Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

KMT uses 'double speak' to spike Taiwan referenda

Taiwan News Editorial

Last week's veto by the right-wing Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang) government of a petition by over 100,000 citizens for a referendum on the bitterly controversial "Cross-Strait Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement" with the authoritarian People's Republic of China has exposed the KMT's use of Orwellian "double speak" to prevent any genuine exercise of democratic democracy in Taiwan.

The "justification" for Thursday's veto by the KMT-controlled "Referendum Review Committee" of the petition submitted by the Taiwan Solidarity Union on the question "Do you approve or do you not approve the signing of an Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement by the government with China?" had been published in the "China Times" May 24 in an open letter to the RRC by KMT unificationist ideologue and lawyer Chen Chang-wen.

Mayor’s competence questioned

Taipei Times Editorial

“When written in Chinese, the word ‘crisis’ [危機] is composed of two characters — one represents danger and the other represents opportunity,” former US president John F. Kennedy said.

The quote surely comes as an apt description of the situation currently facing embattled Taichung Mayor Jason Hu (胡志強), who’s been engulfed in a controversy over seemingly dubious ties between the police and the underworld and questionable police integrity following a shooting on May 28, in which four Taichung police officers were found at the scene yet failed to intervene.

Chen acquitted on graft charge

Taipei Times

The Taipei District Court yesterday acquitted former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) in an embezzlement case involving US$330,000 in secret diplomatic funds.

The court ruling said that evidence provided by prosecutors failed to prove that Chen had embezzled diplomatic funds, court spokesman Huang Chun-ming (黃俊明) said.

Forum told Taiwanese Castro will emerge

Taipei Times

A political strongman in the mold of former Cuban president Fidel Castro is likely to emerge in Taiwan to resist China’s economic interference should the proposed economic cooperation framework agreement (ECFA) with Beijing ravage the middle-classes and benefit only large corporations, an expert attending a forum on the ECFA said yesterday.

Hsu Chung-hsin, a law professor at National Cheng Kung University, said once China took over Taiwan’s economy, even if Taiwan was still politically independent, a candidate with a radical platform was likely to be elected because the public would likely no longer be able to stand the yawning chasm between rich and poor and the stagnation of salaries.

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