Infamous for its impotence and self-importance, China's National People's Congress (NPC) seems to exist in an imperial haze. Ignoring protests from the rest of the world, it will do as it is told and pass the "anti-secession" law treating Taiwan as part of China's territory and the Taiwanese people as a mob to be intimidated or killed if need be. But Beijing has yet to learn the lesson from the failure of verbal attacks and military threats in the past.
The reasoning behind the bill mentions "non-peaceful" means to resolve the Taiwan question -- a frightening phrase that points to an intensifying threat to invade as well as the use of any number of other obnoxious strategies.
But the most unacceptable part of the proposed law is this: The right of interpretation rests solely with the Chinese government. This means that Chinese officials are both the players and the referee in this ugly political game, increasing insecurity both in military terms and in terms more relevant to Taiwanese businesspeople in China.
In 1997, Beijing promised the international community that the Basic Law in Hong Kong would be unchanged for 50 years. But since the right to interpret the law lies with the NPC, the Hong Kong courts' power was effectively stolen away, causing growing public distrust in the judicial system.
China also promised that Hong Kong would be ruled by Hong Kong people, but it is now clear that it will be ruled by Beijing's puppets -- and barely competent puppets at that. The people of Hong Kong have neither the right to elect their chief executive in direct elections nor the right to elect the Legislative Council as a whole. Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa (
The Hong Kong people still live the lives of a colonized people, without any of the respect or pride that was supposed to come with the return to China. The 500,000-strong demonstration against national security legislation in July 2003 was a reflection of the public's lack of trust in Beijing's promises.
The "anti-secession" law is to a large extent modeled on the US Taiwan Relations Act. One of the goals is to rely on unilateral legislation and domestic laws to define the relationship between China and Taiwan in order to intimidate the Taiwanese public, so that they will ape their more compliant "compatriots" in Hong Kong and Macau. At the same time, Beijing is trying to challenge Washington and test its resolve.
If Washington does nothing and other countries refrain from strong reaction to Chinese aggression, then China may escalate its threats of military action to frighten Taiwan away from adopting any domestic reforms and create the impression that Taiwan is already in the bag.
A recent commentary in the Wall Street Journal pointed out that China's rhetoric is similar to North Korea's. North Korean provocations against Asian neighbors have caused no end of problems for the US and Japan.
Unless the world wants a smarter and more self-righteous version of North Korea creating havoc in the region, the international community needs to start saying "no" to China.
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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