Taiwan voters reject deeper ties with China

Rejecting Communist China

• Premier Jiang Yi-huah quits after Nationalists, who pioneered agreements with the mainland, lose nine cities in local elections.
• Ko Wen-je, a 55 year-old emergency doctor who is backed by Taiwan’s opposition Democratic Progressive party, won 57% of the vote to become the city’s first non-KMT mayor in 16 years.

The Taiwanese premier resigned on Saturday following the election of an independent candidate as mayor of Taipei – in a major blow to the island’s pro-China governing party.

Premier Jiang Yi-huah resigned hours after polls closed, and president Ma Ying-Jeou announced that he would reshuffle his cabinet.

Both belong to the Nationalist, or Kuomintang (KMT), party, which has long espoused deepening ties with China.

“This is a very strong message, not only to the KMT administration, but also to Beijing,” said Hsu Szu-chien, a Chinese politics expert at the Taipei-based research institution Academia Sinica.

“The Ma administration depends totally on China’s goodwill — that’s his only strategy for Taiwan’s economic development. And he’s done this by paying the price of sacrificing Taiwan’s democracy,” reports the Guardian.

Taiwan’s distrust of China “is at its highest in recent years”, he said, in the wake of Beijing’s hardline response to the pro-democracy “Umbrella Movement” that continues to paralyse swaths of Hong Kong.

Ko Wen-je, a 55 year-old emergency doctor who is backed by Taiwan’s opposition Democratic Progressive party, will become the city’s first non-KMT mayor in 16 years. According to Taipei’s central elections commission, he took 57.1% of the vote, while KMT candidate Sean Lien, a financier and the son of a former KMT vice-president, took 40.8%.

“The walls of ideology are about to fall,” Ko said in his victory speech, according to Bloomberg. “This is the time for the people to rule.”

The relationship between the two men — Ko outspoken and unconventional, Lien more conservative and cautious — has been punctuated by dramatic twists. In November 2010, Lien was shot in the head while stumping for a KMT candidate at a Taipei rally, and Ko led a team of surgeons which helped to save his life. Ko did not conduct the surgery himself. The gunman, a gang member, is currently serving a life sentence.

Saturday’s elections were the biggest in Taiwan’s history — about 18 million people were registered to vote, and 20,000 candidates competed for an unprecedented 11,130 local seats. The KMT won in six of the island’s major cities and counties, far fewer than expected — four years ago, during the island’s last local elections, the party won 15.

The KMT’s loss of Taipei and the large central city Taicheng bode poorly for current president Ma Ying-jeou as he enters the late phase of his second and final four-year term, and for the KMT as a whole in advance of presidential elections in 2016.

Beijing has considered the island a breakaway province since a bitter civil war drove them apart more than 60 years ago. Yet cross-strait ties have improved significantly since Ma took power in 2008 — the president has signed 21 trade deals with China, the island’s largest trading partner, and expressed hopes of eventually meeting with Chinese president Xi Jinping.

Ma faces criticisms at home over his perceived coziness with mainland officials, stagnating wages, and a string of food safety scandals involving tainted cooking oil. In March, tens of thousands of protesters occupied the island’s legislature and surrounding streets to protest his handling of a cross-strait trade pact, ultimately blocking its ratification.

“I must express apologies to the Nationalist party and its supporters for making everyone disappointed,” Ma told reporters after the results were announced, according to the Associated Press. “I’ve received the message people have sent via these elections. It’s my responsibility and I will quickly offer a party reform plan to address everyone’s demands. I won’t avoid responsibility.”

Chinese state media reported on the election results while glossing over the rise in anti-mainland sentiment that they represent. “We hope compatriots across the Strait will cherish hard-won fruits of cross-strait relations, and jointly safeguard and continue to push forward peaceful development of cross-strait relations,” said Ma Xiaoguang, spokesman for the State Council Taiwan Affairs Office, according to the state newswire Xinhua.

The flag of Free China.

China deal protested by hundreds of thousands in Taiwan

The Screw-Job Cometh

• Both the Democrats and the Republicans totally sold out U.S. workers and shipped countless millions of jobs to China, India and Mexico. 
• Now the people of Taiwan are being screwed over by their own government in an insane pact to abolish the jobs of thousands of local workers and give them to the Communist Chinese.

Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators gathered in the streets around Taiwan's Parliament on Sunday to voice their opposition to a trade pact with China, part of a nearly 2-week-old protest that is challenging the president's policy of moving the democratic island economically closer to China.

Lin Fei-fan, a protest organizer, estimated that 500,000 people had turned out in the biggest demonstration since the movement started. An Associated Press estimate put the number at more than 200,000, and a police estimate at more than 100,000.

Crowds dressed in black sat on one blocked boulevard, many carrying plastic or real sunflowers, the symbol of the protest movement, and wearing yellow ribbons that read "Fight for democracy, retract the service trade pact," reports USA Today.

Several hundred mainly student protesters have been occupying Taiwan's legislature since March 18, supported by thousands outside the building.

