Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

KMT moves to reverse Taiwan democracy

Taiwan News Editorial

President Ma Ying-jeou and his right-wing Chinese Nationalist Party wrote a new dishonorable page in Taiwan history by ramming a bill through the Legislative Yuan that tramples on the one of the most fundamental of democratic principles, namely the right of citizens to vote and be elected to office for fixed terms.

In a legislative session featuring incessant shoving and occasional slugging, the KMT used its nearly three-fourths majority to ram through revisions to the Local Government Act over intense resistance by the opposition Democratic Progressive Party that will allow the KMT to retain its grip over grassroots administration regardless of who wins year-end mayoral elections for five special metropolises.

Scholar says new probe of Lin family murders is a continuing cover-up

Michael Richardson

Wu Nai-teh, a research scholar at Academia Sinica, has denounced the Taiwan High Prosecutor's office for an incomplete investigation in to the 1980 murder of the family of democracy activist Lin Yi-hsiung.

Lin, a former chairman of the Democratic Progressive Party, was an editor at Formosa Magazine and helped organize a Human Rights Day march in Kaohsiung in December 1979. Provocateurs in the large crowd triggered a police assault against the marchers. In a move to shut down the magazine the Kuomintang government of the Republic of China in-exile brought riot charges against the march organizers and ultimately imposed long prison sentences on eight people.

Drop presidential tour to help Haiti, Taiwan

Taiwan News Editorial

President Ma Ying-jeou should reconsider plans to participate in a controversial presidential inaugural in Honduras and make a transit stop in the earthquake devastated Caribbean nation of Haiti for the sake of both humanitarian assistance and Taiwan's global image.

The Office of the President announced Friday that Ma, who is scheduled to embark next Monday to participate in the controversial inaugural ceremony of Honduran president - elect Porphyra Lobo of the conservative National Party of Honduras (PNH), hopes to make a short stop in Haiti or the neighboring Dominican Republic during the return leg of his six-day excursion.

Gilley’s ‘Finlandization’ is wrong

Nat Bellocchi

The relations between Taiwan, the US and China have given rise to many an academic analysis. This is understandable and even laudable: The network of relations is complex and is open to various interpretations and insights. Many past treatises have made valuable contributions to the understanding of developments between the three countries.

However, once every so often an academic publishes an analysis that is so far removed from reality that it would be dismissed out of hand for its lack of understanding and its outright naivite. Bruce Gilley’s article, titled “Not So Dire Straits” — published in the latest edition of Foreign Affairs (January/February 2010) — is such a work.

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