Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

The tyrant is back in the hall

Taipei Times

In a perfectly apt scene involving barbed wire barricades and hundreds of police officers, National Taiwan Democracy Memorial Hall was restored yesterday to its original name, the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall.

It was no small irony that the reversal occurred almost 22 years to the day since the lifting of martial law, declared in 1949 by dictator Chiang Kai-shek himself. What followed were decades of the White Terror, during which thousands of Taiwanese and Chinese who opposed Chiang’s rule were murdered — both at home and abroad — or disappeared.

Taiwanese should blame themselves

Tien-lin Huang

The Chinese-language Commercial Times published an editorial on July 9 titled “Why has the scale of Taiwan’s exports decreased to half of South Korea’s?” The editorial said the government’s biased tax incentives and industrial policies have caused an excessive concentration of resources in the semiconductor and flat-panel sectors. This means Taiwan is easily affected by shifts in the economic climate, and this is also why the recovery of Taiwan’s exports has fallen behind South Korea and other major trading countries.

As the World Turns in Taiwan II: More Games than One In Kaohsiung

Jerome F. Keating Ph.D.

Kaohsiung, Taiwan is gloriously hosting the 8th World Games this year and some 105 countries are here to participate. But the World Games are not the only game in town. Last year when Chen Yunlin from China visited the country, Ma Ying-jeou did not want to admit he was president in front of him. He was introduced as Mr. Ma so as not to offend China. This year, however, things are different. Ma opened the games as the President of Taiwan. So why the change?

China and Chinese are al-Qaeda's new target

J. Michael Cole

Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), an Algeria-based offshoot of al-Qaeda, has reportedly threatened to target Chinese interests overseas in retaliation for Beijing’s crackdown against Uighurs in Xinjiang last week in which 192 people were killed.

Quoting a security consultancy, the South China Morning Post wrote that while AQIM — a loose umbrella for North African extremist organizations, according to terrorism experts — was the first al-Qaeda-linked group to issue such a threat against China, others were likely to follow.

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