Amtrak sorry for saying `province'

 

BY JEAN LIN

STAFF REPORTER , WITH CNA

 

The US' Amtrak apologized for listing Taiwan as a province of China on its online reservation Web site after protests from Formosan Association for Public Affairs (FAPA).

 

Amtrak, the National Railroad Passenger Corp, which operates most intercity passenger railroad routes in the US, corrected the mistake online and apologized for the misunderstanding,

 

According to the FAPA, in May a Taiwanese American in the US discovered that the Amtrak online reservations Web site had listed Taiwan as a province of China.

 

A group of Taiwanese Americans then filed complaints to Amtrak's customer service, but received no replies.

 

In July, the FAPA formally wrote a letter to David Gunn, president of the National Railroad Passenger Corp, and requested correction on this matter.

 

"`Province of China' should not be written after `Taiwan' since it is an incontestable reality that Taiwan is not a part of China," the FAPA letter said.

 

In the letter, the FAPA pointed out that in a 1996 memorandum, the US State Department stated that since the US has no diplomatic relations with the Republic of China, US officials need to refer to Taiwan as "Taiwan."

 

Amtrak was established by the US Congress and receives funding from the government, therefore, what they do should be in accordance with the rules set by the government, the letter said.

 

"I was informed that Amtrak takes no position regarding the sovereignty of Taiwan and simply lists all countries around the world according to ISO 3166-1 provided by the International Organization for Standardization, which does not list Taiwan as a province of China", said Wu Ming-chi, president of FAPA in the letter.

Amtrak officials responded 10 days after the FAPA letter was sent, saying that they would look into it and make corrections if there was indeed a mistake.

 

On Aug. 16, the FAPA office received a letter from Gunn, apologizing for the mistake.

 

 

 

 

No truth, no sale

 

By John Conklin

 

Recently, a number of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) members have suggested selling the party's national headquarters as a way to showcase its willingness to reform, and as a means to raise needed funds. However, this gesture misses the point, in that the emphasis should be on checking the background of the party's various properties.

 

In April last year, KMT Vice Chairwoman Lin Cheng-chih suggested that the KMT streamline the party organization and sell its headquarters to jump-start party reform.

 

"The KMT needs to do something earthshaking and refreshing so that the public will marvel at our efforts to reform," Lin said.

 

She also said that selling the headquarters would be a way to raise money to pay for lay-offs and early retirements.

 

Sixteen months later, a member of the KMT's Central Standing Committee, Apollo Chen, backed the sale ("Selling its HQ building will free the KMT's spirit," Aug. 27, page 8).

 

He states that, "Selling off the party headquarters building will not undermine the KMT, but will be a step toward reforming the party and freeing its spirit, winning greater public support."

 

He also explains that, "Moreover, now that the KMT is not in power, its finances have often proved inadequate to cover its expenses, and the selling off of property and a reduction in staff has become necessary."

 

Such attempts to garner the voting public's support whilst turning a profit for the party underestimate the public's acumen and misinterprets their demands. It is not primarily the appearance of the 12-storey, imported-marble-layered and landscaped monument that directs people not to vote for the KMT. Rather, many voters do indeed have lingering questions and doubts about the KMT's purportedly legal and logical claims to this and other properties.

 

Chen's noble hope that "if voters have any issues, the party will actively respond to resolve those difficulties" needs to be the party's guiding principle, as evidenced not by the act of selling but by the acts of introspection and examination, which must be fully entered into prior to any sale.

 

If there is no internal and external scrutiny, then questions and doubts will persist. Was the prime piece of land for the KMT headquarters illegally appropriated from the Japanese government? Was it sold by the National Property Bureau to the KMT at a very cheap price, squandering the nation's profits to benefit one of the world's richest political parties? Was the headquarters itself constructed in flagrant violation of Taipei's municipal building codes?

 

Accounting for these types of property concerns is the only action that can free the KMT's spirit.

 

Furthermore, an attempt at full accountability needs to be supervised by an independent judiciary and allow for full public disclosure.

 

If the KMT has already "adopted the highest standards in dealing with the party-assets question" and "has had little to be ashamed of as to the legal and rational terms in which it has proceeded in dealing with the party-assets issue," as Chen claims, then a stringent legal and public accounting of its properties, beginning with the headquarters, should not be avoided. Instead, this should be embraced as the way for the KMT to meet public expectations, win greater public support, move toward reform, and, as a result, free its spirit.

 

Nonetheless, KMT Chairman Ma Ying-jeou "also said that Lien has dealt with the issue decisively and that the property rights on the building housing the KMT's headquarters were legal as far as he knew."

 

Is this level of accountability enough to meet the demands of the public on this issue? Only an honest, extensive and legal accounting of the property -- and all others -- will satisfy the electorate. Any sale without this would generate profits, but it most certainly would not convey an image of reform. Thus, we can feel justified in declaring, "No truth, no sale."

 

John Conklin

Indianapolis, Indiana

 

 

Bush, Hu weighing each other up

 

By Paul Lin

 

Chinese President Hu Jintao is scheduled to visit the US this month. It will be Hu's first US trip since he came to power in March 2003.

 

Compared with former president Jiang Zemin's "graduation trip" to the US in October 2002, just prior to his retirement, Hu's trip serves as a beginning.

 

Hu's schedule has been changed five times due to his fear of protests by Falun Gong. The schedule of Jiang's trip had also been changed repeatedly, and was not finalized until one or two days before his departure.

 

Nevertheless, what is more important is the scale of the US reception.

