Tuesday, June 25, 2019

What a college student in Taiwan thinks of the Hong Kong extradition bill


Written by Faith L.

     The “promise” was that China would treat Hong Kong as a separate territory by letting her have her own system of government. One country, two systems. That was the idea. But in reality, Beijing continues to infiltrate and manipulate the Cantonese in order to gain absolute control over Hong Kong. One example of economic manipulation is China’s flooding of Hong Kong with Chinese immigrants.

    The latest in these manipulations is a push for the so-called extradition bill. It essentially says that anybody suspected of criminal activity can be extradited out of Hong Kong and tried in China instead. What people don’t understand is that in communist China, there is no rule of law. Innocent people are convicted and imprisoned. Pastors and their families, for example, are detained and often disappear.

    This means anybody in Hong Kong that China wants to get rid of––any human rights activist, democracy advocate, pastor, or free-speech media––is in danger. China can just say, “we suspect you of something,” and take the person out of Hong Kong. Once that person is in China, he or she might never be seen again.

    The people in Hong Kong know this is what would happen. Of course, the propaganda is, “you don’t need to be afraid unless you’re a criminal,” but the truth is that lots of supposed criminals in China are people like pastors and intellectuals, people who are pro human-rights. Are these people criminals?

    On June 12th, the people of Hong Kong decided that enough was enough. This extradition bill was being pushed by Chief Executive Carrie Lam (who, by the way, was appointed by the Chinese government, not elected by the people). According to media reports, tens of thousands of people gathered on the streets of Hong Kong to peacefully protest the bill. Over the course of the next few days, more and more people joined the demonstration, bringing the number of protestors from tens of thousands to over a million. In response, police fired tear gas and rubber bullets to try to disperse the crowd, which the police misleadingly labeled a “riot.” The protesters, the majority of whom were the younger generation of Hong Kong, vowed to never back down. Lam responded by calling the protestors “unruly children,” but eventually indefinitely postponed the bill.

    This “indefinite postponement” means next to nothing, however, so on Sunday, June 16th, nearly two million people poured out onto the streets of Hong Kong to demand that the extradition bill be revoked and Chief Executive Lam resign.

Two million.

Here are some aerial photos from that day.

    What now? Well, although Lam released a public response to the protests, she never officially apologized and still refuses to step down or withdraw the bill. The people of Hong Kong have vowed to continue rallies until the bill is fully revoked. The future of Hong Kong is still uncertain.

    Why did I choose to write about this event in a blog devoted to Taiwan democracy? Because Hong Kong’s story serves as a warning to Taiwan. Whatever schemes China uses to silence the people of Hong Kong today, she will attempt to use to squash the Taiwanese people tomorrow.  As many Taiwanese people say, 今日香港,明日台灣. “Hong Kong today, Taiwan tomorrow.”

    The survival of the Taiwanese, and the survival of Hong Kong and many other peoples, relies not only on the Taiwanese and Hong Kong people’s continual, vigilant fight for their sovereignty, but also on foreign nations being willing to stand up to the bully that is China. You, reader, must stand up to China. You must not give into and spread the propaganda and lies that the communist Chinese government puts out, all the while ignoring the voice of millions of oppressed people.

    As the people in Hong Kong say, “We are not China.” And we hope they will never be. 

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In the above photo, taken during the 2014 Sunflower Movement, the sign reads: "I am from Hong Kong. Taiwan, please stand on Hong Kong's corpse and consider the path you will take."

Monday, November 28, 2016

Friday, November 6, 2015

Two individuals cannot make fiction to be fact by an agreement

An outgoing unpopular president cannot by one meeting invent something that does not and never existed. There is only an independent republic of Taiwan and a separate, repeat distinct, communist dictatorship of China.

Friday, May 1, 2015

Tsai Ing-wen gets it wrong about moms and childcare

It was disappointing to read Tsai Ing-wen's uninformed and uninspiring policy talk reported in the Taipei Times today.

Is it not better for loved ones (the elderly and children) to be cared for by those who love them: their family members? Tsai Ing-wen is not a mom. But she should realize something: it is much better for the country if the moms are not forced to work but have a choice whether they wish to stay home to raise their own children. But many families are strapped for cash because of Ma Ying-jeou's pro-China and pro-corrupt developer policies that have driven up real estate prices and at the same time driven jobs and capital investment to China.

Spending tax money to provide more day care for children is not the answer, but rather further perpetuates the problem by bloating the government with more entitlements that will put the squeeze on tax payers. Already the national healthcare system is going bankrupt so that the government is finding more ways to tax citizens, hidden of course by taxing companies or those who have passive income. But to tax one is ultimately to tax all. Costs get passed down. Tax a company more and it reduces the size of its workforce, or the level of pay. Or it increases the cost of the product. The buyer ends up paying the tax indirectly but not knowing about it. Disproportionately tax a writer who gets passive royalties as income so that she has to pay a higher level for national health care, and she may just decide the massive hours she puts into a book are not worth it and not write another book. Who loses? To get money such a writer will be forced into a regular job where the employer gets hit with the hidden cost. Her creative output will be suppressed. The net sum of intellectual property in Taiwan will go down.

Tsai Ing-wen should be asking how she might help women to be able to stay home with their children by setting policies that will make more higher income jobs available to their husbands. She should be seeking to reduce the size of government and therefore the tax burden. Further she should seek to eliminate the hemorrhaging of jobs and money flowing to China. She should further embrace efficient fossil fuel burning plants rather than worry about carbon footprints of supposed anthropogenic global warming. Yes, we are too geologically unstable for nuclear power, but the earth can afford greater emissions of CO2. In fact, it will like it. Plants thrive on higher CO2 levels and grow faster. Taiwan needs to upgrade fossil-fuel burning plants to be more high tech, therefore more efficient burners, therefore emitting less of anything except CO2.

These things would help rather than more entitlement spending. Yes, please stay away from KMT fascist cronies and China's commies, but also please do not import failed policies from Europe's proggies.


Proggies: progressivists = socialist, statists, or soft communists/fascists who think the government should have its hand on everything as if it were a goddess to be worshipped.

Monday, April 27, 2015

Like the 228 Massacre in Taiwan, the Katyn Massacre in Poland was a decapitation of the society's leaders by a foreign invader

This month marks the 75th anniversary of the Katyn Massacre, when the Soviets executed over 22,000 Polish officers, nobles, policemen, intellectuals, and clergy. the Katyn Massacre took place 7 years before the 228 Massacre. There are similar estimates in the death toll. And the massacre represented an attempt to remove any opposition to a foreign authoritarian regimes invasion and suppression of a nation.

Wikipedia entry

Taiwan should reach out to Poland based on this historically shared suffering.