Six call for democracy forum

Six current and former heads of state, including two Nobel Peace Prize laureates, were invited by the publicly funded Taiwan Foundation for Democracy to attend a conference in Taipei Jan. 26, where they discussed various topics and establishment of a Global Forum on New Democracies.

At the one-day conference titled "Towards a Global Forum on New Democracies," current ROC President Chen Shui-bian was joined by five former presidents from four continents. These were Francisco Guillermo Flores Perez of El Salvador, Kim Young Sam of South Korea, Punsalmaagiyn Ochirbat of Mongolia, and two Nobel laureates Lech Walesa of Poland (1983) and Frederik Willem de Klerk of South Africa (1993).

The six leaders participated in an all-day dialogue on democratisation and ways to cooperate on the promotion of democracy. Chen spoke at the opening ceremony, saying that the experiences of each new democracy--particularly the experiences and observations of the leaders who guided their nations toward democratisation--were important assets in consolidating and strengthening democracy. It was his earnest hope, he added, that the conference and establishment of the Global Forum on New Democracies would spur the development of democracies the world over.

The presidents then exchanged views in two roundtables. At first, they discussed transitional justice and the choice of a constitutional system. Both Kim and Flores emphasised the importance of removing military influence from politics, while Walesa called for a "United States of Europe" to further deepen regional integration. He even predicted a future "United States of Asia."

De Klerk said that the South African government set up a truth and reconciliation committee to monitor the process of democratic transformation, investigate the truth of past events, and promote reconciliation within the country. He added, however, that whether true justice and reconciliation had been achieved was open to question.

The afternoon roundtable addressed divisions of national and ethnic identities, and the role of mass media in democratic development. Chen said Taiwan's division over national identity had diverse impacts, raising its head whenever policymaking touched on issues of language, culture or education, in conflicts between political parties, and in the tendency for one-sided reporting by media organisations. The issue of national identity also influenced Taiwan's foreign relations and national security.

Flores stated that maintaining respect for diversity was essential to democracy, but related issues had to be handled in the context of nation building.

In the final session, the six leaders expressed their support for establishment of the Global Forum on New Democracies as a meaningful way to promote democracy. Ochirbat stated that the Global Forum would be "an important step in demonstrating democratic values in Asia." De Klerk said, "By sharing experience, we will be able to play a significant role in ensuring that our new democracies become permanent institutions," according to a news release by TFD.

After the full day of deliberations and dialogue, the six leaders adopted and signed the "Joint Declaration of the Global Forum on New Democracies." Through the declaration, the leaders formally announced their intent to set up the forum, which would "utilise the practical ruling experiences of leaders of new democracies to study the factors needed for their successful transformation." The declaration also urged that a charter be drafted for the forum. Finally, the participants decided to hold the inaugural Global Forum on New Democracies in Taipei in 2008.

Chen's aim for Taiwan: 'normal and complete'

Taiwanese people's health rights should not be separate from those of the rest of the world, President Chen Shui-bian stated in an interview on CNN.

Chen was interviewed at the Office of the President Jan. 23 by CNN's Talk Asia host Anjali Rao. In the interview, first broadcast Jan. 27, Chen claimed that, to avoid a gap being left in international disease prevention networks, it was only right that Taiwan first became an observer at the World Health Assembly and then a member of the World Health Organisation. This, he said, would benefit all humankind.

Asked what his priorities would be for the last period of his presidency, Chen said he wanted to make Taiwan into "a normal and complete country." He explained that for Taiwan to be normal, it should be a member of the United Nations and the WHO, and that it was not complete because its current Constitution had never been approved by its people. The 23 million people of Taiwan needed a new constitution that was timely, relevant and viable, he added.

Answering questions concerning China's buildup of its arsenal targeting Taiwan, Chen said that China had 988 missiles deployed against the island and had never renounced the use of force against Taiwan. Moreover, in 2005 it passed the Anti-Secession Law to lay a legal pretext for its future invasion of Taiwan.

