Taiwan, China, and other things. Recovered from the defunct TypePad platform.
Money for nothin' and your lap dances for free.
(Image from . . . ah, hell, I don't know. This pic's been on my hard drive for ages!)
UPDATE (Jul 22/2009): The original (uncropped) photo was from the October 29th, 2005 edition of the Taipei Times. Can't find it on their website anymore, but here it is at Muzi.com.
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I just KNEW I'd written a post on this topic before. August of 2007 . . . lotta water under the bridge:
Should Chinese Students Be Permitted To Study In Taiwan?
Pretty long (4 screens), but thorough. To be entirely honest, you might be able to get away with skipping the first screen.
Taiwan's China Post, on democracy advocates who insist that a referendum be held on any peace treaty the KMT signs with China which might endanger Taiwanese sovereignty.
In other words, the Taiwanese had better just STFU. The constitution ALLOWS the president to surrender the country to China. Conveniently for him (and the Butchers of Beijing), it DOESN'T ALLOW the unwashed plebs to object via referendum.
(And if they DO, they'll be locked up, or worse. All in full accordance with the "law" — the law which in theory, is there to PROTECT their rights.)
Interestingly enough, a man the Post reveres was also in favor of direct democracy. That man would be Dr. Sun Yat-Sen, the father of the Republic of China. Here's Sun, in his own words:
In reply, someone at the Post might say, "Ah, but Sun wasn't in favor of NATIONAL referendums." Which is true. Here's Sun again:
Hard to see however, how anyone could argue that initiatives and referendums at the LOCAL LEVEL are somehow good and virtuous, while at the same time referendums at the NATIONAL LEVEL (by some miracle of transubstantiation) become unholy, demagogic obscenities.
Wouldn't it be ever so cool to have a Nuremberg Rally Olympic Opening Ceremony every day?
Hard to collect a cash flow from all those pirated DVDs, I guess.
Oh, the IOC is gonna be THRILLED about this. Kinda takes the sense of occasion out of a once-in-every-four-year event, don't it?
But they'll probably cave. Faster than a Szechuan schoolhouse.
UPDATE: Readers may encounter a registration page for the original story in the Financial Times if they've read more than three FT articles over the past month. For those not interested in registering, this blog link contains the full article, verbatim.
UPDATE #2: Just ran across this year-old opinion piece about last year's torch run from an Indian (uh, INDIA-Indian). Interesting to see it from his perspective:
"World domination" may be a bit much. But we can see the Chinese Nationalist Party's idea of allowing PRC police to operate on Taiwanese soil is bound to go just SWIMMINGLY.
UPDATE #3: Chinese black jails. Coming soon to a Taiwanese town near you? (Hat tip to That's Impossible: Politics from Taiwan)
Bonus points if you remember Leo Johnson was the abusive husband from Twin Peaks. Leo comes home one night and gets suspicious of the wife. Seems there are cigarette butts in the ashtray, which aren't the kind Shelly usually buys . . .
Leo is a fictional character.
[…]
Even local schools have been issued with a smoking quota for teachers, while one village was ordered to purchase 400 cartons of cigarettes a year for its officials, according to the local government’s website.
Three “non-compliant” cigarette butts were discovered by the “cigarette marketing consolidate team” which informed the teacher he had violated the related civil servants “cigarette usage rule” After some negotiation the school was spared a fine, but subjected to “public criticism” for “undisciplined practices”.
Pretty lucky no one's neck got snapped like a twig, huh?
(Image of Leo Johnson from MySpace.com)
Hat tip to Counting Cats in Zanzibar for this one.
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Taiwan's Chinese Nationalist Party takes a historical monument — a gate built during the Qing Dynasty — and paints their own party symbol on it. Surprise, surprise.
Really though, if the KMT wasn't so single-mindedly obsessed with their own self-aggrandizement, they'd take the Qing-era site, and paint a Qing Dynasty flag on it.
That would be the rational thing to do. If The Party was even remotely concerned with the preservation of history.
(Image from Photoalbum.Davison.ca)
Of course, this would create the intriguing problem of what to do about historic Japanese-era buildings. Oh, what to do, what to do?
