Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

Japan's political environment underwent yet another virtual earthquake in the past week with the departure of Democratic Party of Japan prime minister Hatoyama Yukio after less than nine months in office and his replacement as DPJ president and prime minister by his former deputy prime minister and finance minister Kan Naoto Tuesday.

Hatoyama had entered office last September on a wave of popular expectations after the centrist DPJ swept last August's Diet lower house elections and ended over two decades of consecutive conservative Liberal Democratic Party rule.

Last week's veto by the right-wing Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang) government of a petition by over 100,000 citizens for a referendum on the bitterly controversial "Cross-Strait Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement" with the authoritarian People's Republic of China has exposed the KMT's use of Orwellian "double speak" to prevent any genuine exercise of democratic democracy in Taiwan.

The "justification" for Thursday's veto by the KMT-controlled "Referendum Review Committee" of the petition submitted by the Taiwan Solidarity Union on the question "Do you approve or do you not approve the signing of an Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement by the government with China?" had been published in the "China Times" May 24 in an open letter to the RRC by KMT unificationist ideologue and lawyer Chen Chang-wen.