Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

When USSR Disintegration Meets Japan's Lost Decade

Leo Wang

In one word – China.

The recent international media's reporting on suicides and labor unrest at the 400,000 employee Foxconn factory near Shenzhen got me thinking. Here are some gathered notes and musings:

Foxconn raises could change China

Taipei Times Editorial

Hon Hai Group (鴻海集團) has announced two salary raises in a week for its Foxconn plant in Shenzhen, resulting in a total raise of 122 percent. The event has shaken the Taiwanese stock market, shocked Taiwanese businesspeople along the southern China coast and changed the environment for China’s export-oriented processing industry. Many Taiwanese investors and other foreign businesspeople now worry that the era when China was a low-cost paradise has come to an end with Hon Hai’s massive salary increases.

Japan's new government and Taiwan's opportunity

Taiwan News Editorial

Japan's political environment underwent yet another virtual earthquake in the past week with the departure of Democratic Party of Japan prime minister Hatoyama Yukio after less than nine months in office and his replacement as DPJ president and prime minister by his former deputy prime minister and finance minister Kan Naoto Tuesday.

Hatoyama had entered office last September on a wave of popular expectations after the centrist DPJ swept last August's Diet lower house elections and ended over two decades of consecutive conservative Liberal Democratic Party rule.

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.

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