UPDATE: Letters from Taiwan has a post on the subject. Sounds like the KMT culturally vandalized the historic site back in 1966. (Hat tip to The View)
UPDATE #2: More at Arthur Dent's site.
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It's all part of Chinese puppet president on Taiwan Ma Ying-jeou's ingenious Swiss-cheese defense strategy. Build a big wall, then punch holes in it. Or in 21st Century parlance, ask for advanced fighter aircraft — then let spies take pics of military installations with impunity:
[…]
. . . [the Chinese "tourist"] was caught taking photos of military equipment installed at a computer warfare command center that is part of a military recruitment complex on Keelung Road in downtown Taipei. The recruitment center is open to the general public, but the computer warfare command area is a restricted facility.
Guy sneaks into a cyberwarfare center, and the Taiwanese authorities release him without bail. Perish the thought that an honorable Communist Party member such as he would ever abscond !
(Compare that to former president Chen Shui-bian, who's has been held in pre-trial detention for 6 1/2 months. But then, he doesn't have friends in Zhongnanhai places.)
UPDATE: Takes on this from The View from Taiwan and J. Michael Cole.
UPDATE (Jun 3/09): The Chinese spy returns home, scot-free. We'll be seeing a lot of this, I think.
High-class mainlander Comsymps over at Taiwan's China Post, working like stakhanovites to convince Taiwanese to surrender to the Communist Chinese.
Actually, if that's the tack you want to take, then the right to determine one's political status is being trampled right now — by the ROC constitution. And in the complete ABSENCE of any independence referendums! Because it takes all kinds to make a country — Taiwan independence advocates, elderly Japanophiles . . . youthful America lovers:
I am a proud citizen of Taiwan / Japan / America. I want my country to include Taiwan / Japan / America. I refuse to be classified as a citizen of the Republic of China! The R.O.C. constitution is trampling over my right to determine my political status!
A reply to all of them might go something like this:
The classical liberals of the nineteenth century believed that individuals should be free to determine their own lives. It is why they advocated private property, voluntary exchange, and constitutionally limited government. They also believed that people should be free to reside in any country they wish. In general, therefore, they advocated freedom of movement. Governments should not compel people to stay within their political boundaries, nor should any government prohibit them from entering its territory for peaceful purposes.
An extension of this principle was that individuals should be free to determine through plebiscite what state they would belong to. This is distinctly different from the collectivists’ notion of “national self-determination,” the alleged necessity for all members of an ethnic, racial, linguistic, or cultural group to be incorporated within a single political entity, regardless of their wishes. Thus, for instance, the Nazis demanded that all members of the “Aryan race” be forcefully united within a Greater Germany under National Socialist leadership.
[Similar demands made by Chinese nationalists, be they KMT or CCP — The Foreigner]
Classical liberalism is closer to “individual self-determination.” Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises argued in Liberalism (1927) that the liberal ideal allows individuals within towns, districts, and regions to vote on which state they would belong to; they could remain part of the existing state, join another state, or form a new one.
Mises stated that in principle this choice should be left to each individual, not majorities, since a minority (including a minority of one) might find itself within the jurisdiction of a government not of its own choosing. But because it was difficult to imagine how competing police and judicial systems could function on the same street corner, Mises viewed the majoritarian solution to be a workable second best. [emphasis added]
Communist Party fellow-traveller (and faux-individualist) Bevin Chu is a big fan of the the majoritarian solution — not for the honorable intention of empowering self-determination but for crushing it. The Post usually endorses this scheme of Chu's, but on this one occasion feigns mild disapproval:
Suppose Beijing were to argue that "The political status of China must be determined by the 1.3 billion people of China. The political status of the 1.3 billion people of the mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau must be collectively determined by the 1.3 billion people of the mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau by popular referendum."
Polls have revealed that 95% of the public [in the Communist People's Republic of China] opposes Taiwan independence. Does anyone doubt what the outcome of a referendum on Taiwan independence would be?
Good one, Bev. And while we're at it, let's keep those rebellious Danes in the Reich by means of a referendum among all true-blooded Germanic Aryans!