The president revealed that, according to intelligence sources, China had completed plans for a three-stage preparation for use of force against Taiwan: establishment of contingency-response combat capabilities by 2007, buildup of combat capability for large-scale military engagement by 2010, and capability to ensure victory in a decisive battle by 2015.

Regarding the issue of the "special state affairs fund" case, in which Chen was accused of graft but currently enjoyed presidential immunity under Article 52 of ROC Constitution, Rao asked if Chen would like to have his day in court after leaving office and the chance to confront his accusers. He replied that this was really a matter of respecting the existing system, Constitution and existing regulations.

In response to the final question of how Chen would like his leadership to be thought of in 10 or 20 years' time, the president said people would remember that it was under his guidance that Taiwan completed its first-ever transfer of political power, that he had insisted on Taiwan being an independent, sovereign country, and that the People's Republic of China did not have jurisdiction over Taiwan, nor did Taiwan have jurisdiction over the People's Republic of China.

Beijing shows defiance with satellite destruction

China's military modernisation program, initiated by former leader Deng Xiaoping in 1979, has long since triggered worldwide anxiety because of its anticipated impact on the balance of power in East Asia and, therefore, on prospects for regional peace and security. China's penchant for hiding its true military spending and militarisation goals has only exacerbated the situation, needless to say.

As a result of this program, the military might of the People's Liberation Army has doubled or even trebled over the past two decades. This threatens the status quo across the Taiwan Strait--and, consequently, Taiwan's security--as well as impinging on the defence interests of the United States, Japan and other countries.

ROC defence planners were alerted last week by China's deployment of 12 Jian-10 jets to Zhejiang Province about 500 kilometers from Taiwan. While these were still inferior to the Russian-made Su-27 and Su-30 fighters that China also possesses, they will make it harder for Taiwan to maintain its air superiority in the Taiwan Strait; already China has numerical advantage.

This deployment was followed immediately by China's destruction of an aging satellite using a ballistic missile. This action was widely interpreted as showing Beijing's ambition to develop its own version of a Star Wars program and thus break Washington's space predominance. It also added a new threat that would deter the United States from intervening if the PLA attacked Taiwan.

At the very least, China's latest muscle flexing raises serious doubts about its professed "peaceful rise." Washington and Tokyo should take a second look at their recent promotion of military relations with Beijing and ask themselves whether what they must give up to restart the six-party talks is worth the risk. The PRC is clearly playing a double-handed game in its recent efforts to court the United States and Japan, while continuing on its own course defiantly.

Kung fu cuisine hits New Year dinner tables

In Taiwan, food is serious business. For a crucial event such as Lunar New Year, only a kung fu dish will do. The name refers to the enormous time, effort and skill that go into cooking such a dish, and every mother and restaurant has at least one kung fu meal that is only brought out on special occasions. Since Lunar New Year is one of the few times everyone in the family can take time off to eat together, that is when people are most willing to take the necessary time to cook or pay premium prices for kung fu dishes.

Back in the old days, when Taiwan was still an agricultural society, people invested a lot of time in shopping for food and spending hours, sometimes days, cooking a New Year feast. Things have changed since then. Society has become so busy nowadays that many people have to work until the day before New Year's Eve. In some cases, people are even required to work in the final hours leading up to the holiday.

This has meant the decline of homemade kung fu dishes. "This is particularly true for career women. They must juggle the responsibility of getting ahead at work and still take care of their families," said Tracy Wang, public relations manager of Howard Plaza Hotel Taipei. "Ensuring that the New Year dinner goes well is a big part of that, so they are more willing to buy New Year dishes from convenience stores and hotels."

"I think the reason why our New Year specials have been so popular is that there are so many dual-income families and young housewives who just don't have time or lack the experience to prepare big dishes," said Wang. "The benefit of our service is that you only have to heat up the takeout dishes in your microwave or rice cooker, and the dinner will be ready in minutes. Last year, we sold roughly US$200,000 worth of New Year dishes before New Year's Eve."

The five-star hotel has three different Chinese restaurants specialising in Shanghainese, Cantonese and Taiwanese cuisines. This year, the hotel expects even greater sales, and its three restaurants will dish out some new surprises to ever-demanding connoisseurs.

