:(

Yet another year of (probably) fixed baseball in Taiwan makes me very frowny face. Especially when it heavily involves the team that lost the championship.

Hmm...

The green-leaning Liberty Times cites an unnamed KMT Central Standing Committee member, saying Ma Ying-jeou and all the cabinet members were given gifts by candidates back during Mid-Autumn Festival. The disgruntled anonymous "former" CSC member, forced to resign with all other members in the wake of a scandal showing wide spread bribery by those running for election, asks if that means Ma is also guilty of taking a bribe from candidates, as he is also eligible to vote for CSC members.

China Times: Taiwan has access to real time PLA movements

So they say. The report, in which China Times quotes unnamed military sources, claims that Taiwan's military has rented access to a privately-owned high quality satellite to spy on China, and has been doing so for years now. The data is extensive, including photos showing detail down to 0.6m, and allows Taiwan to maintain real time understanding of China's troop and equipment movements.

The article implies that the US must know about and be passively allowing Taiwan to maintain this contract, otherwise, the report alleges, the Taiwanese officials involved wouldn't have gotten visas to go to the US in the process of dealing with this satellite company. Considering the close cooperation between high-tech companies and the US government, I would suggest it would indeed be unlikely such a contract would escape the notice of the US.

Is this news? I don't know enough about the topic to say. But it's being broken as news.

Some things never change...

But TVBS does occasionally switch away from being a KMT mouthpiece! While channel surfing last night, I decided to take the old motto to heart which advises "keep your friends close but your enemies closer." So I turned on a TVBS news talk show, 新聞夜總會. And the opening segment shown here has some interesting rumors, where pro-blue insider commentators suggest that half or more of the newly elected KMT central standing committee gave gifts to voters (against regulations). This was particularly noteworthy because one of Ma's first actions upon coming chairman was to invalidate the results of two members' election to that body on the basis that they gave gifts. Here's the first related clip:



Let's see if anyone else gets punished ...

Ouch.

Taiwan falls from 36th to 59th place in the press freedom rankings compiled by Reporters without Borders, and the compliers point to the newly empowered KMT's actions as a major cause.

On those latest Unification/Independence poll numbers

Tim Maddog has blogged on an apparent explosion in support for "immediate independence" over at Taiwan Matters!, but let me throw in some cautionary words.

First, keep in mind that there is a lot of ambiguity on what constitutes the status quo (is Taiwana province of an all-China ROC? Is Taiwan de facto independent? Is Taiwan's status undetermined?). Remembering this will help us decode the shift in support.

Tim does a good job of comparing the latest poll results with an earlier Mainland Affairs Council poll on the subject. In the table below, I've also thrown in a Global Affairs 5/20 poll on the same subject.

	Independence ASAP	Status quo now, Independence later	Status quo now, decide later	Status quo forever	Status quo now, unification later	Unification ASAP
Global Affairs 10/20	19%	10.3%	40.7%	11%	4.3%	4.0%
Global Affairs 05/20	15%	10.4%	44.9%	11.5%	5.1%	3.2%
MAC 4/20	6.7%	15.1%	35%	27%	7.6%	1.2%

Taking in all the data together, it appears support for unification now or later is rather static at around the 8.0-8.5% mark. The independence ASAP camp does seem to have gained some ground lately, picking up support from the "wait and see" group. Still, if the latest Global Affairs poll is accurate, a solid two thirds majority are content with the ambiguous "status quo."

Perhaps the shift is a result of people fearing Ma is moving too fast. Perhaps it's because people no longer find the status quo as ambiguously favorable toward Taiwan as they did before. Or perhaps the increase is really just statistical noise. In any case, it will be worthwhile to keep an eye on these numbers as time goes on.

Taiwan, China, and freedom

Michael Turton has repeatedly made the point that the closer Taiwan moves to China, even as talks remain restricted to economic issues (for the time being), the farther away Taiwan moves from democracy.

Now, my nose tells me that there will be plenty of skeptics to this theory, especially as the connection is not so linear. After all, why must it be so? There are so many other possible outcomes. Maybe nothing will really chance in Taiwan. Or maybe Taiwan will make China more democratic through osmosis, right?

