Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

ANALYSIS: Taiwan's negotiators not on the ball

Taipei Times

The recent dispute between Taipei and Beijing over additional cross-strait flights highlights the administration’s need to improve its negotiating skills, analysts said.

Taiwan suspended five cross-strait flights operated by Chinese airlines in retaliation for decisions by Beijing that affect Taiwanese airlines. The dispute centers around the distribution of 50 flights added to the schedule after negotiations in May.

Taiwan lacks food security strategy

Taipei Times Editorial

In an attempt to quell the escalating Dapu Borough (大埔) farmland expropriation controversy Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) called a press conference with Miaoli County Commissioner Liu Cheng-hung (劉政鴻), Minister of Agriculture Chen Wu-hsiung (陳武雄) and Minister of the Interior Jiang Yi-huah (江宜樺) on Thursday.

During the conference, Wu declined to promise that more agricultural areas would not be seized for future development projects, but he did say that food security is an area of national strategic importance.

Taiwan's Hybrid Nature: its Strength and its Hope

Jerome F. Keating Ph.D.

Most short and long term visitors to Taiwan will comment on its unique characteristics, culture and style. Taiwan has an identity that makes it clearly different from all its neighbors; further its people are hardy, resilient and adaptive. Why? This is no doubt more than just the result of historical experience and development; it may also be its nature. Theorists certainly wonder how and why after century upon century of diverse colonizers, with each striving to impose its brand of imagined community on it, Taiwan has still managed to develop its own characteristics and culture. I posit that Taiwan did this not so much by rejection, but by absorbing the colonizing cultures and cross breeding them into its own indigenous ways and stock. In other words, Taiwanese have forged what can be called their own unique hybrid culture and way, the Taiwanese way.

Land seizure comes under fire

Taipei Times

In the wake of the Miaoli County Government’s forced seizure of farmland in Jhunan Township’s (竹南) Dapu Borough (大埔), residents of Taipei County’s Gongliao Township (貢寮) are worried about the possible ecological impact of a plan to take over wetlands in Tianliaoyang Village (田寮洋) and turn the area into a housing complex.

According to a plan initiated by the Council for Economic Planning and Development (CEPD) in March, a total of 688.5 hectares of land in Gongliao would be expropriated to sell to major corporations to build hotels or housing complexes.

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