Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

How ECFA threatens Taiwan news freedom

Taiwan News Editorial

Taiwan will face greater challenges in defending existing hard-won levels of news freedom in the wake of the signing of the controversial "Cross-Strait Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement" with the authoritarian People's Republic of China.

In stark contrast to the pollyannaish attitude of President Ma Ying-jeou's rightist Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang) government, a new report by the Legal Research Bureau and the Budget Center of the Legislative Yuan on the impact of ECFA on Taiwan warned that Taiwan's government and citizens cannot ignore the "contradictions" between the broadcasting and news media systems of Taiwan and the PRC especially since "news freedom is an important index in evaluating the degree of national democratization."

ANALYSIS: US to defer arms sales to next year: analysts

Taipei Times

US officials will defer any major new arms sales to Taiwan until at least next year as Beijing steps up pressure on Washington, where mending Sino-US ties is a priority, defense analysts say.

Sales of anything more than minor parts or low-end upgrades will wait until early next year, possibly much longer, letting Taiwan trail further in the balance of power against China, but advancing relations between the two superpowers, analysts say.

Dead fish thrown at Executive Yuan

Taipei Times

Yunlin County Commissioner Su Chih-feng (蘇治芬) and a group of Mailiao Township (麥寮) residents yesterday appealed to Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) and the government to listen to their complaints about pollution from a naphtha cracker in their town.

Braving the scorching sun, the protesters knelt in front of the Executive Yuan during their protest. They also threw dead fish and clams that had been found days after a fire broke out in a residual desulphurizer at Formosa Petrochemical Corp’s petrochemical complex on Sunday night.

China-based businesses lack loyalty to Taiwan

James Wang 王景弘

During the Communist revolution in China, one of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) slogans was that “workers have no motherland.” Nowadays, capitalists advocate globalization based on the view that businesspeople have no motherland. Both are wrong, because both workers and businesspeople have a motherland. The only exceptions are the businesspeople of Taiwan: They exist in limbo, somewhere between having and not having a motherland.

Taiwanese businesspeople who have invested in China are affectionately called “compatriots” by Chinese officials, who welcome them back to “the motherland.” However, according to the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) Constitution they are not citizens of that motherland and so their treatment, for good or for bad, differs from that accorded to their “motherland compatriots.”

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