With the best will in the world it is hard to see anything new in President Chen Shui-bian's (陳水扁) invitation to Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) to hold a "rational dialogue." The government is trying to talk up the offer as if it involves major concessions.
After all, Taiwan has now abandoned the two previous conditions -- that the talks take place outside China and that China abandon its demand that Taiwan recognize its "one China" principle.
In reality, this is almost meaningless. Chen cannot go to China without appearing as a supplicant seeking terms of surrender. And Hu will only come to Taiwan for a "handover" ceremony. As for "one China," Taiwan's condition for talks was that China drop this condition. Now Taiwan says it doesn't have to. But China's condition, of course, remains in place. And this is something that no Taiwanese government can afford to acquiesce to, given the slippery ever-changing definition of that principle -- something the pan-blues, shortsighted and ignorant even when not simply paid off by Beijing, have never properly dealt with.
Chen's talk of creating a "window of opportunity" for the "co-existence of a democratic Taiwan and a democratic China" verges on the fatuous. The current Chinese regime doesn't want a democratic China. And this is not simply because a bunch of cadres are used to the perks of power and don't want to lose them.
A large part of the Chinese intelligentsia -- the academics and think tank crowd whose role in policy-making is underappreciated -- are convinced that China can buck the historical trend according to which the most prosperous societies are liberal democracies, whatever the link between those two conditions might be. They think China is an exception, and democracy will destroy the social cohesion necessary for prosperity. There is an entire intellectual establishment in China, not just a political elite, that is opposed to democracy. If China is to democratize at all, it is not something that is going to happen soon.
A Taiwanese president might waste his time with pipe dreams about co-existence of democracies if he chooses, but the reality he faces is a weak democracy faced with a bellicose, ultra-nationalistic neighbor which imagines it has a claim on that democracy's territory. For Chen to spend so long enunciating a vision of democratic harmony was a victory of sentiment and wishful thinking over a sober analysis of the facts. If Chen's speech in Miami on Wednesday was, therefore, a lightweight party piece rather than anything of significance, there were still aspects of his speech to ponder. One of them was his remark that China is avoiding dialogue with Taiwan's popularly elected president and government.
This is of course true. But it is not unambiguously seen as such. One of the most profound consequences of the dispute over the presidential election last year -- ? and the deeply unfortunate results of the legislative election last December -- was the muddying of the waters about who actually represents Taiwan. The pan-blues have consistently claimed since the presidential election that it was a fraud, and that Chen does not have a legitimate mandate, despite the lack of evidence to support such a claim. They have also presented the legislative elections as a "referendum" on the DPP government which the government "lost." The pan-blues have, therefore, despite their list of what should have been catastrophic electoral checks over the past five years, still present themselves as a legitimate voice for the people of Taiwan, and a voice that China is happy to deal with.
The result is that Taiwanese democracy can simply be ignored by China, which sees it either as a farce or backing the pan-blues. This is a misapprehension on Beijing's part that might have very serious consequences.
When 17,000 troops from the US, the Philippines, Australia, Japan, Canada, France and New Zealand spread across the Philippine archipelago for the Balikatan military exercise, running from tomorrow through May 8, the official language would be about interoperability, readiness and regional peace. However, the strategic subtext is becoming harder to ignore: The exercises are increasingly about the military geography around Taiwan. Balikatan has always carried political weight. This year, however, the exercise looks different in ways that matter not only to Manila and Washington, but also to Taipei. What began in 2023 as a shift toward a more serious deterrence posture
Reports about Elon Musk planning his own semiconductor fab have sparked anxiety, with some warning that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) could lose key customers to vertical integration. A closer reading suggests a more measured conclusion: Musk is advancing a strategic vision of in-house chip manufacturing, but remains far from replacing the existing foundry ecosystem. For TSMC, the short-term impact is limited; the medium-term challenge lies in supply diversification and pricing pressure, only in the long term could it evolve into a structural threat. The clearest signal is Musk’s announcement that Tesla and SpaceX plan to develop a fab project dubbed “Terafab”
China’s AI ecosystem has one defining difference from Silicon Valley: It is embrace of open source. While the US’ biggest companies race to build ever more powerful systems and insist only they can control them, Chinese labs have been giving the technology away for free. Open source — making a model available for anyone to use, download and build on — once seemed a niche, nerdy topic that no one besides developers cared about. However, when a new technology is driving trillions of dollars of investments and leading to immense concentrations of power, it offered an antidote. That is part of
In late January, Taiwan’s first indigenous submarine, the Hai Kun (海鯤, or Narwhal), completed its first submerged dive, reaching a depth of roughly 50m during trials in the waters off Kaohsiung. By March, it had managed a fifth dive, still well short of the deep-water and endurance tests required before the navy could accept the vessel. The original delivery deadline of November last year passed months ago. CSBC Corp, Taiwan, the lead contractor, now targets June and the Ministry of National Defense is levying daily penalties for every day the submarine remains unfinished. The Hai Kun was supposed to be
RSS