李慶安淚灑記者會說

李慶安與七根竹筍 ◎ 謝又新
李慶安淚灑記者會說：「我絕對不是詐欺犯！」希望司法還她清白。
我 是大安區選民，我要說的是：李市議員、李委員，妳騙了我們十多年，誰還我們公道？打從一開始妳就錯了！竟然還好意思做賊喊抓賊！一點都比不上台東縣議員饒 慶鈴！饒慶鈴也被同黨爆有美國籍，饒慶寧馬上拿出ＡＩＴ文件自清，所有誣陷她的人全雞嘴變鴨嘴。唯獨，就是妳和馬總統，始終提不出證明，洗刷自己清白。
如今，是法院還人民公道！但是，我要說還是判太輕！妳知不知道一個小老百姓偷挖了七根竹筍要關七個月？妳知不知道台東柑仔店老婦，在不知情下買了五瓶假酒販賣，被罰五萬元？誰比較冤呢？請李慶安妳別得了便宜還賣乖！
正本清源，立法院下會期應盡速通過沒有爭議「國籍法」草案！ （作者為大安區龍淵里居民）

this kind of China

Taipei Times - archives

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Beijing warns Obama on Dalai Lama meeting

AFP, BEIJING
Wednesday, Feb 03, 2010, Page 1

Beijing yesterday warned US President Barack Obama against meeting the Dalai Lama, saying it would “seriously undermine” Sino-US ties — the latest salvo in an escalating row between the two powers.

Beijing also said no progress was made in the latest round of talks between Chinese officials and envoys of the spiritual leader, saying the two sides remain “sharply divided” on the future of the Himalayan region.

The comments came after the first negotiations between the two sides in more than a year, which wrapped up at the weekend. The envoys of the Dalai Lama returned to their exile base in India on Monday.

The Dalai Lama, whom China accuses of seeking independence for his homeland, is scheduled in the US this month for a visit that includes a stop in Washington, but a meeting with Obama has not been announced.

Such a meeting would “seriously undermine the political foundation of Sino-US relations,” Zhu Weiqun (朱維群), executive vice minister of the Chinese Communist Party body that handles contact with the Dalai Lama, told a news conference.

“If the US leader chooses to meet with the Dalai Lama at this time, it will certainly threaten trust and cooperation between China and the US,” Zhu said.

“We oppose any attempt by foreign forces to interfere in China’s internal affairs using the Dalai Lama as an excuse,” he said.
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Beijing looms large in US policy

Taipei Times - archives

Beijing looms large in US policy

By Sushil Seth

Monday, Feb 01, 2010, Page 8

‘China appears to believe that the time has come to assert its power as the Middle Kingdom.’

China is looming large in the reformulation of the US’ policy toward the Asia-Pacific region. Speaking at the East-West Center in Hawaii, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the US wanted active engagement with Asia.

It would also like to be actively involved in building up Asia’s security and economic structures and would like collaborative action on issues like nuclear proliferation, climate change and food security.

At the same time, Clinton emphasized the significance of regional forums in these matters.

Without mentioning China, she said that no country, including the US, should try to dominate regional institutions — but she also emphasized the beneficial role of US engagement in the region.

In other words, the US is back in Asia to re-engage with the region. What exactly led the US secretary of state to reassert US engagement with Asia?

First, under the administration of former US president George W. Bush, the preoccupation with Iraq, Afghanistan and the “war on terror” led to slackening interest in Asia.

The administration of US President Barack Obama is keen to dispel that view, which has gained increasing currency.

Second, the Bush presidency was more given to unilateral initiatives than to multilateral forums like ASEAN, APEC, the East Asia Summit or the UN.

China, on the other hand, had reversed its aversion to regional forums, having earlier feared their domination by the US.

With their new economic and political clout, they found these forums very useful for expanding their regional role.

In other words, the US pre-occupation with Iraq and Afghanistan and indifference to the potential of Asian regional cooperation proved a blessing for Beijing.

In the process, China was able promote and expand its role as a “benign” power supportive of regional institutions.

For instance, Beijing has been able to cobble together a free-trade agreement with the members of ASEAN.

It is timely for the US to be showing new interest in engaging with Asia. Until now, the Obama administration has seemed to focus on forging a new regional and global partnership with China.

