Taiwan’s former vice president, Chen Chien-jen, a Catholic, who became the country’s new prime minister at the end of January, can do a lot. But his term in office will be short as the East Asian nation goes to presidential and parliamentary polls next year.
Beneath all the harsh words and military manoeuvrings, Taiwan enjoys robust ties with China, which wants to annex it, and the US, which will come to its aid in case of an attack by the communist nation.
China, which lays claim to Taiwan as its renegade province, takes in 37 percent of all Taiwanese exports, which rose by 14.2% last year. China also provides 20 percent of Taiwan’s imports, which increased by 9.5 % in 2022.
As neighbours, they face a raft of mutual risks from the depletion of marine stocks to global supply chain challenges. So, they cooperate one way or the other.
But still, Chen has to worry because there are enough strategic reasons why China won’t consider Taiwanese independence from the mainland.
Though the appellation “Taiwan” appears in brackets after the Republic of China, (the official name of Taiwan) and only 14 nations, including the Vatican, have diplomatic ties with it, Taiwan proudly occupies the United States’ eighth-largest trading partner position among the nearly 200 nations in the world.
“Chen will have to lift the fortunes of the party before presidential and parliamentary polls next year”
Though about 267 times smaller than China in size, Taiwan’s trade ties with the US are constantly strengthening.
A devout Catholic, Chen, who attended Pope Benedict’s funeral at the Vatican as the president’s envoy, took up the new assignment as part of a reshuffle by the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) after it suffered heavy losses during local elections four months ago.

The suicide blast at a mosque in Pakistan, claiming the lives of 101 people — mostly policemen — and injuring more than 220 on Jan. 30, has set alarm bells ringing among the country’s Christian groups.
The blast in Peshawar, capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, bordering the Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, is the deadliest since twin suicide bombings at the city’s All Saints Church that killed 70 worshippers and injured more than 120. The attack in 2013 was the worst strike on Christians in Pakistan.
Atif Javed, a Catholic, whose six friends and their families were injured in the church blast, expressed fear for his wife who works at the social welfare department close to the targeted mosque in the sixth most populous city in Pakistan.
“Nobody is safe. We try to return home early when we go out shopping and eating,” Javed told.
“We don’t trust words and await what plan they have to protect us”
“We were worried about her when the news came in about the mosque blast. On the phone, she described the blast as an earthquake initially. A Christian police officer, who lives adjacent to the mosque, lost his mother,” Javed added.

Governments in multiple countries in the Asia-Pacific region suppressed basic freedoms and civic space amid rising authoritarianism and high level of corruption, says a new report from Transparency International (TI).
Afghanistan, Cambodia, Myanmar, and North Korea are ranked among the worst Asian nations to curb civic space and basic freedoms, according to the Corruption Perception Index (CPI) 2022 report published on Jan. 31.
The Berlin-based global anti-graft watchdog said that “grand corruption remains common, and the overall situation has barely improved” among Asia-Pacific nations.
While the report pointed out some Asian countries making headway in their fight against corruption, the region scored an average of 45 points out of 100 for the fourth year in a row.
The CPI ranks 180 countries and territories around the world by their perceived levels of public sector corruption, scoring on a scale of 0 (highly corrupt) to 100 (very clean).
Among the Asian nations, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan scoring 83, 76, and 73 points each were ranked in the top three spots.
“Asian leaders persisted in allowing anti-corruption commitments to fall on the back burner”
Among the tail-enders were Afghanistan, Cambodia, Myanmar, and North Korea scoring 24, 24, 23, and 17 points respectively.
Despite the Asian sub-continent seeing multiple diplomatic summits to ease international tension and reduce corruption, the results were widely varying, TI said.
“Asian leaders persisted in allowing anti-corruption commitments to fall on the back burner, while Pacific governments refocused and recentered their efforts to combat it,” the annual report read.
It specifically pointed out Malaysia’s (47 points) 1MDB scandal terming it as a “grand corruption” that implicated banks, celebrities, and institutions across six countries.
In 2022, former prime minister, Najib Razak, was jailed for his involvement in the scandal.

