taichung branch sentenced a woman to 30 days in detention and two years of probation, and ordered her to pay NT$200,000 in compensation to a beef noodle restaurant over a July 2008 blog post saying the food was “too salty,” the place had cockroaches and was unsanitary and that the owner was a “bully” because of parking issues. The restaurant owner sued the blogger for defamation. The case went to the High Court after the blogger appealed a 30-day detention order handed down by the Taichung District Court, which said her criticism had exceeded reasonable bounds.

Experts call for US, China policy shift to avoid war

Taipei Times

Experts told a conference in Washington on Wednesday that to avoid war over Taiwan, Beijing and Washington must change their current policies.

“China must renounce the use of force against Taiwan or Washington must declare clearly, unequivocally and publicly that it will defend Taiwan against Chinese attack,” said Joseph Bosco, who served in the office of the US secretary of defense as a China country desk officer in 2005 and 2006.

The US, China and Taiwan urgently need a “declaration of strategic clarity,” he said.

Quoting former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger, Bosco said that while ambiguity was sometimes the lifeblood of diplomacy, it could not be maintained indefinitely.

Ma doesn’t understand the status of Taiwan

HoonTing 雲程

In an interview with the Associated Press (AP) in October last year, President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) revealed that he planned to conclude political agreements with China during his second term. Ma was forced to deny the report, ascribing the claims about his unification plot to a translation error on the part of the AP.

However, when he received German politician Hermann Otto Solms on June 14, Ma promoted his “mutual non-recognition of sovereignty and mutual non-denial of jurisdiction” with Beijing, erroneously comparing his hush-hush reconciliation with China to the 1972 Basic Treaty between West and East Germany.

Ma’s aspiration to force Taiwan to unite with China never wanes. He seems obsessed with legitimating unification.

Who’s in charge of policymaking?

J. Michael Cole 寇謐將

More and more, China’s Taiwan Affairs Office (TAO) is behaving as if Taiwan were under the administrative control of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Two recent instances suffice to highlight the matter — one involving a soon-to-be-implemented policy allowing individual Chinese to travel to Taiwan and the other concerning reports that the Taiwanese navy would send vessels to patrol waters surrounding contested islands in the South China Sea.

In both cases, comments by TAO officials purposefully gave the impression that real decision--making powers existed not in Taipei, but rather in Beijing. Whether those comments were propaganda efforts or stemmed from a firm, if confabulatory belief that this is the case is not as important as the fact that the government in Taipei failed to counter the claims with the decisiveness that the situation called for.

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