Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

Ma needs a lesson in leadership

Taipei Times

When a natural disaster strikes, an analogy is often drawn between a government’s disaster relief efforts and that of its military going to battle. By this analogy, the government lost the battle of Typhoon Morakot.

President Ma Ying-jeou, as commander-in-chief, must shoulder responsibility.

Ma Ying-jeou, When Images Are Not Enough!

Jerome F. Keating Ph.D.

What world does Ma Ying-jeou live in? A clear and painful result of Typhoon Morakot has been that it is a world of images, a world of images past and images present. It is a world of imaginary images, imaginary images that have been built on, fostered and fashioned by years and years of faulty Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) paradigms and reinforced by their propaganda. True in the mind of Ma Ying-jeou, his party and his spin-masters, image has always trumped performance and/or reality. But Taiwanese are finally realizing this. They are not only realizing this but they are also realizing that regardless of and contrary to his words, Ma has no idea of what it is to be Taiwanese.

Why the US will lead the ‘Asian century’

John Lee

Not a week passes, it seems, without a big-picture thinker releasing a big-picture book or giving a big-picture sermon describing the gradual eclipse of US hegemony in Asia. True, US power will inevitably decline in relative terms as Asian giants such as China and India rise. But, at least as far as Asia is concerned, arguments about the end of US hegemony ring hollow. For one thing, the US was never a hegemon in Asia. Only some US post-Cold War triumphalists thought it was. The nature of US power and the exercise of its influence was always much more clever and subtle than most assume. In fact, as India and China rise, the US could actually find itself in a stronger position.

Typhoon Morakot, a Painful Reminder of Ma Ying-jeou and the Peter Principle

Jerome F. Keating Ph.D.

With the government's mis-handling of Typhoon Morakot, many have finally come to realize how Ma Ying-jeou exemplifies the Peter Principle--a person that rises to the level of his/her incompetence. For perceptive Ma-watchers this was already evident when Ma was mayor of Taipei. Unfortunately for Taiwan, the general public is often distracted and swayed by promises (Ma's forte) rather than performance and so it only listed to Ma and elected him to the Presidency based on his 6-3-3 promise of economic prosperity. Chang Jung-feng, the National Security Council deputy secretary-general under Lee Teng-hui recently spoke to this and gave the public a painful reminder by saying. "Now as president, he (Ma) is expanding the scope of his ineptitude from the municipal level to a national scale."

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