Those who are concerned about the cross-strait issue should keep in mind that since Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) Chairman Joseph Wu (
For example, the council plans to allow Chinese actors and actresses to take part in Taiwanese movies. Late last month it announced that it would allow five major Chinese media outlets -- including the state-controlled Xinhua News Agency (
Due to competition from popular Chinese, Japanese, and South Korean movies and TV dramas, the number of outlets for local artists has shrunk significantly in the past few years. In practical terms, this openness would seem then to have few direct benefits. But it is a case of insisting on openness as a matter of principle.
This newspaper praises the council's insistence on openness, which proves that the goodwill of President Chen Shui-bian's (陳水扁) administration towards China was not just lip service. The actions of Wu and Chiu -- who have followed Chen for years and won his trust -- are the expression of this goodwill.
However, now that Taiwan has shown its goodwill, how has China responded?
Wang Zaixi (王在希), the vice minister of China's Taiwan Affairs Office (TAO), said Thursday that Beijing was "seriously considering creating a unification law" to make Taiwan a special administrative region of China. This makes us think of Beijing's attempt to use Article 23 of the Basic Law (基本法) to tighten freedom of speech in Hong Kong -- a move which sparked a 500,000-person demonstration in that city.
Putting aside the retrograde nature of any unification law, China is providing the pan-green camp with ammunition for propaganda. China should remember that in this year's presidential election, Chen was elected for a second term, defeating the pan-blue forces, despite a lackluster performance by his administration over the previous four years. Credit for this victory should be given to an awakening Taiwan consciousness.
China's actions at this time only serve to consolidate Taiwan awareness and increase the chances that the pan-greens will be able to obtain a legislative majority at the end of the year. The pan-greens must therefore be taking silent delight in the boost that the unification law has given them.
We would like to warn China that since the victory in the primaries to represent the KMT in Hsinchu City by Ko Chun-hsiung (柯俊雄), the former actor who registered to participate in the 1996 Hong Kong provisional legislative elections, the spectrum of the pan-blue camp has shifted into the red zone. The pan-greens are already preparing their attack should Ko be officially nominated. For the pan-greens, Ko's known soft spot for China is like a gift from heaven.
The TAO's Wang should be given special thanks for contributing to the pan-green legislative election campaign because of his use of the unification law to stimulate Taiwanese consciousness. At this point, it will be hard for the pan-greens to resist making use of their "Love Taiwan" propaganda once again.
We call on leaders on both sides of the Strait to put aside ideology and work toward building trust and furthering exchanges between the people of China and Taiwan.
Since we share a common language and culture, once the political issues are solved, Taiwan will always be China's friend, never its enemy. If we put aside emotion and insist on rational dialogue, we can help re-establish friendship between the two sides of the Strait.
Taiwan stands at the epicenter of a seismic shift that will determine the Indo-Pacific’s future security architecture. Whether deterrence prevails or collapses will reverberate far beyond the Taiwan Strait, fundamentally reshaping global power dynamics. The stakes could not be higher. Today, Taipei confronts an unprecedented convergence of threats from an increasingly muscular China that has intensified its multidimensional pressure campaign. Beijing’s strategy is comprehensive: military intimidation, diplomatic isolation, economic coercion, and sophisticated influence operations designed to fracture Taiwan’s democratic society from within. This challenge is magnified by Taiwan’s internal political divisions, which extend to fundamental questions about the island’s identity and future
The narrative surrounding Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s attendance at last week’s Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit — where he held hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin and chatted amiably with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) — was widely framed as a signal of Modi distancing himself from the US and edging closer to regional autocrats. It was depicted as Modi reacting to the levying of high US tariffs, burying the hatchet over border disputes with China, and heralding less engagement with the Quadrilateral Security dialogue (Quad) composed of the US, India, Japan and Australia. With Modi in China for the
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) has postponed its chairperson candidate registration for two weeks, and so far, nine people have announced their intention to run for chairperson, the most on record, with more expected to announce their campaign in the final days. On the evening of Aug. 23, shortly after seven KMT lawmakers survived recall votes, KMT Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) announced he would step down and urged Taichung Mayor Lu Shiow-yen (盧秀燕) to step in and lead the party back to power. Lu immediately ruled herself out the following day, leaving the subject in question. In the days that followed, several
The Jamestown Foundation last week published an article exposing Beijing’s oil rigs and other potential dual-use platforms in waters near Pratas Island (Dongsha Island, 東沙島). China’s activities there resembled what they did in the East China Sea, inside the exclusive economic zones of Japan and South Korea, as well as with other South China Sea claimants. However, the most surprising element of the report was that the authors’ government contacts and Jamestown’s own evinced little awareness of China’s activities. That Beijing’s testing of Taiwanese (and its allies) situational awareness seemingly went unnoticed strongly suggests the need for more intelligence. Taiwan’s naval
RSS