Till today, I never knew the fellow-travellers there were actually on the take — receiving advertorial money on a regular basis from the Butchers of Beijing.
From their grotesque opposition to defensive weaponry for Taiwan, to their sly anti-Dalai Lama rhetoric, to their enthusiastic support of the Politburo's demeaning "Chinese Taipei" appellation for the R.O.C., down to their unseemly cheerleading for the modern Chinese economic model (& on occassion, its political leadership as well) — all these stances for several years now have made the paper's sell-out apparent to all.
But I'd always chalked-up the KMT mouthpiece's new-found pro-Communist leanings to the sentiments of Chinese ultranationalists who had made their peace with 'Communism' (if not 'communism'). How wrong I was.
As the paper was once fond of saying, cui bono?
That's Latin for, "Who benefits?" Or in the modern vernacular, "Follow the money".