US has obligation to Taiwan
David Evseeff (Letters, Jan. 8, page 8) says that President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) is ignorant and arrogant in proposing the "defensive referendum."
In his opinion, it is US soldiers' lives that will be at stake if Taiwan has to be defended against an attack by China.
But with or without Chen's proposal, nearly 500 ballistic missiles in China are pointing toward Taiwan.
The lives of 23 million Taiwanese are under constant threat. Should we keep quiet about this threat just because it is part of the "status quo?"
Won't these missiles be launched once an attack has been initiated?
Or are Taiwan's civilian lives not as precious as those of US soldiers?
It would not be a pure favor to the Taiwanese people if the US were to help defend the country against a Chinese attack.
The US will defend Taiwan only to protect its own interests, without regard to its obligations to this country.
Who was a long-time supporter of Chiang Kai-shek's (
It was this dictatorship under which the Taiwanese people suffered for more than four decades. It was also this dictatorship that has led Taiwan into facing a rather difficult situation on today's international stage.
The US, which claims to be the leader of the democratic world, cannot simply withdraw from its long involvement and leave Taiwan to fend for itself against a possible Chinese attack.
Alou Bo
Hsinchu
Taiwan already independent
I read that China has imposed anti-dumping tariffs on cold-rolled steel imports from Taiwan ("China to impose steel tariffs," Jan 14, page 11).
If China imposes tariffs on imports from Taiwan, then it is certainly behaving as though Taiwan were a separate country.
In fact since Taiwan and China have separate borders, governments, legislatures, laws, presidents, militaries, passports and currencies, no objective observer could conclude anything but that China and Taiwan are separate countries.
Taiwan need not "move toward independence" (China's words) since it is already there.
Daniel McCarthy
Salt Lake City, Utah
A series of strong earthquakes in Hualien County not only caused severe damage in Taiwan, but also revealed that China’s power has permeated everywhere. A Taiwanese woman posted on the Internet that she found clips of the earthquake — which were recorded by the security camera in her home — on the Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu. It is spine-chilling that the problem might be because the security camera was manufactured in China. China has widely collected information, infringed upon public privacy and raised information security threats through various social media platforms, as well as telecommunication and security equipment. Several former TikTok employees revealed
Two sets of economic data released last week by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) have drawn mixed reactions from the public: One on the nation’s economic performance in the first quarter of the year and the other on Taiwan’s household wealth distribution in 2021. GDP growth for the first quarter was faster than expected, at 6.51 percent year-on-year, an acceleration from the previous quarter’s 4.93 percent and higher than the agency’s February estimate of 5.92 percent. It was also the highest growth since the second quarter of 2021, when the economy expanded 8.07 percent, DGBAS data showed. The growth
At the same time as more than 30 military aircraft were detected near Taiwan — one of the highest daily incursions this year — with some flying as close as 37 nautical miles (69kms) from the northern city of Keelung, China announced a limited and selected relaxation of restrictions on Taiwanese agricultural exports and tourism, upon receiving a Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) delegation led by KMT legislative caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅崑萁). This demonstrates the two-faced gimmick of China’s “united front” strategy. Despite the strongest earthquake to hit the nation in 25 years striking Hualien on April 3, which caused
In the 2022 book Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, academics Hal Brands and Michael Beckley warned, against conventional wisdom, that it was not a rising China that the US and its allies had to fear, but a declining China. This is because “peaking powers” — nations at the peak of their relative power and staring over the precipice of decline — are particularly dangerous, as they might believe they only have a narrow window of opportunity to grab what they can before decline sets in, they said. The tailwinds that propelled China’s spectacular economic rise over the past