 

For Jiang's first US trip during his presidency in October 1998, the question of whether it was a "working visit" or a "state visit" still remains unresolved after all these years.

 

Although Hu will enjoy a 21-gun salute and red-carpet treatment, he will not receive a state banquet. Washington therefore does not consider his trip a state visit, a point that US officials have repeatedly "clarified." But Beijing insists that it is indeed a state visit.

 

This has resulted in the unusual situation of each country making its own interpretation.

 

Washington knows that Sino-US relations are of great significance. So, since it has already compromised on many other issues with Beijing, why doesn't it make a concession on this trivial matter? Not to mention the fact that "face" is extremely important to Chinese.

 

The US insistence is believed to be a result of currently thorny Sino-US relations. In traditional Chinese culture, people are encouraged to try peaceful means before resorting to force when handling international or interpersonal relations.

 

But in the communist era, in which Marxism-Leninism is dominant, people resort to force before diplomacy, only stopping to see who has the bigger fists.

 

On the surface, China has been courteous. On July 21, Beijing announced that it would allow the Chinese yuan to appreciate by 2 percent; on July 26, it restarted the six-party talks on North Korea's nuclear weapons; and on July 28, it announced the purchase of 50 airplanes from Boeing.

 

But all these gestures have little significance.

 

The appreciation of the yuan was much lower than the US hoped for. No conclusions were reached in 10 days of six-party talks, and no one knows when the next round will be. As for the Boeing deal, to win the contract, the company on June 28 named its first advanced Boeing 777-200LR Worldliner after Zheng He, a famous navigator who lived during the Ming Dynasty.

 

Moreover, Beijing has obtained navigation technology used on advanced US missiles and fighters thanks to Boeing, whose commercial planes are equipped with sophisticated QRS11 gyroscopic microchips. The planes were sold to China between 2002 and 2003.

 

Boeing was later fined US$47 million by the US government for this action.

 

In contrast, China's military is flexing its muscles. On March 14, Hu promulgated the "Anti-Secession" Law, which is a direct threat to both Taiwan and the US.

 

The US did not take the bait, but then, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Lien Chan and People First Party (PFP) Chairman James Soong responded by declaring submission to Hu during meetings earlier this year.

 

Flushed with this success, Hu is now adopting a still harder line on Taiwan.

 

That's why Major General Zhu Chenghu's threat of unleashing nuclear devastation against the US has not cost him his job.

 

It is also an indication that Zhu's statement is in line with the sentiments of the Chinese leadership.

 

Last month, China held an unprecedented joint military exercise with Russia in which Taiwan and the US were the imagined enemy.

 

Following the exercise, China signed a massive arms deal with Russia to further put pressure on Taiwan, the US and Japan. The smoke from the joint military exercise has not yet cleared, so it hardly seems likely that the US will regard this threat as a courtesy salute.

 

These bellicose actions are intended to make the US submissive, but this is hardly likely for such a superpower. US President George W. Bush is not likely to emulate Lien and Soong.

 

The problem now is that as China and the US have different ideas of how Hu will be treated during his visit, it is more than likely that they will each interpret the results differently as well. When the US declared that it did not support Taiwan's independence, China interpreted this as meaning that it opposed Taiwan's independence.

 

Even the biographies of former US president Bill Clinton and US Senator Hillary Clinton were revised by the Chinese authorities to conform to their own interpretations, so is there anything they would be unwilling to do in this regard?

 

People in the US are better placed to understand the situation in the context of these divergent interpretations, for their access to such information is not blocked by their own government.

 

"Patriotic" Chinese, on the contrary, can only regard the party's preaching as truth, with the result that most Chinese people believe that, in the face of China's nuclear threat, the US has no choice but to give in to all its demands.

 

This simply encourages the emergence of more warmongers such as Zhu, more exercises targeting the US, Japan and Taiwan, and even the hope that this might spark a war.

 

This will be of no benefit to the US or the rest of the world, nor to China itself. During the meeting between Bush and Hu, China should be warned not to encourage rumors and mislead the public.

 

But how can China move beyond this method of doing things?

 

Paul Lin is a commentator based in New York.

 

Iraqis facing a fake democracy

 

Nicaragua and South Africa, not the US, should be the inspiration for Iraq's new constitution

 

By George Monbiot

THE GUARDIAN , LONDON

 

Between the idea and the reality falls the shadow of occupation.

 

Whatever the parliamentarians in Iraq do to try to prevent total meltdown, their efforts are compromised by the fact that their power grows from the barrel of someone else's gun. When US President George W. Bush picked up the phone last week to urge the negotiators to sign the constitution, he reminded Iraqis that their representatives -- though elected -- remain the administrators of his protectorate. While US and British troops stay in Iraq, no government there can make an undisputed claim to legitimacy. Nothing can be resolved in that country until the occupying armies leave.

 

This is by no means the only problem confronting the people who drafted Iraq's constitution. The refusal by the Shias and the Kurds to make serious compromises on federalism, which threatens to deprive the central, Sunni-dominated areas of oil revenues, leaves the Sunnis with little choice but to reject the agreement in next month's referendum. The result could be civil war.

 

Can anything be done? It might be too late. But it seems to me that the transitional assembly has one last throw of the dice. This is to abandon the constitution it has signed, and Bush's self-serving timetable, and start again with a different democratic design.

 

The problem with the way the constitution was produced is the problem afflicting almost all of the world's democratic processes. The deliberations were back to front.

 

First, the members of the constitutional committee, shut inside the green zone, argue over every dot and comma; then they present the whole thing -- 25 pages in English translation -- to the people for a yes or no answer. The question and the answer are meaningless.