A diocesan pro-life panel in southern Vietnam celebrated a special requiem Mass and burial for 700 aborted foetuses on Jan. 29 where participants dedicated themselves to raising awareness of human dignity in the communist nation where students lead the pack in seeking abortions.
Led by Xuan Loc diocese’s pro-life committee, the special Mass at Bac Hai Church in Bien Hoa City, in the southeast region of Vietnam, was attended by hundreds of pro-life volunteers from different faiths. The cemetery is home to over 62,000 unborn babies.
Before the burial, the dead foetuses were cleaned with alcohol, wrapped in white cloth, given names, decorated with flowers, and placed in the church for people to pray for.
“Burying dead foetuses is to apologize to unborn babies for the pain and suffering we make them endure … and to pray for other babies to be safe,” Father Joseph Nguyen Van Tich, one of two priests who concelebrated the Mass said.
The other priest was Father Vincent Nguyen Minh Tien.
Although people took ten days off to celebrate the Tet (Lunar New Year) festival in January, early terminations did not subside and volunteers still collected 700 dead foetuses from local clinics and hospitals, Father Tich said.
The southeast Asian nation with a population of 99.4 million records 300,000 terminations per year, mainly among girls aged 15-19. Of them, 60-70% are students, according to studies.

North Korean defectors residing in South Korea face discrimination due to language barriers and negative perceptions about their country causing many to have psychological breakdowns, says a new survey.
The Korea Hana Foundation (KHF) in its 2022 North Korean Refugees Social Inte-gration Survey found that one in every five North Korean defectors face discrimination due to their “speech, lifestyle, and attitude,” Catholic Peace Broadcasting Corporation (CPBC) reported on Feb. 1.
Park Joo-myung, 43, felt that apart from the support and benefits provided by South Korea to settle in, the defectors’ North Korean accent is also a factor that impacts discri-mination. “I felt a lot of alienation because of [my] North Korean accent. So, I have no choice but to react sensitively to even passing [comments],” Park said.
KHF is a non-profit public organization established by the Ministry of Unification in 2010 to help defectors settle down through its multi-faceted projects.
In the organization’s 2022 annual survey among 2,198 of the estimated 30,000 North Korean defectors in the county, 19.5% of respondents acknowledged facing discrimi-nation of some sort, CPBC reported.
In contrast, 16.1% had experienced dis-crimination while trying to settle down in South Korea in 2021.
Concerning the reasons for discrimination, “negative perception about the existence of North Koreans” among South Koreans ranked second at 44.2% after the speech, lifestyle, and attitude issues.
The assumption that North Koreans “lack the ability compared to South Koreans in terms of professional knowledge and skills” ranked third at 20.4%

Filipino Jesuit Father Catalino Arevalo, whom many consider the “Father of Asian Theology,” died at the age of 97 on Jan. 18.
The Jesuit brought his own method into conversation with other theologians in the Philippines, recalls Vincentian Father Daniel Franklin Pilario, a theology pro-fessor in the Philippines. In the following tribute, Father Pilario provides excerpts from a 2004 article he wrote on the theology of Father Arevalo:
Theologians need to have a concrete grasp of the country’s main political and economic move-ments, so as to act on them in the spirit of the Gospel. This intrinsic connection of theology with time and historical circumstance can be discerned in Filipino Jesuit Father Catalino Arevalo’s theolo-gical method of “reading the signs of the times,” a term introduced by Vatican II.
Somewhere in his writings, Father Arevalo wrote: Ours is “a theology of bits and pieces gathered and scotch-taped together in hours of doing and suffering, in dialogue and confrontation, in reflec-tion and prayer, in emptiness, in confusion and paralysis — in all the times and seasons of Qoheleth, it would seem — in struggle, sometimes in anguish and despair, sometimes with the shedding of real blood and tears.”

