Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

A leading US expert on the Chinese military says that by 2020, Beijing could have 2,000 or more missiles, nearly 1,000 modern combat aircraft, 60 modern submarines and a potential invasion force of many hundreds of thousands of troops “pointed at Taiwan.”

Richard Fisher, a senior fellow with the International Assessment and Strategy Center near Washington, warned in an article in the Wall Street Journal that the US “should be under no illusion about Beijing’s motives.”

He says that while President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) has made historic progress in defusing tensions with China, Beijing has signaled that it wants to end Taiwan’s democratic era.

Two years after the onslaught of Typhoon Morakot, the predictions in the book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein are unfortunately being played out. The state, business, charities and other social control organizations are using this “opportunity” to force Aborigines down from the mountains, taking them away from their homes in order to get their hands on their traditional territory.

By contrast, the Aboriginal filmmaker Maywa Biho’s film Light up My Life shows how Aborigines are working hard to turn their situation around, with young Aborigines returning to the Kanakanavu tribe to start growing millet and other traditional crops again.