Wayward Sisters
Last week marked the 14 th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, providing a chance for reflection on a blunder that the Bloomberg administration is in the process of making. The mayor's office has recently said that it is beginning the process of reinstating the "sister city" status of Beijing — a status that was revoked by Mayor Koch after the butchers of that city murdered hundreds of pro-democracy students in 1989. As the Red Chinese have made no amends for the massacre and continue to impose a totalitarian, Communist dictatorship on the majority of the Chinese people, we propose an alternative: Make Taipei, the capital of Free China, New York's sister city instead.
According to the Web site of the Sister City Program, one of the four main objectives of the initiative is to," Promote multinational cultural and commercial interaction respectful of individual differences and human rights." Beijing hardly fits this bill. The current list of New York's sister cities includes Budapest, Madrid, Johannesburg, Santo Domingo, Cairo, Jerusalem, London, Rome, and Tokyo. With the exception of Cairo, all of these cities are located in democratic nations. Better, it would seem, to swell the ranks of the free cities on this list.
While Beijing is home to what Rep. Thos. DeLay recently called "decrepit tyrants," Taipei is home to a budding democracy. The Free Chinese government relocated to Taiwan in 1949, after the Communists established a dictatorship in 1949. The Taiwanese government lifted martial law in 1987 and instituted a series of democratic reforms. The first direct presidential election took place in 1996, and in 2000 the nation saw its first peaceful transfer of power to the Democratic Progressive Party. Freedom House has said Taiwan is now on par with Japan as one of the three freest countries in Asia. Taipei itself is a city of 2.6 million people with a burgeoning technology sector. As some in the State Department attempt to climb down from the president's statement of two years ago that America would do "whatever it took" to defend Taiwan, New York can reaffirm its commitment to capitalism and democracy.