The Lunar New Year, which began on Jan. 22, is traditionally a time for families to come together, share meals, visit relatives and take time off work. As people across China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, and many other parts of Asia and the world celebrate the Year of the Rabbit, many will have traveled long distances to reunite with their families.
But as this festival gets underway, let us remember those who cannot be with their loved ones — in particular, those in prison for their political or religious beliefs. And let us especially think of one prominent Catholic, the 75-year-old Hong Kong entrepreneur, publisher and pro-democracy campaigner, Jimmy Lai, who is spending his third Lunar New Year behind bars.
In December 2020, Lai was jailed, awaiting trial on multiple charges. He was briefly released on bail and was able to spend Christmas that year with his family, albeit under a form of house arrest, but on Dec. 31, 2020, his bail was reversed and he has been in prison ever since.
Late last year, on Dec. 10 — which is Human Rights Day — Lai was sentenced to almost six years’ imprisonment, on totally trumped-up fraud charges. He has already served two other sentences, one of 13 months for lighting a candle and saying a prayer at a vigil to mark the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and another of 14 months for participating in a peaceful protest in 2019.
“If convicted, Lai may end up spending the rest of his life in jail”
But even worse is to come. His biggest trial — under Hong Kong’s draconian National Security Law — begins in September this year, having been postponed from last year due to a wrangle over his choice of defense counsel. His chosen lawyer, British barrister Tim Owen, KC, was rejected by the Hong Kong government and his work permit was temporarily suspended, even though Hong Kong’s Court of Final Appeal had approved him.
Beijing has now given Hong Kong’s chief executive carte blanche to determine not only who the judge is in a National Security Law trial, but also who the defendant’s legal representative will be.
If convicted, Lai may end up spending the rest of his life in jail.

The Japanese government’s policy of increasing financial subsidies for families to have a baby has a long history. It is of course an attempt to address the country’s extremely low birth rate and aging population.
Japan has really tried everything, from providing couples with subsidies for marriage before the age of 40 to encouraging couples to spend more time at home and offering cheaper day-care. In fact, government funds have been heavily spent in recent years to wage war against the hedonism of single individuals with the aim of bringing about a demographic shift.
This time the subsidies that were going to be handed out were about US$400 to match the average price for giving birth at a clinic. And guess what? All those clinics on hearing the news that an unexpected bonus was coming their way have raised their prices accordingly.
So what the government accomplished was to effectively increase future taxation for its citizens, while at the present claiming it was all done with a pure heart and good intentions.
“Traditional family structure and traditional gender roles are slowly but surely coming under attack”

The parliament of Pakistan moved this week to tighten its already far-reaching blasphemy laws, under which numerous Christians and other minorities have been prosecuted and subjected to mob violence, often for dubious charges of blasphemy against beliefs or figures associated with Islam.
Insulting the Prophet Muhammad is already, at least on paper, a capital offense in Pakistan. Under the newest legal changes, those convicted of insulting the Prophet Muhammad’s wives, companions, or close relatives will now face 10 years in prison, a sentence that can be extended to life, along with a fine of 1 million rupees, or roughly $4,500, reported the New York Times. It also makes the charge of blasphemy an offense for which bail is not possible.
Islam is the state religion of Pakistan, and blasphemy laws have been on the books in the country for more than a century, even before it became an independent nation. A notable escalation of the country’s blasphemy laws occurred in 1987 when the death sentence was made mandatory for some violations.
One of the most famous cases in recent years was that of Asia Bibi, a Catholic woman who spent nearly a decade on death row after being accused of disparaging Islam. Numerous world leaders called for her immediate release, including Popes Benedict XVI and Francis.

In the wake of rising attacks against places of worship, senior religious leaders of Myanmar have appealed for restraint citing international pacts that call for the protection of places of worship, places of learning, and places of healing.
In the latest attack, a church, bell tower and other buildings of Our Lady of the Assumption Cathedral at Mandalay in Upper Myanmar were destroyed on January 15.
Government soldiers, an eyewitness revealed, also “desecrated” the place by “looting, drinking alcohol and smoking” inside.
The destroyed church is a historical and cultural heritage for the entire country, including Buddhists since 1894.
Also ,in the January 15 attack, a century-old convent of the Franciscan Sisters was set on fire by the military.
In addition, five out of 16 dioceses in the country — Loikaw, Pekhon, Hakha, Kalay and Mandalay — are affected by the ongoing conflicts between the army and ethnic rebel groups, some of whose members belong to various Christian denominations.
On January 21, in his message to the faithful published on the occasion of Chinese New Year, Archbishop of Yangon Cardinal Charles Maung Bo declared January as the “month of the ceasefire,” asking all parties – including the military – to “silence their weapons” and “believe in a peaceful solution.”
The cardinal, who is also the president of the Federation of Asia Bishops’ Conferences, emphasized the value of ‘dialogue’ in conflict resolution and called for the resumption of the Panlong peace process.
“Why are these sacred places attacked and destroyed?” ask archbishops of Yangon, Mandalay and Taunggyi in the open letter entitled “Peace is a pilgrimage, let us walk it together.”