I think it's increasingly apparent Michael is right. Not because this outcome is somehow inevitable, but because China clearly has every intention of using all the leverage it has to extract compliance from Taiwan in all areas. Let us count the ways that Chinese pressure has manifested in just the last couple of months:

• Rebiya Kadeer was denied a visa due to the "national interest," which is to say because China would have thrown a hissy fit.
• Kaohsiung City nearly didn't show The 10 Conditions of Love at their film festival due to Chinese pressure; an earlier decision to screen it early and separately still resulted in China directing its tourists away from Kaohsiung, causing a hit to the tourism industry here and setting a solid precedent.
• The virtual guarantee that the Dalai Lama will not be granted a visa again (it had been denied once already, but the 8/8 flooding made it impossible to deny it the second time).

China already uses its rhetorical leverage to send international investors scurrying away from Taiwan whenever China gets its feelings hurt or senses "splittist" activity. But imagine what's going to happen when the Chinese own significant amounts of stock, real estate, and businesses here (including joint ventures with Taiwan companies).

These tools will be leveraged just as the tourists were in Kaohsiung; when Taiwan complies with Chinese wishes (which everyone agrees are aimed solely at unification), China will play nice. When Taiwan does not comply with those wishes, China will make Taiwan hurt.

Even if we grant the KMT the best of intentions, the KMT-CCP dynamic is a whirlpool that will suck Taiwan into ever-decreasing norms of freedoms and eventual unification. Simply put, the KMT wants greater economic integration with China and political détente; China wants unification; China has the greater leverage in negotiations; so China will demand steps toward unification as it grants economic integration and marginal political favors, while denying any political détente that will really push unification off the table for a while.

None of this is to say that China can use this intimidation to successfully annex Taiwan -- there could eventually be significant backlash. But with the KMT in power, things do not look bright.

Dan Bloom writes on Woodstock and how it changed more than the US.

Rundown of KMT factional problems

Well, all candidates are registered for year end elections, and the final picture is not pretty for the KMT -- not because the DPP is looking so strong, but because of KMT infighting. In fact, the KMT is suffering faction driven splits in candidates in Nantou, Hsingchu County, Hualien, Chiayi City, and Jinmen. Those would otherwise be safe seats.

Here is the run down of what things look like on a county by country basis:

District	Candidate	Party
Yilan	林聰賢	DPP
	呂國華	KMT
Taoyuan	吳志揚	KMT
	鄭文燦	DPP
	吳富彤	Hakka Party
Hsinchu County	張碧琴	No affiliation
	曾錦祥	No affiliation
	彭紹瑾	DPP
	邱鏡淳	KMT
Miaoli	李佳穆	No affiliation
	楊長鎮	DPP
	劉政鴻	KMT
Changhua	卓伯源	KMT
	翁金珠	DPP
	張春男	No affiliation
Nantou	陳振盛	No affiliation
	李文忠	DPP
	李朝卿	KMT
	張俊宏	No affiliation
Yunlin	蘇治芬	DPP
	吳威志	KMT
Chiayi County	蕭登標	No affiliation
	張花冠	DPP
	翁玉隆	No affiliation
	翁重鈞	KMT
Pingtung	周典論	KMT
	曹啟鴻	DPP
Taitung	黃健庭	KMT
	劉櫂豪	DPP
Hualien	張志明	No affiliation
	杜麗華	KMT
	傅崐萁	No affiliation
Penghu	王乾發	KMT
	蔡見興	DPP
	曾坤炳	No affiliation
Keelung	李步輝	No affiliation
	張通榮	KMT
	林右昌	DPP
Hsingchu City	許明財	KMT
	劉俊秀	DPP
	林修二	No affiliation
Chiayi City	涂醒哲	DPP
	林聖芬	No affiliation
	黃敏惠	KMT
Jinmen	吳成典	No affiliation
	翁天慶	No affiliation
	楊榮祥	No affiliation
	陳水在	No affiliation
	李沃士	KMT
	許敬民	No affiliation
	梁國棟	No affiliation
Lienchiang	劉增應	KMT
	楊綏生	KMT
	陳財能	No affiliation