Word: ma
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...major face of Taiwan's new politics. The other is his political associate Ma Ying-jeou, the big winner of the March 22 presidential election. Ma's victory is a landmark development that has the potential to not just change Taiwan but transform its fraught relationship with China. For decades after its leadership fled to Taiwan in 1949, the KMT regarded the island merely as a transitional base from which to reclaim the mainland. The KMT, an outsider, ruled Taiwan in an authoritarian manner, and was out of touch with local folk, who identified themselves as Taiwanese, not Chinese...
...rather than command, their respect. The core policy of reunification with the mainland under the KMT, always a far-fetched idea, was put on the backburner. And old-guard mainlanders, who had run the party for so long, realized they had to give way to younger leaders such as Ma (who was born in Hong Kong and went to Taiwan when he was just 1) if the KMT were ever to regain power...
...time I met Ma, it was clear he understood that Taiwan was punching below its weight and that it had to liberate its over-regulated economy to compete in a globalized world. He also recognized that Taiwan needed to acknowledge China's might. Now that he is President, Ma wants to launch direct transport links with the mainland, lift restrictions on Taiwan businesses operating in China and open the island to Chinese tourists and investors. As he told my colleague Michael Schuman: "We can make cross-strait relations work for both - a win-win situation...
...approach that benefits the entire region. Well-educated and well-spoken, Ma excites the Chinese diaspora in a way not even China's best and brightest do. On election night, I was watching the results with my wife on a Taipei cable channel in our Hong Kong home when the doorbell rang. It was our neighbors, a Taiwan family - husband, wife and their two children; they didn't have Taiwan TV and wished to follow the election on ours. As Ma pulled away from his opponent Frank Hsieh, the voice of the anchorwoman was drowned out by their cheers...
...Ma is enough of a politician to know he cannot be a change agent all by himself. There are myriad ways he can stumble. His pledge to improve people's livelihoods will be hard to fulfill. On cross-strait initiatives, he requires Beijing to go along, and, within his own party, he has to walk a tightrope between competing factions. But Ma should be able to lean on the KMT-controlled legislature and, in a bid to heal the island's divisions between the two main parties and between mainlanders and Taiwanese, he has reached out to the DPP, acknowledging...