One traditional Taiwanese New Year dish is called "Buddha jumps over the wall" soup, because in popular folklore, this dish was so delicious that it even tempted monks to sneak out of their monastery for a taste. The hotel's Formosa Restaurant has a new recipe for the famous Buddha soup.

"We put at least 14 different ingredients into the soup. It consists of scallops, pork ribs, sea cucumbers, bamboo shoots, chestnuts, chicken thighs, fish lips, quails eggs, shark's skin, shark's fin, taro, mushrooms, fish skin and pig stomach," said 51-year-old Executive Chef Wang Che-wen, who began his career at 16. "If you notice carefully, I avoid using Chinese cabbage, chicken feet and pork knuckles in the soup, because they either taste a bit sour or they are too rich in collagen from livestock. Instead, I use seafood to get the collagen, which generates a milder taste," said Wang, who insists on doing everything himself in the kitchen.

To cook up an urn of a soup like "Buddha jumps over the wall" requires at least five hours of preparation. Just cleaning and cutting all the ingredients alone takes two hours. The taro, ribs, thighs, eggs and mushrooms are all deep-fried in oil in advance. Then comes three hours of steaming, which does not include time for making chicken broth. "After all, the idea of the soup is that everyone in the family, young or old, will find what he or she likes in the soup," said Wang.

Another Taiwanese New Year delicacy is red crab steamed with red yeast rice cake. According to Wang, he learned the dish from the 84-year-old mother of his boss, who knew an old Taiwanese recipe. Wang spent several days at her home, watching her demonstrate and then learning to cook the dish himself.

"The secret to making a successful red crab rice cake has everything to do with making sure the sticky rice absorbs all the red crab juice," Wang said. "My idea is to take out the old lady's recipe, refine the ingredients and refresh our memory of the good old days."

Howard Plaza Taipei and other five-star hotels and restaurants are not the only ones out to conquer the market for Lunar New Year takeout food, which is worth about US$15 million, according to the Chinese-language ETtoday news Web site Jan. 25. The latest competitor on the scene is President Chain Store Corp., operator of 7-Eleven convenience stores. The popular chain has 4,384 branches around the nation, including some on outlying islands, such as Kinmen, Matsu, Penghu and Green Island.

"Our service emphasises three things: convenience, flavor and fair prices," claimed Bonnie Chao, public relations specialist at 7-Eleven. "The advantage of buying from us is that we have more sales outlets offering 24-hour service and the assurance of the quality of our New Year dishes, which have absolutely no artificial additives. Most of all, we have a home delivery service that brings the frozen package to your doorstep," she explained. This year, the chain is hoping to sell US$4 million worth of New Year dishes with a choice of five set menus and 31 kung fu dishes.

"In 2004, we started with a choice of eight dishes, and we added 13 more the following year. In 2006, we saw that demand increased tremendously, so we came up with dishes provided by five-star chefs," Chao added. "It tells us that the demand is there and that Taiwan's urban lifestyle, consumer behavior and work patterns are undergoing readjustment."

Chao conceded that, despite 7-Eleven's marketing campaign and brand recognition, it is still facing fierce competition from small family-operated restaurants, as well as hypermarkets such as Carrefour Corp. Taiwan, RT-Mart International Ltd. and Far Eastern Geant Co. Ltd.

To compete with the five-star hotels, PCSC entered into its own partnership with the five-star Tayih Landis Hotel in Tainan and will introduce New Year Good Luck Dishes. Deciding the names and prices of the dishes has become an important part of the marketing campaign. Many of the names follow the Han Chinese tradition of giving best wishes during the New Year festival. This custom of auspicious names for dishes goes back to ancient times. At banquets attended by businessmen, dishes were named to promote their businesses and their profits, while palace dishes were named to bless rulers with good luck and long lives, according to an article by the China Internet Information Center.

