Ah, the world was different back in the 1960s, as Newsweek relates in a piece adapted from a new book on the 1960 Olympics:
The context was different, but the central political question as the Rome Olympics neared was the same as it is now: how should the world deal with China? The issue was debated [...]
Typhoon Fung wong is closing in, and here in Taichung, a steady rain is falling as of eight this morning, Taichung time. No wind at all yet. Schools and offices across the island have shut down in anticipation of a major load of rain.
Yesterday the email lists were abuzz with the claim of Rupert Hammond-Chambers, [...]
Lien Chan’s best was on display today in the Taipei Times, showing the haughty nastiness that explains why he lost two presidential elections:
Lien also blamed the administration of former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) for refusing to push direct flights and open the country to Chinese tourists despite the consensus reached at the KMT-Chinese Communist Party [...]
Xinhua reports on the announcement of prices by China Eastern:
China Eastern Airlines announced on Friday flight fares for weekend charter flights from Shanghai to Taipei and immediately started selling tickets.
The carrier is charging 3,700 yuan (US$ 528.6) for a round trip of economy-class flight, while business class costs 5,500 yuan, both including taxes.
Group tickets, for [...]
Looking at the current situation with the talks with China on one hand, and the hilarious mess with the fishing vessel Lian He Hao colliding with a Japanese military vessel in the Diaoyutai, one is forced to ask, Where’s Waldo? style: where’s Ma?
The Taipei Times offered an interview today with new DPP Chairman Tsai Ing-wen [...]
Jonathan Adams has an excellent piece in the CS Monitor on the recent agreement, full of useful insights and details, covering almost all the main points.
…..Analysts cautioned that Friday’s deal was just the first – and easiest – step on the long and difficult road toward reconciliation between the two bitter rivals. Critics in Taiwan [...]
Ralph Jennings of Reuters is reporting that a Chinese Nationalist Party claimed that China had promised to stop its missile build up and then to reduce the number of missiles facing Taiwan:
Last week, when KMT Chairman Wu Poh-hsiung visited senior leaders in Beijing, including President Hu Jintao, he asked about the missiles and was told [...]
The old Japanese agricultural research station in Tainan, in use until recently.
There’s nothing like the yawning political abyss that the KMT is dropping Taiwan into accompanied by gray skies and the pitt-pitt-pitt of steadily falling rain every day. It’s more demoralizing than being called stupid by Sharon Stone.
The Taipei Times had an excellent editorial today [...]
Xuenfang Battery in Tainan, on Guanghua Street, now enclosed in the grounds of a Buddhist nunnery.
The DPP came out with a statement on Saturday morning saying that the Wu-Hu talks had inflicted “five major wounds” on Taiwan:
Harming Taiwan’s democracy by regressing the pattern of cross-strait negotiations back before even the October 1992 semi-public SEF-ARATS talks [...]
A-gu over at That’s Impossible! had another great catch today with the words of KMT Chairman Wu Po-hsiung as he greeted Chinese officials on his “historic” trip to China.
吳伯雄首先對川震災民表達關切：「我們要為四川的往生者深切哀悼，海峽兩岸同屬中華民族，從此時可看出兩岸人民深層的血緣牽繫。」(YAM)
After some pro-forma remarks about the Sichuan quake, Wu then observed that “the two sides of the Strait belong to the Chinese [ethnic] people.” A-gu opines that [...]
The Nelson Report has the latest from CSIS’ Bonnie Glaser on Ma Ying-jeou’s victory and what the US should be doing. Glaser is normally a first class commentator on Taiwan affairs, but this one is well-below her usual standards….
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CHINA-TAIWAN…with President-elect Ma’s inauguration getting closer, Beijing is still locked in a debate over what, and when [...]
I blogged the other day on the MAC appointment of Lai Shin-yuan (賴幸媛), a Taiwan Solidarity Union politician who was also Taiwan’s WHO negotiator and whom, I was told by someone who had worked with her, is an anti-globalization lefty. The incoming premier appointed Lai to head up the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC), Taiwan’s chief [...]
That sucking sound you heard today was for once not jobs going to China but instead, the collective in-breath of the world media. Big news today was that Lai Shin-yuan (賴幸媛), a politician from the “pro-independence” (”surprise choice“; “counter to the pervasive mood of thawing“; “pro-independence figure“) Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU) was appointed to head [...]
Many news sources are reporting that Andrew Card, with longstanding ties to the Bush family, will be sent to represent the US at Ma’s swearing-in. The Nelson Report, the Washington Insider Report, with the latest on that and the Administration:
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TAIWAN…a final quick note…Administration sources had hinted for some time that the White House would try [...]
In the run-up to the 2000 Taiwan election, the Washington Post featured a short piece by a reporter named John Pomfret, an interview with then-presidential candidate James Soong. Pomfret presented Soong, at that time a lifelong opponent of democracy, as a democratic reformer. I responded with a short letter protesting this mischaracterization of Soong’s political [...]
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