Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

KMT needs to go for the nation to be reinvented

Lee Min-yung 李敏勇

President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) has performed poorly during his time in office; his campaign slogan “total government, total responsibility” is nothing but empty words. Ma is a true politician. He excels in taking credit for things that go right and passing the buck when they go wrong.

Ma exploits former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) for his own political benefit, using him to foment ethnic tensions through Chen’s continued imprisonment. As a result, non-violent democratic reforms have been tainted by confrontation between the ruling Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and opposition camps. Although Ma named the plaza at Ketagalan Boulevard in front of the Presidential Office Building the “democratic plaza against corruption,” it should have been called the “corruption plaza against democracy.” What an embarrassment.

HK protests may have cost Beijing Taiwan: academic

Taipei Times

Pro-democracy protesters chat at a protest site in the Mongkok district of Hong Kong yesterday. More than a month after tens of thousands of Hong Kongers took to the streets demanding free leadership elections for the semi-autonomous Chinese city, weary demonstrators remain encamped across several major roads.
Photo: AFP

China may have “lost” Taiwan as a result of its ham-fisted handling of the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, a Washington conference was told this week.

“There is no sense on the island now, if there ever was one, to buy into this ‘one country, two systems’ formula,” George Washington University professor David Shambaugh said.

Dealing with dirty cooking oil cash

Chin Heng-wei 金恆煒

In the Bible, Jesus says: “Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”

It is a familiar saying and has spawned many similar phrases: “Politics is politics and economy is economy”; “politics is politics and the law is the law”; and even: “Art is art and administration is administration.”

The most recent is “education is education,” which was used by National Sun Yat-sen University in an attempt to deflect concern that they had received money from Ting Hsin International Group (頂新國際集團).

Name-change activists being harassed: groups

Taipei Times

Aboriginal and civic groups yesterday protest in front of the National Police Agency against what they say has been police harassment of Aborigines who participated in spraying graffiti on the facade of the Guangfu Township Office in Hualien County last month.
Photo courtesy of the Association for Taiwan Indigenous Peoples’ Policy

Aboriginal and civic groups yesterday accused the government of conducting a “political witch hunt” with its pursuit of activists who spray-painted the Guangfu Township (光復) Office building in Hualien County to demand the restoration of Aboriginal names to tribal areas.

Early on Oct. 19, the Fa-Ta Alliance for Attack and Defense (馬太攻守聯盟), an Aboriginal group with members from the local Fataan and Tafalong communities in Hualien, painted graffiti on the facade of the office reading: “The land is the eternal nation” and “Whose restoration [(光復, guangfu)]? Names [of places] should be left to the master of the land,” along with the Aboriginal names of the two tribes.

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