They are protesting President Ma Ying-jeou's intention to enact a trade deal that would allow Taiwanese and Chinese service sector companies in businesses ranging from banking to beauty parlors to open up branches or shops in the other's territory.

Thousands of Taiwanese protest China pact

Just like in the U.S., the Taiwanese government wants to sell out their

nation and allow endless job losses to Corporatist-Communist

backed Chinese companies.

Protesters display a banner denouncing the controversial China-Taiwan trade
pact during a massive protest in front of the Presidential Building in Taipei.

The action was sparked by the decision by a lawmaker from Ma's ruling Nationalist Party to renege on a promised clause-by-clause review of the trade deal, which was signed by both sides last year but is awaiting ratification by Taiwan's Parliament.

On Saturday, Ma gave into students' demands to increase scrutiny of future pacts signed with China, but refused to withdraw the pact in question, saying it would deeply harm Taiwan's interests.

"I'm not against free trade, but the government should come up with policies to protect local industries before they open the door," said a protester, Philip Lihan, 30, a graphic designer in Taipei originally from Chiayi in southern Taiwan.

"I've been sitting-in near the legislature every day after work until midnight," said Lihan, who added that he had been working with other artists to create murals in support of the protest.

Flower shop worker Li Li-ming took a four-hour bus ride from her home in Tainan city in southern Taiwan to the capital Sunday morning with her children, aged 7 and 9, to take part in the protest.

"This is the first time that I have participated in such a big demonstration and I am here because this is a demonstration led by neither party, but students," said Li, 38. "I just came back from Hong Kong. Everything is getting so expensive there. I'm afraid Taiwan will become like Hong Kong."

Opponents of the pact say it would cost Taiwan tens of thousands of jobs because small businesses on the island will be unable to compete with cash-rich, mostly state-run Chinese companies intent on investing in Taiwan. They also say it would give a big boost to China's efforts to bring the island, which split from the mainland 65 years ago, under its control.

The protest is the most serious challenge to Ma's signature policy of moving Taiwan ever closer to China by tying their economies together. Since he took office in May 2008, he has superintended a drastic upsurge in the number of cross-strait flights, and pushed through more than a dozen commercial agreements with China, including a partial free trade deal that slashed tariffs on scores of items in 2010.

Student protesters occupy the Taiwanese Legislature on Wednesday to protest against the act by the ruling Kuomintang party to ratify a controversial service and trade agreement with China.

Ashley Pon/Getty Images

Obama bows to China again - and throws Taiwan under the bus

Obama bows yet again to his Puppetmasters in China and refuses to sell jets to Taiwan

By all reports, Comrade Obama will cave to China and refuse to support Taiwan, an American ally.

The United States has refused Taiwan's request for 66 new F-16C/D fighter jets that China had warned would risk inflaming tensions between the two big powers, according to Defense News citing a Taiwan defense official.

Taiwan has repeatedly asked Washington to agree to sell the advanced F-16 fighter jets, citing the need to counter the growing military strength of China, which deems the island a breakaway province that must eventually accept reunification, by force if necessary.  China cut off ties with the United States military for most of last year to protest against an American arms package for Taiwan.

Neither Washington nor Taipei has made any formal announcement about the latest call for the fighters, but Defense News said on Sunday that Taiwan had been told there would be no sale, citing Taiwan's Ministry of National Defense.

"We are so disappointed in the United States," the report quoted an unnamed Taiwan defense official as saying.

"A US Department of Defense (DoD) delegation arrived here last week to deliver the news and offer instead a retrofit package for (Taiwan's) older F-16A/Bs," the journal reported from Taipei.


Selling F-16s to Taiwan not only supports a friend and ally, but creates jobs
for Americans.  But Obama will always obey his Puppetmasters in Communist China.


Any fresh US arms support to Taiwan is likely to raise hackles in Beijing, but the advanced fighter jets have been an especially touchy point for China, which this week will host US Vice-President Joe Biden.

The bitter debate in the US Congress over spending and the downgrade of the US sovereign credit rating by Standard & Poor's drew blunt criticism from China's state media, including a commentary that said the US debt woes reflected its military overreach abroad.

Taiwan's Defense Ministry said it could not comment on the report, as it had not heard from the US.

"However, we want to point out that the Republic of China (Taiwan) does hope the sale of new F-16C/D fighter aircraft will go through. We are in urgent need of the aircraft," said spokesman Luo Shou He.

"Frankly, it is not a real surprise. The real surprise is that they sold them the F-16s in the first place," said Mr Richard Bitzinger, a senior fellow and regional defense expert at Singapore's S Rajaratnam School of International Studies.

But Bitzinger said it was not a total victory for Beijing because a potential upgrade to existing fighters would go a long way in covering Taiwan's loss of a new batch of F-16s.

"The types of upgrades they are talking about would make them the most advanced F-16s in the world.

"This is a significant upgrade, and I am sure a lot of that work will go to Taiwanese companies. In that regard, it may be a better deal," he said.    - - - Reuters


This China of capitalism and free elections is an Alien Land to Comrade Obama. 

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