Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

Can ECFA negotiations be trusted?

Taipei Times

The government’s atrocious handling of the expansion of US beef imports — opaque, peremptory and confused, regardless of the merits of the products — is becoming a real cause for concern in terms of the bigger picture: cross-strait detente, and particularly a proposed economic pact with China.

The PRC’s malign currency policy

Thomas I. Palley

Over the last several weeks, the US dollar’s depreciation against the euro and yen has grabbed global attention. In a normal world, the dollar’s weakening would be welcome, as it would help the US come to grips with its unsustainable trade deficit. But in a world where China links its currency to the dollar at an undervalued parity, the dollar’s depreciation risks major global economic damage that will further complicate recovery from the worldwide recession.

Accountability is issue in Taiwan-U.S. beef flap

Taiwan News

Yesterday's consensus among all parties in the Legislative Yuan to rapidly approve a legal ban on the importation of beef products with especially high risk of contamination of "mad cow disease" sent an important message to President Ma Ying-jeou's Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang) government and decision-makers in Washington and Beijing that voices of the Taiwan people cannot be ignored.

Death will not silence the protests

Taipei Times

If China hopes to quell unrest in Xinjiang by kidnapping, jailing or even executing scores of Uighurs, the results will fall short. Decades of oppression — economic, cultural, religious and linguistic — have at times welled into protests or riots in China’s biggest territory, as seen again this summer. Clamping down further on the region, history tells us, is more likely to fuel unrest than squash it.

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