On Monday, Chiang Pin-kun (
After arriving in Guangzhou, Chiang told reporters that the primary purpose of the trip was to discuss direct links and passenger and freight services across the Taiwan Strait. He said that the results of these discussions would be passed on to the government for implementation. Another object for this delegation is to pave the way for KMT Chairman Lien Chan's (
The arrangements for Lien's visit to China is an internal matter for the KMT. However, the delegation arrived in China two days after hundreds of thousands of Taiwanese took to the streets of Taipei to protest Beijing's passage of the "Anti-Secession" Law. Therefore, the timing of the KMT's visit to China seems calculated to soothe China's embarrassment over the rally and to misdirect world opinion into believing that the people of Taiwan do not object to the law's passage. The visit has therefore drawn criticism from pan-green legislators and civic groups.
It seems that the KMT deliberately timed its visit to China for this most inappropriate time and that it has ambitions of playing the peacekeeper. Perhaps it believes that walking a political tightrope is the best way to break the deadlock in cross-strait relations. But this risky strategy could just as easily destroy the KMT altogether if it fails.
Chiang told the media that "if there is anything that the government is unwilling to do or cannot do, let the KMT, the largest opposition party in Taiwan, take over and complete the mission." Clearly, the KMT has ambitions of taking over the government's role in cross-strait relations by playing a more active part. Whether the KMT can win over the general public with its ambitions will be seen in future elections.
Beijing seeks to use the opposition to disrupt the government. Such tactics are hardly surprising. Having been defeated in two consecutive national elections, the KMT is now actively seeking to improve its relations with China. Are they really so naive that they will willingly walk into a trap laid for them by Beijing, accepting the task of helping to disrupt Taiwan's political environment? This is something that those KMT members who claim to love Taiwan should be wary of.
If we look at the results of the two previous peace talks between the Nationalists and the Communists, we can see that on both occasions the Nationalists emerged as losers, which is why Chiang Kai-shek (
But if this is the path that the KMT has chosen, then they should at least take the opportunity during this visit to make Beijing understand Taiwan's opposition to the "Anti-Secession" Law. At all costs they must avoid pandering to Beijing's views, forgetting their own position as a result. Otherwise, the KMT will already have lost its self-confidence and dignity before the peace talks can even get off the ground, and they will be despised by China for allowing that to happen.
Former KMT chairman and president Lee Teng-hui (
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 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
A large part of the discourse about Taiwan as a sovereign, independent nation has centered on conventions of international law and international agreements between outside powers — such as between the US, UK, Russia, the Republic of China (ROC) and Japan at the end of World War II, and between the US and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) since recognition of the PRC as the sole representative of China at the UN. Internationally, the narrative on the PRC and Taiwan has changed considerably since the days of the first term of former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) of the Democratic
A report by the US-based Jamestown Foundation on Tuesday last week warned that China is operating illegal oil drilling inside Taiwan’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ) off the Taiwan-controlled Pratas Island (Dongsha, 東沙群島), marking a sharp escalation in Beijing’s “gray zone” tactics. The report said that, starting in July, state-owned China National Offshore Oil Corp installed 12 permanent or semi-permanent oil rig structures and dozens of associated ships deep inside Taiwan’s EEZ about 48km from the restricted waters of Pratas Island in the northeast of the South China Sea, islands that are home to a Taiwanese garrison. The rigs not only typify
RSS