Every morning as I make breakfast, I listen to my Mandarin lesson. This morning, the sentence I learned was, "Taiwan is about the same size as Holland."
It struck me that there wasn't just a Chinese lesson in this for me. Here was also a Chinese lesson for China. Not just in size is Taiwan comparable to the Netherlands.
The people, culture and language of Taiwan are Chinese. Those of the Netherlands are Germanic.
Somehow, however, the Netherlands didn't get absorbed into greater Germany, as did so many comparable areas with their distinctive local cultures and ways of speaking. It got to pursue a different course of development and came to play a unique and important role in history. Europe would be poorer without the little Netherlands, and so would the world.
Asia, and the world, would similarly be poorer without little Taiwan.
In ways that were unique and different from any other country, Taiwan -- its business community that is -- was able to make the early move into China and set in motion developments that later made China into a great economic power.
Nowadays, the economy of big China eclipses that of little Taiwan, but Taiwan's usefulness to its big neighbor is far from ended. Taiwan will again play a unique role in what promises to be China's next big crisis and perhaps most difficult transition.
Should it come as any surprise that freedom can sometimes happen in a small place easier than in a large one? When the US became free it was little and England was big. However, now that the US has become a big superpower, it is losing what was always most special about it. Being big isn't as important as being free. Hence the importance of the small.
The Hindu elephant god Ganesha represents, among other things, what is big and powerful. However, a little mouse can always be seen at Ganesha's feet.
Thus, it can be seen that the Hindu religion recognizes that the power of the big is connected with the power of the small.
Taiwan is the little mouse at China's feet. The reason Taiwan is so important to China is because it is small, independent and free.
In the history of Europe and the world, small independent states have often played a role out of proportion to their size. Why is it proving so hard for Beijing to grasp that Taiwan's value to China is in its independence from China and that it serves China better if it remains the way it is?
The answer is simple. Just as a small bird will grab whatever is at hand to weave its nest, even bits of trash, so China, in its frantic scramble to reinvent its identity, has snatched up an inappropriate aspect of its past and woven it into the nation's new self-concept.
The notion of a so-called "one China" that Beijing has wielded to bully Taiwan has to finally be seen for what it is -- a euphemism for the brutal central dictatorship that for too long now has crippled so many prosperous and promising regions of China and forced them into a misguided cultural and economic stagnation.
The "one China" notion needs to be uprooted and discarded before it does more damage than it already has.
Taiwan's politicians admittedly often don't act like a bunch of circus clowns. And that's all they would be -- were they not inventing from within Chinese culture a form of democracy that is as uniquely Chinese as the economic miracle their fathers invented before them, and then passed on to China.
Small Taiwan hasn't stopped cooking. It's just got something else on the stove right now. It's more useful to big China and the world than ever. It would be a tragedy if China grew too big and too full of its new wealth and power to grasp this.
As the example of the US illustrates today, big, arrogant and proud countries can be the slowest to learn -- which is all the more reason why the small, independent and free ones are so useful to have around.
William Stimson is a writer based in Taiwan.
As strategic tensions escalate across the vast Indo-Pacific region, Taiwan has emerged as more than a potential flashpoint. It is the fulcrum upon which the credibility of the evolving American-led strategy of integrated deterrence now rests. How the US and regional powers like Japan respond to Taiwan’s defense, and how credible the deterrent against Chinese aggression proves to be, will profoundly shape the Indo-Pacific security architecture for years to come. A successful defense of Taiwan through strengthened deterrence in the Indo-Pacific would enhance the credibility of the US-led alliance system and underpin America’s global preeminence, while a failure of integrated deterrence would
The Executive Yuan recently revised a page of its Web site on ethnic groups in Taiwan, replacing the term “Han” (漢族) with “the rest of the population.” The page, which was updated on March 24, describes the composition of Taiwan’s registered households as indigenous (2.5 percent), foreign origin (1.2 percent) and the rest of the population (96.2 percent). The change was picked up by a social media user and amplified by local media, sparking heated discussion over the weekend. The pan-blue and pro-China camp called it a politically motivated desinicization attempt to obscure the Han Chinese ethnicity of most Taiwanese.
On Wednesday last week, the Rossiyskaya Gazeta published an article by Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) asserting the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) territorial claim over Taiwan effective 1945, predicated upon instruments such as the 1943 Cairo Declaration and the 1945 Potsdam Proclamation. The article further contended that this de jure and de facto status was subsequently reaffirmed by UN General Assembly Resolution 2758 of 1971. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs promptly issued a statement categorically repudiating these assertions. In addition to the reasons put forward by the ministry, I believe that China’s assertions are open to questions in international
The Legislative Yuan passed an amendment on Friday last week to add four national holidays and make Workers’ Day a national holiday for all sectors — a move referred to as “four plus one.” The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), who used their combined legislative majority to push the bill through its third reading, claim the holidays were chosen based on their inherent significance and social relevance. However, in passing the amendment, they have stuck to the traditional mindset of taking a holiday just for the sake of it, failing to make good use of
RSS