Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

In a perfectly apt scene involving barbed wire barricades and hundreds of police officers, National Taiwan Democracy Memorial Hall was restored yesterday to its original name, the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall.

It was no small irony that the reversal occurred almost 22 years to the day since the lifting of martial law, declared in 1949 by dictator Chiang Kai-shek himself. What followed were decades of the White Terror, during which thousands of Taiwanese and Chinese who opposed Chiang’s rule were murdered — both at home and abroad — or disappeared.

The Chinese-language Commercial Times published an editorial on July 9 titled “Why has the scale of Taiwan’s exports decreased to half of South Korea’s?” The editorial said the government’s biased tax incentives and industrial policies have caused an excessive concentration of resources in the semiconductor and flat-panel sectors. This means Taiwan is easily affected by shifts in the economic climate, and this is also why the recovery of Taiwan’s exports has fallen behind South Korea and other major trading countries.