Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

The price of incompetent leadership

Taipei Times

It is now a week since Typhoon Morakot struck Taiwan. Amid growing public anger, the government is struggling to demonstrate that it can handle this crisis and its formidable ramifications.

Even now, thousands of people remain trapped in mountain villages — running out of food and running out of time. The risk of disease is growing. Official rescue efforts, including military helicopters and special squads on the ground, are finally beginning to resemble an operation that reflects a disaster of this enormity.

How can Ma appease the military?

J. Michael Cole

President Ma Ying-jeou’s Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) administration is now bound and driven by big business and financial institutions to a degree that is probably unprecedented in the history of the party.

Given the close relationship between big business, the banking sector and the KMT, it comes as no surprise that Ma’s cross-strait policies have been tremendously beneficial to those sectors.

A muted response to real disaster

Taipei Times

Over the past few days, volunteers and Netizens across the nation have turned their compassion into action, serving as rescue workers and searching for typhoon victims and transporting relief aid, or donating money and disseminating rescue and missing persons information via e-mail, Twitter, Plurk, Facebook and other social networking Web sites.

Yet the broadcast and print media continue to be filled with heartrending images of frightened survivors recounting narrow escapes, tearful villages wailing for their missing or dead loved ones and horrifying scenes of villages annihilated by water, rocks and mudslides.

A president far from his people

Taipei Times

As hundreds of people wait for news of missing loved ones and hundreds of thousands mourn the damage to their towns, homes, shops and fields, solace is needed as urgently as relief efforts. But victims of Typhoon Morakot looking to President Ma Ying-jeou for that solace will be disappointed.

More Articles...