PCSC left nothing to chance, choosing lucky names and even lucky prices for its New Year dishes. Its President's Golden Dragon Feast is priced at NT$3,088 (US$94), whose numbers sound like "Give you wealth" in Mandarin. Formosa's "Everything You Wish Banquet" costs NT$8,888 (US$271), which suggests four-fold wealth. According to Han Chinese custom, eight is the luckiest number, because it sounds similar to the word for "making a fortune." PCSC's plan was to replace the original names of all dishes or ingredients with names that symbolise good luck, happiness or longevity. Thus, roasted lobster will become "Rolling Fortune," and red crab rice cake will be named "Best of Luck Ahead."

A great meal is essential to having a prosperous year. Taiwanese always want to start the New Year right, and that means getting the food right.

Finance companies dial up new markets with credit card phones

Shopping just got easier. People can now pay for their purchases by putting a credit card phone on a special card reader. The innovation started with Visa International Service Association and MasterCard Worldwide, which launched new payment systems called Visa Wave and MasterCard PayPass in November 2005 and December 2004. These systems used "contactless" technology, which allowed credit cards to be held close to a card reader, rather than needing to be swiped.

In January, Chunghwa Telecom Co., Chinatrust Commercial Bank and Visa jointly launched a cutting-edge mobile phone that functioned as a Visa Wave credit card, according to a Jan. 11 press release from Chunghwa Telecom. By placing this mobile phone on a card reader, consumers only needed about four seconds to complete any purchase under US$91, said Chen Chang-rong, Chunghwa vice president, who added that a purchase over the maximum limit required the customer to sign the receipt, similar to using a regular credit card.

"This credit card phone service originated in Japan," Chen revealed. The first "wallet mobiles" were released in a joint venture between Sumitomo Mitsui Card Co. Ltd. and phone company NTT Docomo Inc., according to the Japan-based J-Cast Business News Web site Jan. 20, 2006. They were the first to install contactless credit card technology into a mobile phone.

"We saw that people nowadays are expecting society to become more convenient," said Chen, "and the need to make daily life as simple as possible is increasing." With credit cards and mobile phones becoming so indispensable, integrating both into one device seemed inevitable, he noted.

To produce the phones, Chunghwa cooperated with Taiwan-based High Tech Computer Corp., the world No. 1 maker of handsets using Microsoft Corp.'s mobile operating system. Dopod International Corp., acquired by HTC last year, manufactured the credit card mobile phones for the venture.

While Chunghwa handled the phones, Chinatrust was in charge of consumer usage, risk management and encouraging as many domestic retailers as possible to install compatible card readers. At present, the credit card phone service was only available to Chinatrust depositors, who could pay with the phones at drugstore chain A.S. Watson Group, video rental retailer Blockbuster Inc., Taipei 101 food court and some gas stations across the nation, said Michael Chang, credit card division director, in the Jan. 11 press release.

Visa, moreover, fulfilled its role in the partnership by authorising the use of its Visa Wave chips inserted in the mobile phones and providing technical assistance, said Visa Managing Director Ma Shao-hua in the press release, adding that "This innovative product is expected to meet growing consumer demand for a fast and convenient payment system and to help local businesses prepare for mobile payment in the future."

"This product incorporates the latest technology," said Chen, explaining that the chip inside the mobile phone was based on the radio frequency identification system. According to the Web site of the RFID Technology Center under the government-sponsored Industrial Technology Research Institute, RFID is a wireless system using radio waves in order to receive and process information. This technology was regarded as vital to "help retailers, manufacturers and other users reduce supply chain costs while accelerating the flow of merchandise," the Web site continued.

More than a technological advance, the newly launched mobile phone was seen as a stimulus to the sluggish credit card market, said Chen. Starting in 2005, snowballing defaults on credit card debt swept through the nation, resulting in banks issuing fewer credit cards and people using them less often for purchases. According to a Jan. 21 report in the Chinese-language Economic Daily News, the amount of money exchanged through credit cards reached approximately US$43 billion in 2005, but dropped to US$39 billion last year. To revive the industry, local banks and credit card associations had to find new ways to get people to use credit cards again, the report said.

