Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

The limits of Ma's achievements

Taipei Times

President Ma Ying-jeou has touted the Maokong Gondola and the Mass Rapid Transit system’s Neihu Line as two major achievements of his eight-year stint as the mayor of Taipei. To highlight his role as a key figure in making these projects possible, Ma was invited by Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin to take part in the inauguration of the gondola in July last year and the Neihu Line earlier this month.

But neither project has covered itself with glory, with the former struggling to justify the massive amount invested to provide the public with a sound and safe mode of transportation.

As the World Turns in Taiwan I: Junket Time

Jerome F. Keating Ph.D.

The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) forum has begun in China. This is a party to party forum initiated in 2005 by the two leaders (KMT Lien Chan and CCP Hu Jintao); neither one of them has ever won a democratic election; that should tell you something about the nature of the forum. It is party to party, but in his own way of dodging the truth, Ma Ying-jeou wants to call it a cross-strait forum. He knows party to party talks cannot justify a basis for policy, but he does not want to give outsiders any real power in it. They will only be "special guests."

Detained by a lawless judiciary

Chi-yao Huang

Astonishingly, the Taipei District Court again ruled to continue the detention of former president Chen Shui-bian. In doing so, the court flouted international human rights legislation as well as the fact that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights have been signed into Taiwanese law.

Why 2012 will be a deadly deadline

J. Michael Cole

At no time since the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government fled to Taiwan has the Chinese Communist Party been so close to accomplishing its objective of annexing Taiwan.

Rather than achieve this through threat of force or diplomatic pressure, Beijing is using economic integration — a process launched soon after President Ma Ying-jeou came to office last year — to reel Taiwan in.

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