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http://tinyurl.com/l9dy6ph

On the antlers of a dilemma


    ...Students occupying parliament have resorted to undemocratic
    means, and many of the arguments they and the DPP make about the
    trade agreement are specious....

    ...學生佔領議會是反民主的，而且學生和民進黨關於貿易協議的訴求
    都是刻意誤導...




整篇裡面除了這段都沒有價值判斷，負面意見也是引用DPP的發言。這些人
真的可以洗洗睡了。
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全文


    THE fresh-faced good looks have been lined and drawn by the cares
    of office. His immaculate English is forsaken for the dignity of
    immaculate Mandarin. Patient replies to questions come wearily, as
     if said many times before. Yet, six years into his presidency, Ma
     Ying-jeou’s hair remains as lush and jet-black as any Chinese
    Politburo member’s. And, speaking in the presidential palace in
    Taipei, he remains as unwilling as any leader in Beijing to admit
    to any fundamental flaws in strategy.

    Perhaps Mr Ma draws inspiration from his portrait of Sun Yat-sen,
    founder of his ruling party, the Kuomintang (KMT), and, in 1912,
    of the Republic of China to which Taiwan’s government still owes
    its name. Sun is revered as a nationalist hero not just by the KMT
     but, across the Taiwan Strait, by the Chinese Communist Party
    too. Mr Ma may also hope to be feted on both sides of the strait—
    in his case as a leader responsible for a historic rapprochement.
    For now, however, reconciliation between Taiwan and China remains
    distant. And Mr Ma, once the KMT’s most popular politician, is
    taunted by opponents as the “9% president”, a reference to his
    approval ratings in opinion polls last autumn.

    Improving relations with China has been the central theme of his
    administration, after the tensions of eight years of rule by the
    Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which leans towards declaring
    formal independence from the mainland. Mr Ma can boast of 21
    agreements signed with China. He reels off the numbers of two
    fast-integrating economies: a tenfold increase in six years in
    mainland tourists to Taiwan, to 2.85m in 2013; cross-strait
    flights from none at all to 118 every day; two-way trade,
    including with Hong Kong, up to $160 billion a year.

    China’s strategy to reabsorb Taiwan is plain. As the island’s
    economy becomes more intertwined with that of the vast mainland,
    China thinks, resistance to unification will wane. Then Taiwan
    becomes an “autonomous” part of China—like Hong Kong, though
    allowed its own army. Taiwan will return to the motherland without
     resort to the missiles and increasingly powerful armed forces
    ranged against it. But as Mr Ma sees it, cross-strait “
    rapprochement” is a first line of defence against Chinese
    aggression, since “a unilateral move by the mainland to change
    the status quo by non-peaceful means would come at a dear price”.
     Politics in Taiwan is framed as a debate about independence or
    unification but is really about preserving the status quo.

    The next step in rapprochement with China would be a meeting
    between political leaders. In February in Nanjing, once the
    capital of a KMT government of all China, ministers from China and
     Taiwan held their first formal meeting since 1949. Mr Ma hoped to
     meet China’s president, Xi Jinping, in Beijing this November, at
     the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC) summit. To
    accommodate Hong Kong and Taiwan, APEC’s members are not “
    countries” but “economies”. So Mr Xi and Mr Ma could meet as “
    economic leaders”, sidestepping the tricky protocol that usually
    dogs relations, with China viewing Taiwan as a mere province. The
    Chinese demurred. But Mr Ma thinks a meeting somewhere is “not
    outside the realm of possibility”.

    This backdrop explains why a protest movement against a
    services-trade agreement with the mainland is more than a little
    local difficulty for Mr Ma. Students occupying parliament have
    resorted to undemocratic means, and many of the arguments they and
     the DPP make about the trade agreement are specious. But they
    have tapped a vein of popular mistrust of Mr Ma and of economic
    integration with the mainland. A split persists between native
    Taiwanese, on the island for generations, and mainlanders, like Mr
     Ma, whose families came over as the KMT lost the civil war in the
     1940s. Protesters portray Mr Ma as either a mainland stooge or as
     clueless and out of touch. In the occupied parliament, student
    caricatures give him antlers, a reference to a slip he once made
    when he appeared to suggest that the deer-antlers used in Chinese
    medicine were in fact hair from the animal’s ears.

    Mr Ma says public opinion supports a “Ma-Xi” summit. Joseph Wu
    of the DPP, however, claims such a meeting would actually damage
    the KMT in the next presidential election, due in 2016; rather, he
     says, Mr Ma is trying to leave a personal legacy. The DPP’s lead
     in the polls alarms not just the Chinese government but also
    America, which could do without another flare-up in a dangerous
    region. The stronger China grows, the more Taiwan’s security
    depends on commitments from America. It switched diplomatic
    recognition to Beijing in 1979, but Congress then passed a law
    obliging it to help Taiwan defend itself.

    All political lives end…

    Mr Ma says relations with America are better than they have ever
    been at least since 1979 and perhaps before. Others are doubtful.
    In all the talk of America’s “pivot” to Asia, its promises to
    Taiwan are rarely mentioned. Many in Taiwan paid attention when
    John Mearsheimer, an American academic, suggested in the National
    Interest, a policy journal, that there is “a reasonable chance
    American policymakers will eventually conclude that it makes good
    strategic sense to abandon Taiwan and to allow China to coerce it
    into accepting unification.” For some, abandonment is a fact of
    life and unification a matter of time. “No one is on our side
    strategically, diplomatically, politically; we have to count on
    China’s goodwill,” an academic in Taipei argues.

    Mr Ma has tried to steer what seems a sensible middle course
    between such defeatism and the adventurism of those in the DPP who
     would like to confront and challenge China. But he sounds weary
    with the effort, and Taiwan’s people seem weary of him. Their
    pragmatism and the DPP’s internecine strife may yet see them
    elect another KMT president in 2016. But if Mr Ma hoped to leave
    office with cross-strait relations stabilised, and with his own
    role as an historic peacemaker recognised on both sides and around
     the world, he seems likely to be disappointed.


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