The underlying assumption was that China’s partnership was necessary to resolve tricky issues like nuclear proliferation in North Korea and Iran, climate change, the global financial crisis and the undervalued Chinese currency.

But there apparently has been a growing sense of frustration with China’s cavalier and arrogant response, climaxing at the climate change conference in Copenhagen.

The US feels that China sabotaged the conference and humiliated Obama.

And then there’s the matter of Google. So far, Internet giants like Google, Yahoo and others have been toeing Beijing’s line by censoring their content as required by the Chinese authorities.

But when Chinese hackers started attacking the Gmail accounts of human rights activists and stealing source codes and data from Google (as well as 33 other high-tech, industrial and chemical companies), Google blew the whistle.

Google legal officer David Drummond said on the company’s blog: “We have taken the unusual step of sharing information about these attacks with a broad audience not just because of the security and human rights implications of what we have unearthed, but also because this information goes to the heart of a much bigger debate about freedom of speech.”

He added that it had “led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China.”

Google has thus put this issue in a larger context of freedom of speech and human rights — and it has the support of the Obama administration.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said: “We support Google’s action. Our concern is with actions that threaten the universal rights of a free Internet.”

China obviously takes a different view. According to the State Council Information Office, “Our country is at a crucial stage of reform and development and this is a period of marked social conflicts.”

As a result, “Properly guided internet opinion is a major measure for protecting Internet information security,” it says.

This is an interesting admission of the acute social conflict in China.

Despite Chinese President Hu Jintao’s (胡錦濤) “harmonious society” slogan, China is going through a social crisis.

What this means is that regardless of all the hype about China’s uninterrupted and on-going rise, its future is subject to the vagaries of how this crisis is managed and resolved.

Considering that China is a top-heavy, one-party state, it lacks the political shock absorbers and the process of political mediation as exercised through popular elections as well as alternative political structures and constitutional forums.

No wonder the Chinese Communist Party sees the Internet as a serious threat to its rule and will go to any length to disrupt and control it.

But the Internet will always remain a challenge because of the multiple ways in which determined users can circumvent government censorship of its content.

Google’s threat to pack up its bags and abandon the Chinese market has created a serious strain in US-China relations.

It has come on top of persistent attempts by Chinese hackers to get into the Pentagon and other US agencies in an ongoing cyber warfare of sorts, with serious implications.

It has led the US and some other Western countries to beef up their security systems against potential intrusions. Australia is the latest country to set up a separate agency to deal with this risk.

The effects of Chinese hacking is widespread. Some reports say the FBI has estimated that as many as 180,000 Chinese are engaged in hacking and that they attacked the Pentagon’s computer systems 90,000 times last year alone.

The US is the most prized target of Chinese hackers.

China’s cyber army (although Beijing denies any official link) is part of a wider strategy to wear down the US at a time when it is overstretched militarily, financially and, to some degree, psychologically.

Having followed late leader Deng Xiaoping’s (鄧小平) advice to bide its time and build strength, China appears to believe that the time has come to assert its power as the Middle Kingdom.

And it is in Asia that it is building up its military power to challenge the US over the next decade or so.

It is developing weapons systems to deny the US access to some of the waterways in Asia, like the South China Sea, where there have already been some naval incidents between China and the US.

China is developing a set of weapons not only to deter the US but, if necessary, to take it on. These include submarines, a new generation of combat aircraft, cruise missiles and even ballistic missiles that could target US aircraft carriers.

It is about time the US engages actively with Asia.



Sushil Seth is a writer based in Australia.

Dissidents warn ‘Beijing Model’ could harm Taiwan

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Dissidents warn ‘Beijing Model’ could harm Taiwan

BY RICH CHANG AND SU YUNG-YAO

Sunday, Jan 31, 2010, Page 3

Chinese dissidents yesterday expressed concern that a “Beijing Model” is being duplicated in Taiwan in which economic advance is being promoted at all costs.

“There is this new term, the ‘China model’ or ‘Beijing model,’ which is to promote economics regardless of the cost, and such a view is gradually being voiced in Taiwan,” Chinese democracy activist Wang Dan (王丹) told a forum in Taipei hosted by the Taiwan Society yesterday.

Among the “costs” are a growing gap between rich and poor, pollution and “even crackdowns on people with military force” like the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

Wang expressed concern that Taiwan’s democracy and human rights might be threatened by an economic cooperation framework agreement (ECFA).

