From an editorial in yesterday's China Post entitled, "Living a simple and virtuous life":
There is a growing awareness among the Taiwan public that adopting a new lifestyle is necessary to combat inflation and keep the wolf from the door. It is imperative to adjust one's spending habits.
[...]
All in all, our people must re-embrace the traditional virtues of thrift and diligence.
Funny, but for the last two years, the Post wasn't sternly exhorting its readers to return to the simple life. No, for at least two years the paper busied itself with rank economic demagoguery, directed at Taiwan's pro-independence president.
(Food prices too high? Blame Chen Shui-bian!)
But that was then. There's a new man at the helm now -- a KMT man, a pro-communist man. And suddenly, poverty itself has become a virtue!
(What, did they really think nobody was going to notice the about-face?)
You know, a couple weeks ago the China Post lamented the decline of its Chinese-language sister paper, the China Times. Let me go out on a limb here and say that if the Times' respect for its readers' intelligence is anything like its English-language cousin, then perhaps there may have been a perfectly valid reason for that decline.
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