Visa was not alone in diversifying into credit card phones. MasterCard, Taiwan Mobile Co. and Taipei Fubon Commercial Bank Co. Ltd. would launch the first "near field communication" mobile phone with MasterCard PayPass technology in February, said a Jan. 11 press release from Taiwan Mobile. NFC was "a new, short-range wireless connectivity technology that evolved from a combination of existing contact-free identification and interconnection technologies," said the Web site of the NFC Forum, which was established in 2004 with the aim of using this technology in consumer electronics, mobile devices and personal computers.

The NFC mobile phone would offer more than an easy way to pay for purchases. The phone could also download electronic coupons, so users could enjoy discounted services right away, the press release said, adding that the new phone was expected to be operational overseas. For example, in the future, phone users could take the subway in New York, watch Major League Baseball games, shop at Ikspiari shopping mall in Japan and watch movies in Canada, simply by paying with their phone.

Although more convenient, a regular mobile phone carried a risk; using one with a credit card function had twice the risk, Chen noted. He explained that if someone lost a regular mobile phone, he just lost the phone, but if he lost a credit card phone, he could lose substantial money from fraud. Chen recommended users to report a loss as soon as it occurred. For its own part, Visa Wave card details were stored on the phone, but could not be accessed from the phone menu or SIM card, according to the Visa Asia Web site. When banks and credit card organisations came up with better security features, mobile phones might be able to replace credit cards altogether, Chen said.

The origin of 'Chinese Taipei'

When athletes from Taiwan carried their flag onto the stage for the opening ceremony of the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, Greece, they marched with other countries that began with the letter "T." Officially, they did not represent Taiwan, however they represented "Chinese Taipei."

The athletes did not carry the flag of the Republic of China, which had been used in Olympic Games up until the 1970s, but rather the official Chinese Taipei Olympic flag sanctioned by the International Olympic Committee. This flag is white with a blue and red outline of a five-pedaled flower, wrapped around a small white sun enclosed in a blue background--the symbol found on the ROC flag--with the five Olympic rings below.

Prior to 1949, the ROC represented China in three Olympic Games: 1932, 1936 and 1948, according to the Chinese Olympic Committee Web site. Since the end of the civil war, Taiwan competed as the Republic of China in six Summer Games and two Winter Games, the last being the 1976 Winter Games in Innsbruck, Austria. The ROC withdrew from the 1976 Summer Games in Montreal to protest competing under the name "Taiwan," the "Taiwan Yearbook 2004" stated.

A few years prior to the ROC's last Olympic appearance, China's official seat in the United Nations was transferred in 1971 from the ROC to the PRC, which set off a chain reaction in which countries began cutting ties with Taiwan in favor of China.

Following the switch, the ROC rejected the proposed name "Taiwan, China," arguing that it implied Taiwan was China's subordinate. Furthermore, the ruling Kuomintang government at the time insisted that the ROC was still the only legitimate China, another reason why it would not accept the name "Taiwan." In 1979, the ROC and PRC reached a compromise on the issue, with the help of the IOC. The Executive Committee of the IOC voted for the Nagoya resolution, which said that Taiwan would compete as the "Chinese Taipei Olympic Committee," according to an article in the autumn 1985 issue of Pacific Affairs Journal.

In 1980, the PRC made its first appearance in the Olympics as the official China. After an eight-year hiatus, athletes from Taiwan arrived in Los Angeles for the 1984 Summer Games, where they competed as "Chinese Taipei" for the first time. This also marked the first time Chinese Taipei would compete alongside the PRC.

Although it was the ROC that initially insisted on using "Chinese Taipei," ironically now it is the PRC that enforces this rule. In the past, China might have accepted the name "Taiwan" since it would signify "Taipei's acknowledgement of Beijing's legitimacy as the government of all China," a Jan. 10, 2002 article by the Taiwan-based National Policy Foundation stated.

Since the adoption of "Chinese Taipei," the name has been used to represent Taiwan not only in the Olympic Games, but also in all international athletic competitions, including the World Cup, the Paralympics and the Asian Games, as well as in some economic entities, such as the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum. Even in non-athletic international competitions, for example the Miss Universe beauty pageant, a contestant from Taiwan had to compete as Miss Chinese Taipei, according to a May 23, 2003 report by the semi-official Central News Agency.