I would like to respond to your report on "US wants Chen to keep promises" (Oct. 19, page 3).
The US State Department comments regarding Taiwan have long baffled me.
First of all, China has already unilaterally changed the status quo with its missile and military buildup and aggressive attempts to annex Taiwan. Whatever Taiwan does to decrease the threat and increase its autonomy would be bringing things closer to the status quo of earlier years.
And secondly, how could the US not want Taiwan to be a free and independent nation? It is the best thing for their strategic interests.
So why does the US keep making these statements? I think it must be because the US State Department is actually trying to help Taiwan. They don't really care if Taiwan moves toward formal independence. But they have decided that the best way to help Taiwan prevent war is if they say they do not want Taiwan to do anything. That way, China will hold off on war because they think there is outside international pressure on Taiwan.
If this is true, then what Taiwan should do is go full-speed ahead on democratization. President Chen should ignore past promises as part of a past (un)reality, and bring this country into a new republic fit for Taiwan. The US can keep saying, "We don't want anyone to change the status quo." And we'll know they are crossing their fingers behind their backs.
Joel Linton
Taipei
In Chinese author Lu Xun’s (魯迅) novella The True Story of Ah Q (阿Q正傳) — one of the earliest works of modern Chinese fiction, first serialized in 1921 — the story’s hapless protagonist, Ah Q (阿Q), is a poor itinerant worker from China’s peasant class, living during the part-feudal, part-colonial dying embers of the Qing Dynasty. Ah Q is a feeble and psychologically flawed individual who bullies the meek and cowers before the powerful. Despised and regularly mocked by villagers, after every episode of public ridicule and failure, Ah Q consoles himself that he has won a “spiritual victory.” Utterly
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) chairman Mark Liu (劉德音) said in an interview with CNN on Sunday that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would render the company’s plants inoperable, and that such a war would produce “no winners.” Not only would Taiwan’s economy be destroyed in a cross-strait conflict, but the impact “would go well beyond semiconductors, and would bring about the destruction of the world’s rules-based order and totally change the geopolitical landscape,” Liu said in the interview, according to the Central News Agency. Bloomberg columnist Hal Brands wrote on June 24: “A major war over Taiwan could create global economic
Washington’s official position on US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan is that nothing has changed: The US government says it is maintaining its “one China” policy, that Pelosi is free to arrange international trips with congressional delegations independent of the government and that she is not the first US official to visit Taiwan even this year. Yet there is no denying that the fact and the optics of the second-in-line to the US presidency speaking with lawmakers at the Legislative Yuan about inter-parliamentary discussions and learning from each other as equals are hugely significant, as were
Amid a fervor in the global media, US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her congressional delegation made a high-profile visit to Taipei. President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) awarded a state honor to her at the Presidential Office. Evidently, the occasion took on the aspect of an inter-state relationship between the US and the Republic of China (ROC) on Taiwan, despite no mutual state recognition between the two. Beijing furiously condemned Pelosi’s visit in advance, with military drills in the waters surrounding coastal China to check the move. Pelosi is a well-known China hawk, and second in the line of succession to
RSS