We all know what it means to break the law. It is perhaps the most fundamental fact governing our social behavior that we understand the constraints and the pressures to stay within the law and the consequences of not doing so.Kuomintang Honorary Chairman Wu Po-hsiung’s shocking “one country, two areas” remark, believed to be President Ma’s message, is precisely laying the groundwork for cross-strait relations, eliminating surprises and stepping forward from the current “1992 Consensus” toward i

Viewpoints March 30, 2012

The G20 is at a crossroads and the world is watching. A lack of continuity, legitimacy and credibility are shadowing the G20 in 2012. This year’s Los Cabos Summit takes place only seven months after the Cannes Summit, yet it has a very ambitious agenda: green growth. Last year’s agenda was hijacked by European crisis management. This time, green growth has been criticized as having a lack of clarity in terms of where it is leading to.On the topic of economics and finance, a financial inclusion,

Viewpoints March 29, 2012

Syria’s crisis is now a year old, with close to 10,000 people, mostly civilians, dead -- and no end in sight. The country is at a stalemate: the opposition is unable to topple President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, and Assad’s forces are unable to quash the resistance.Both sides are adamant: the opposition is determined to bring down a regime that it views as illegitimate, sectarian, corrupt, tyrannical, and stained with blood, while the regime’s hard-line core believes that by persevering it will

Viewpoints March 29, 2012

The G20 is at a crossroads and the world is watching. A lack of continuity, legitimacy and credibility are shadowing the G20 in 2012. This year’s Los Cabos Summit takes place only seven months after the Cannes Summit, yet it has a very ambitious agenda: green growth. Last year’s agenda was hijacked by European crisis management. This time, green growth has been criticized as having a lack of clarity in terms of where it is leading to.On the topic of economics and finance, a financial inclusion,

Viewpoints March 29, 2012

The Fair Trade Commission has toughened its regulation on related-party transactions among subsidiaries of chaebol groups in a bid to expand business opportunities for small and medium-sized enterprises.Under the new rule, which is to apply starting April 1, a company belonging to a business group with aggregate assets exceeding 5 trillion won is required to obtain prior approval from the board of directors when it places an order valued at 5 billion won or more with a sister affiliate. Presentl

Editorial March 28, 2012

The presidential office must be on edge as it faces two high-profile investigations at the same time. One concerns the cyberattack last October on the website of the National Election Commission while the other is about illegal surveillance of a civilian.On Monday, an independent counsel started a probe into the NEC website attack that took place on Oct. 26, the day Seoul mayoral by-election was held. A massive distributed denial-of-service attack brought the election watchdog’s website down, ma

Editorial March 28, 2012

Call it musical chairs with Chinese characteristics. The number of seats remains the same, but a player gets eliminated instead.Bo Xilai’s ouster as leader of Chongqing two weeks ago, a result of his top aide’s asylum dash to a U.S. consulate, might have snuffed out his chances of a promotion in the Chinese Communist Party. But it has brightened the prospects of almost every single one of his rivals.“The removal of any major player releases pressure on others because there are just so few seats

Viewpoints March 28, 2012

China watchers are waiting to see whether the country has engineered a soft landing, cooling down an overheating economy and achieving a more sustainable rate of growth, or whether Asia’s dragon will crash to earth, as others in the neighborhood have before it. But some, particularly American politicians in this presidential election year, focus on only one thing: China’s trade balance.True, not long ago the renminbi was substantially undervalued, and China’s trade surpluses were very large. Tha

Viewpoints March 28, 2012

As it prepares to hold its latest annual summit in New Delhi on March 28-29, the BRICS grouping -- Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa -- remains a concept in search of a common identity and institutionalized cooperation. That is hardly surprising, given that these countries have very different political systems, economies, and national goals, and are located in very different parts of the world. Yet the five emerging economies pride themselves on forming the first important non-Weste

Viewpoints March 28, 2012

These are strange days for China’s netizens. On March 15, the Chinese Communist Party relieved Bo Xilai, the Chongqing party secretary, of his duties after his police chief allegedly attempted to seek asylum in the United States. It was arguably the biggest political story to hit China in two decades, and Chinese microbloggers embraced it with gusto. In the hours following the concise, two-sentence official statement the state media carried about the firing, citizens posted millions of tweets to

Viewpoints March 27, 2012

A friend of mine had his name in the paper the other day. It was an article speculating about who might inherit a prestigious post in the literary world when the current grandee retires. The article said that my friend would have led the list 10 years ago. Ouch! The obvious though unstated implication is that now he’s too old. He just turned 60. He says he already has his dream job and didn’t mind the idea that, because he is 60, some career opportunities have moved beyond his reach. But I mind.

Viewpoints March 27, 2012

Park Geun-hye, Han Myeong-sook and Lee Jung-hee. These three women dominate electioneering in the Republic of Korea, each leading a political party. Of them, Lee is the youngest and newest. This baby-faced, smiling woman is also probably most intelligent ― the highest female scorer in the 1987 SAT ― but she is dedicated to the toughest political cause. She wants to be Korea’s first woman president from the working class.Lee Jung-hee, a co-leader of the United Progressive Party, left the parliame

Editorial March 26, 2012

When U.S. President Barack Obama visited Camp Bonifas near the Panmunjeom truce village on his way to a guard post in the Korean Demilitarized Zone on Sunday, he must have been told whom the U.S. Army facility was named after. It was dedicated to Capt. Arthur Bonifas, one of the two U.S. officers who were killed by axe-wielding North Korean guards while on a work detail from the U.N. Command on Aug. 18, 1976.Time has passed very slowly in the 36 years since the bloody incident and since the sign

Editorial March 26, 2012