POSTSCRIPT: Quite frankly, it's surreal to be talking about independence referendums in Taiwan when the Chinese Nationalist Party controls both the presidency and 75% of the legislature.
Independence referendum in Taiwan? Not gonna happen.
For a long, long time.
Always a hoot when the Confucian collectivists at Taiwan's China Post invoke individualism (!) to rationalize Taiwan's annexation by the Chinese Empire. On Wednesday, the paper even tried to get away with the dishonest suggestion that Ayn Rand would have been cool with that.
From the editorial, A thought experiment on 'right to self-determination':
[…]
But this conventional definition, considered utterly non-controversial by mainstream political scientists, is in fact conceptually defective at its very core, and gets us into all sorts of trouble. One might say that the politically-correct "national right to self-determination" is one of those things that we know for sure that "just ain't so".
Really? Try telling that to the freed peoples of the Austro-Hungarian, British, Turkish and Soviet Empires. "Hey — ya'll have no national right to self-determination. Howdya like them apples?"
OK, now that Rand has been injected into the whole Taiwan independence debate, let's see what her actual thoughts on secession were:
Sounds like the lady was dead-set against it. But there's a catch . . .
Now, that part about the "mixed economy" is actually a huge caveat. After all, even the most capitalist countries in the world possess at least SOME elements of socialism. . .
We can clearly see that Rand whole-heartedly approved of the right to national self-determination — for free peoples.
UPDATE: Consistent with that secession quote, I just found some pretty strong support for Taiwanese independence over at the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights.
Eat your heart out, Bevin Chu. A is still A. Eh?
UPDATE #2: More from Rand herself —
[A free nation] has a right to its sovereignty (derived from the rights of its citizens) and a right to demand that its sovereignty be respected by all other nations.
Taiwan's Department of Health Minister Yeh Ching-chuan proves that you're never too old . . . to be an honorary member of the Strawberry Generation:
[…]
“I really don’t know what these people want,” a tearful Yeh said later at a press conference.
Now, don't you take that kind of abuse from those pretty young coeds, Weepy. Stand up for your rights !
“Everybody has the right to speak out. I endorse the rights of the two students to speak out. But, when you do [protest], you need to make sure what you do is legal and show proper respect to others,” Yeh said.
Oh, yeah. The country's in really good hands when its ministers TURN ON THE WATERWORKS when confronted by the disaffected knee-sock and pony-tail set.
Communist party thugs in the World Health Assembly, beware. There's a new sheriff in town.
Name's Yeh. "Strawberry Shortcake" Yeh.
(But can Taiwan's new "tuff" guy defend the country's interests against that ornery, mean and miserable sneak, The Peculiar Purple Pieman of Porcupine Peak?)
("Quickdraw" Strawberry Shortcake Yeh — sans his blazing stack of subpoenas. Image from Taiwanreview.nat.gov.tw)
BLAST FROM THE PAST: Remember the days when former Taiwanese President Chen was mocked — not for threatening his hecklers with lawsuits, but for merely answering back?
Leave it to Yeh Ching-chuan to make Chen Shui-bian — Chen Shui-bian! — look like He-Man in comparison.
UPDATE: Yeh cattily "forgives" the hecklers.
Minister of Health Yeh Chin-chuan forgave co-eds from Taiwan yesterday for insulting him at a Geneva hotel dinner party on Saturday.
Yeh told reporters in Taipei by telephone the students are "ignoramuses" for disrupting the party he hosted in honor of health ministers from Taiwan's diplomatic allies.
"They are unlettered, rude compatriots," said Yeh, who is attending this year's World Health Assembly meeting as minister of the Department of Health, Chinese Taipei.
"But I forgive them," he said. [emphasis added throughout]
Seeking to bury the hatchet, the college girls generously followed suit:
"Yeh Ching-chuan is a thin-skinned, litigious, communist butt-kisser . . . but regarding his tyrannical threats to sue us, we forgive him. We're big enough to do that . . . After all, it's not HIS fault that he gets cranky as hell during that certain time of the month."
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