A couple hundred years ago China thought it was at the center of a world divided into two parts: one which accepted Chinese superiority and received the benefits of Confucian culture and another which ought to have. The idea that China can legislate for the world seems to have held fast. Last week we learned that a law mandating Taiwan's unification has been drafted in Beijing. We wondered what other country might pass laws about places and polities over which it had no control. Imagine the environmentally conscious Swedes passing a law forbidding gas-guzzling Americans from driving SUVs. Or the workaholic Germans passing a law restricting Spanish lunch breaks to a swift 30 minutes.
Chen Shui-bian (
Taiwan has to see passage of this "law" as a threat. But the cloud may have a silver lining. To say that China needs to come up with new thinking about Taiwan is a familiar refrain for this newspaper. Officially China has staked everything on "one country, two systems." And when that formula might yet have worked, there was little reason to give thought to any other way of bringing Taiwan back into the Chinese fold.
By any standards, however, "one country, two systems" has clearly failed. Far from Hong Kong basking in enviable prosperity created by its capitalist system, enviable freedoms guaranteed by the Basic Law, and enviable security as a part of the "upcoming superpower," it now has none of those things. The only people there who appear content are the clique of businessmen China has appointed to run the place. It is quite obvious that Hong Kong's fate now provides the strongest disincentive for Taiwan to consider a unification deal.
The only solution Beijing will consider to its "Taiwan problem" is therefore vacuous. Beyond that there are also a host of limitations on the way the Taiwan issue can be discussed in China. Taiwan independence, which in de facto or de jure forms is what the majority of Taiwanese want, can only be regarded as the wish of a small minority of deluded "compatriots," most of whom are dupes a "foreign power." However unrealistic this is -- and the delusion is perfectly obvious to any Chinese scholar with Internet access -- it is a thought crime in China to discuss Taiwan in any other way.
That doesn't mean people haven't been doing so. The very prominence given to rent-a-quote "academics" toeing the official line by Xinhua and other state-owned media, along with anecdotal evidence from personal contacts, suggests to China-watchers both new thinking and an attempt to suppress it. The draft law is a tool in that suppression. It is there to, in effect, criminalize any proposal concerning resolution of the Taiwan issue except that mandated by the government. Ironically, Beijing needs this not because of Taiwan itself -- over which it has no control -- but because new thinking on Taiwan calls attention to the failure of Hong Kong. And that is something that simply cannot be admitted.
Chinese agents often target Taiwanese officials who are motivated by financial gain rather than ideology, while people who are found guilty of spying face lenient punishments in Taiwan, a researcher said on Tuesday. While the law says that foreign agents can be sentenced to death, people who are convicted of spying for Beijing often serve less than nine months in prison because Taiwan does not formally recognize China as a foreign nation, Institute for National Defense and Security Research fellow Su Tzu-yun (蘇紫雲) said. Many officials and military personnel sell information to China believing it to be of little value, unaware that
Before 1945, the most widely spoken language in Taiwan was Tai-gi (also known as Taiwanese, Taiwanese Hokkien or Hoklo). However, due to almost a century of language repression policies, many Taiwanese believe that Tai-gi is at risk of disappearing. To understand this crisis, I interviewed academics and activists about Taiwan’s history of language repression, the major challenges of revitalizing Tai-gi and their policy recommendations. Although Taiwanese were pressured to speak Japanese when Taiwan became a Japanese colony in 1895, most managed to keep their heritage languages alive in their homes. However, starting in 1949, when the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) enacted martial law
“Si ambulat loquitur tetrissitatque sicut anas, anas est” is, in customary international law, the three-part test of anatine ambulation, articulation and tetrissitation. And it is essential to Taiwan’s existence. Apocryphally, it can be traced as far back as Suetonius (蘇埃托尼烏斯) in late first-century Rome. Alas, Suetonius was only talking about ducks (anas). But this self-evident principle was codified as a four-part test at the Montevideo Convention in 1934, to which the United States is a party. Article One: “The state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications: a) a permanent population; b) a defined territory; c) government;
The central bank and the US Department of the Treasury on Friday issued a joint statement that both sides agreed to avoid currency manipulation and the use of exchange rates to gain a competitive advantage, and would only intervene in foreign-exchange markets to combat excess volatility and disorderly movements. The central bank also agreed to disclose its foreign-exchange intervention amounts quarterly rather than every six months, starting from next month. It emphasized that the joint statement is unrelated to tariff negotiations between Taipei and Washington, and that the US never requested the appreciation of the New Taiwan dollar during the
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