Chinese-democracy-activist turned-economist Chen Pokong (陳破空) told the forum that China entered the WTO in 2005 with US support. Before this, the US levied an average 42 percent tariff on Chinese goods, but after the US cut tariffs to 2.5 percent. Since then cheap Chinse products have been dumped on the US market causing an annual US$200 billion trade deficit.

Chen warned Taiwan of a similar situation after the signing of an ECFA.

“Needless to say there is political purpose behind the economic pact, which is to use the economy to trap Taiwan before a political annexation,” he said.

Taiwan Society secretary-general Lo Chih-cheng (羅致政) told Taiwanese to stay vigilant for a possible regression of democracy as “democracy and human rights are usually sought with loud bangs, but often ebb away silently.”

Contemporary Monthly magazine editor-in-chief Chin Heng-wei (金恆煒) was more optimistic.

Chin said although President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) is China-friendly, several surveys showed most of the public regard themselves as Taiwanese, not Chinese, and support Taiwanese independence. The numbers are higher than during the former Democratic Progressive Party government, he said.

In his weekly online journal posted yesterday, Ma said an ECFA “will help Taiwan businesses become stronger to compete globally.”

Ma said signing an ECFA would be like putting on spikes allowing Taiwan to run like the wind amid fierce competition in the world market.

Critics warn the agreement would jeopardize Taiwan’s sovereignty, making it economically dependent on China and leading to an influx of Chinese capital and goods.

Additional reporting by CNA
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We are a-bian casters3

Large aftershock terrifies Haitians

Taipei Times - archives

Large aftershock terrifies Haitians

LIMITED GOOD NEWS: A 69-year-old woman was among four people found alive in Port-au-Prince ruins by rescuers on Tuesday

AP , PORT-AU-PRINCE
Thursday, Jan 21, 2010, Page 1

Pierre Louis Ronny is carried by Russian rescuers after being found under the Teleco Haitian telecom building in Port-au-Prince on Tuesday. One of Ronny’s hands had been caught between cement blocks and he was discovered by looters combing the building for goods. PHOTO: REUTERS

A powerful new earthquake struck Haiti yesterday, shaking buildings and sending screaming people running into the streets only eight days after the country’s capital was devastated by an apocalyptic quake.

The magnitude-6.1 temblor was the largest aftershock yet to the Jan. 12 quake. It was not immediately clear if it caused additional injuries or damage to weakened buildings.

Wails of terror rose from frightened survivors as the earth shuddered at 6:03am. The US Geological Survey said the quake was centered about 56km northwest of Port-au-Prince and was 22km below the surface.

Last week’s 7.0 quake killed an estimated 200,000 people, left 250,000 injured and made 1.5 million homeless, the EU Commission said.

A massive international aid effort has been struggling with logistical problems, and many Haitians are still desperate for food and water.

Still, search-and-rescue teams have emerged from the ruins with some improbable success stories — including the rescue of a 69-year-old Roman Catholic who said she prayed constantly during her week under the rubble.

Ena Zizi had been at a church meeting at the residence of Haiti’s Roman Catholic archbishop when the Jan. 12 quake struck, trapping her in debris. She was rescued by a Mexican disaster team on Tuesday.

Zizi said after the quake, she spoke back and forth with a vicar who was also trapped. But he fell silent after a few days, and she spent the rest of the time praying and waiting.

“I talked only to my boss, God,” she said. “I didn’t need any more humans.”

Doctors who examined Zizi on Tuesday said she was dehydrated and had a dislocated hip and a broken leg.

Elsewhere in the capital, two women were pulled from a destroyed university building. And near midnight on Tuesday, a smiling and singing 26-year-old Lozama Hotteline was carried to safety from a collapsed store in the Petionville neighborhood by the French aid group Rescuers Without Borders.

Crews at the cathedral recovered the body of the archbishop, Monsignor Joseph Serge Miot, who was killed in the Jan. 12 quake.

Authorities said close to 100 people had been pulled from wrecked buildings by international search-and-rescue teams. Efforts continued, with dozens of teams hunting through Port-au-Prince’s crumbled homes and buildings for signs of life.

But the good news was overshadowed by the frustrating fact that the world still can’t get enough food and water to the hungry and thirsty.

