Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

Chinese aren’t going to end the economic crisis

Larry Elliott

China is heading for big trouble. Fearful of a political backlash from the sort of deep recession being suffered in the west, Beijing has embarked on a program of reckless expansion that is providing short-term gain at the expense of long-term pain.

This is an unfashionable view. The conventional wisdom is that China has taken the bold steps necessary to tackle the global downturn, and that its mixture of Keynesian pump-priming and Leninist centralised control will help drag the rest of the world back to prosperity.

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.

More Articles...