Monday Links and comments

The kids in Taipei a decade ago.

Lazy Monday...

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Daily Links:

• KMT Party Chairman Eric Chu says that whoever is the Party's presidential nominee must pay his own way -- no party money will be used. Thus Chu preserves funds for a 2020 run, while preventing anyone from squirreling away party funds to oppose him later. Or perhaps from wasting it in the month between the ending of the nomination process and Chu being "drafted" by the core of the KMT. Meanwhile, recall that Speaker of the Legislature,Wang Jin-pyng, whom Ma tried to destroy two years ago, is going to announce tomorrow, according to media reports last week. A couple of days ago current candidate Hung Hsiu-chu, who has been acting as Chu's stalking horse, said it would be ok to draft Chu if he didn't want to stand as candidate.
• Emily Chen in The Diplomat: Tricky waters both parties have to navigate before 2016 elections. Chen writes on Taiwan for several publications, and gets it. The new generation of Taiwanese is also creating a new generation of people writing about them.
• Frozen Garlic on the Chu visit: it's mostly bad. This para is priceless: 

  The American in me thought that Chu looked like a leader. He was energetic, friendly, and spoke eloquently without a script. This was in marked contrast to the other side of the table, which seemed dull and lifeless. However, the voice in my head that pretends to understand Chinese political stagecraft laughed at my inner American’s naiveté. Chu was overeager, a younger smiling too broadly and showing his desperation for the older man’s approval. Xi showed his dominance by giving only the faintest of smiles in the official photo. Xi read his remarks from a script without much emotion, as if this were just another – relatively unimportant – event in his busy schedule. Yesterday while I was driving home, a talk show host (on a deep blue radio station) lambasted Chu for introducing his team one by one in the reception line, as if he were presenting a group of schoolchildren to the principal for a pat on the head. Chu simply didn’t seem to have the gravitas of people like Lien Chan.

• Also: Taiwan's indigenous Submarine Saga
• WSJ interviews Ma Ying-jeou. The softball questions that permit Ma to engage in normal MaSpeak are the sad outcome of the fact that interviews with Ma are controlled. Nevertheless, to ask these questions, WSJ sent three editors. Wouldn't it be great if they had sent a single student intern and a poodle, to say "Look, as soon as you let us ask serious questions, we'll be happy to supply serious people."
• WSJ with a review of five things the next president has to worry about
• Jacob Tischer's blog about Taiwanese popular religion
• Richard Saunders on the Wind Lion Gods of Kinmen
• Tie Non, from Matsu with good pics.
• It's a miracle. The Taiwan Tourism Bureau makes a paid advertizement for cycling that doesn't suck
• Chinese spouses demand reduction in waiting time for citizenship from six to four years.
• Ma orders medals of honor struck for veterans of war against Japan. The Taiwanese who served in the armed forces of Japan get nothing. 
• Epoch Times on netizen reaction to the video of woman saying KMT and CCP should ignore the feelings of the Taiwanese. More on her from Thinking Taiwan: Let the Taishang speak honestly
• AIT Chief Burghardt in Taipei for six day visit
• The textbook controversy continues -- major revisions made to the history and geography texts to reflect pro-China views, delete democracy references. Now government is warning people not to veer from them.
• Former KMT Miaoli county chief now accused of other forms of misuse of funds, this time overseas trips. Now that all the construction he fostered is concluded, they can go after him.
• Old material on John Tkacik's website on the formation of US Taiwan policy that the status of Taiwan is undetermined.
• Useful: Bibliography for the democratic transition in Taiwan 

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