“We need so much. Food, clothes, we need everything. I don’t know whose responsibility it is, but they need to give us something soon,” said Sophia Eltime, a 29-year-old mother of two who has been living under a sheet with seven members of her extended family.

The World Food Programme (WFP) said more than 250,000 ready-to-eat food rations had been distributed in Haiti by Tuesday, reaching only a fraction of the 3 million people thought to be in desperate need.

The WFP said it needs to deliver 100 million ready-to-eat rations in the next 30 days, but it only had 16 million meals in the pipeline.

So far, international relief efforts have been unorganized, disjointed and insufficient to satisfy the great need. Doctors Without Borders says a plane carrying urgently needed surgical equipment and drugs has been turned away five times, even though the agency received advance authorization to land.

A statement from Partners in Health, co-founded by the deputy UN envoy to Haiti, Paul Farmer, said the group’s medical director estimated 20,000 people are dying each day who could be saved by surgery.

The reasons are varied: Both national and international authorities suffered great losses in the quake, taking out many of the leaders best suited to organize a response.

A woefully inadequate infrastructure and a near-complete failure in telephone and Internet communications have also complicated efforts to reach millions of people forced from their homes, while fears of looting and violence have kept aid groups and governments from moving as quickly as they would like.

Google can do the right thing in China

Taipei Times - archives

EDITORIAL : Google can do the right thing in China

Tuesday, Jan 19, 2010, Page 8

Google’s announcement that it will stop restricting search results on its Chinese platform — a condition set when the Internet giant entered the Chinese market in 2006 — and the threat that it could pull out of China altogether if Beijing continues to launch cyber attacks for gathering information on human rights activists is a praiseworthy development. It shows that even large corporations that stand to make a fortune from the gigantic Chinese Internet market can abide by their principles when the state overreaches.

The decision may also have been self-interested, as the conditions imposed on Google for entry into China had tarnished its reputation, something that was put in sharp relief when Yahoo pulled out of China after data it gave the Chinese authorities resulted in the arrest of journalists. (Yahoo sold its China business to Alibaba Group [阿里巴巴] in 2005, while acquiring a 39 percent stake in Alibaba.)

Some commentators, including Martin Jacques, author of When China Rules the World, have argued that Google’s battle with Beijing demonstrates that China has forever transformed the world and that, consequently, Google has already lost the fight.

“The Google model of a free and open Internet, an exemplar of the American idea of the future, cannot and will not prevail,” Jacques wrote in Newsweek last week. “China’s Internet will continue to be policed and controlled, information filtered, sites prohibited, noncompliant search engines excluded, and sensitive search words disallowed. And where China goes, others … will follow.”

This view is flawed because there is nothing teleological about authoritarianism, just as there is nothing teleological about democracy. Had the Internet existed when the Soviet Union was at its apex, would Jacques have made the same prediction, drawing on Russia’s centuries-old history of strong, centralized rule? Back then, did thinkers in the West argue that Moscow would forever alter the way we share information because the Soviet Union was censoring the media and arresting dissidents? Did we abandon dissident writers like Vaclav Havel and Czeslaw Milosz? Of course not.

In time, the Soviet Union, rife with contradictions and ossified by lack of freedoms, collapsed, and people like Havel were hailed as heroes.

China’s economy may be almost twice the size of the Soviet Union’s at its demise, and its population about six times as large, but this doesn’t mean the world will be more willing to accommodate Chinese authoritarianism than it did during the Cold War.

In fact, thanks to the ubiquity of electronic media and global travel, people today are more aware of what’s going on abroad, and are better equipped to access that information, than at any time. Even Chinese, who live under a regime seeking to control information, have a better chance of learning about the world than Czechs, Poles and Russians did under Soviet rule. And the thirst for that knowledge is equally strong. There is nothing in the Chinese character that makes them less inclined to seek the truth.

As China rises and its leadership shows no sign of liberalizing, the last thing we want to embrace is defeatism, believing that we can’t do anything about the impact this will have on our world. More than ever, people are starting to realize that China’s philosophy on freedom of expression is threatening our way of life. Ask Australians during the Melbourne International Film Festival, or Taiwanese when newspaper editors are fired as a result of pressure from Beijing.

Google’s decision is not capitulation. It is taking a stand for the liberties that the great majority of human beings cherish and aspire to. Let’s hope others follow Google’s lead.
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