The portents are bad: The day that the qualifying tournament for the Olympic baseball competition finished in Taiwan was the day that Beijing commenced its violent crackdown on Buddhist monks and other protesters in Tibet and Gansu Province after a week of protests.
Local sports fans may be delighted at the good fortune of the national baseball team, especially in light of its poor performance in previous contests. But for Taiwanese looking at the bigger picture, the thrill should be seriously dampened by the reports of a massive police mobilization, gunfire and burning of buildings in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa.
Pre-Olympics pressure against the Chinese government over its many ugly faces has focused on its funding and arming of Sudan's murderous government. This pressure is well earned, but in terms of sheer scale, the number of people that Beijing oppresses within its own borders has not received the attention that it deserves.
Until now.
It is difficult to see how Beijing can deal with the disturbances without angering or embarrassing its sympathizers in the West. Its inclination is to use total force to extinguish Tibetan expressions of dissent, but to do so threatens to conflagrate an already delicate domestic mood.
The opposite strategy -- a negotiated solution with Tibetan leaders in exile and religious figures in Tibet -- remains out of the question: Such a concession would be revolutionary and precipitate changes in other parts of the country that would be seen as a threat to the Chinese Communist Party.
The likely approach will fall somewhere in between. A media blackout and selected arrests in monasteries and elsewhere -- but also a concerted effort to minimize the use of violence in more conspicuous locations. The Chinese can afford to exercise restraint, because once the Olympics are over they can resume special treatment for dissidents at any level of violence they choose.
With the British government already expressing concern over the unrest in southwest China, it remains a matter of time before more conscientious governments in the West -- especially those in northern Europe -- begin to juggle the implications of recommending an Olympic boycott to the national Olympic committees.
As for the Tibetans, it is becoming increasingly apparent -- in no small part because of the Dalai Lama's more direct criticisms of Beijing in recent days -- that the Olympics might be their last chance to appeal to the world for something approaching dignified treatment by a government that wants to overwhelm, marginalize and denude them.
The situation is thus likely to worsen until Beijing faces the impossible dilemma of sacrificing either Olympic glory or its self-declared right to molest its national minorities.
There are five months until the Olympics. With this early outbreak of public anger against despotism, the time ahead is bound to increasingly rattle Olympic sponsors, frighten the Chinese government and unnerve even the most mercenary of International Olympic Committee bureaucrats.
For everyone else with a trace of conscience and a grasp of diplomacy, the truth is out: The Beijing Olympics debacle has begun.
Because much of what former US president Donald Trump says is unhinged and histrionic, it is tempting to dismiss all of it as bunk. Yet the potential future president has a populist knack for sounding alarums that resonate with the zeitgeist — for example, with growing anxiety about World War III and nuclear Armageddon. “We’re a failing nation,” Trump ranted during his US presidential debate against US Vice President Kamala Harris in one particularly meandering answer (the one that also recycled urban myths about immigrants eating cats). “And what, what’s going on here, you’re going to end up in World War
Earlier this month in Newsweek, President William Lai (賴清德) challenged the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to retake the territories lost to Russia in the 19th century rather than invade Taiwan. He stated: “If it is for the sake of territorial integrity, why doesn’t [the PRC] take back the lands occupied by Russia that were signed over in the treaty of Aigun?” This was a brilliant political move to finally state openly what many Chinese in both China and Taiwan have long been thinking about the lost territories in the Russian far east: The Russian far east should be “theirs.” Granted, Lai issued
On Tuesday, President William Lai (賴清德) met with a delegation from the Hoover Institution, a think tank based at Stanford University in California, to discuss strengthening US-Taiwan relations and enhancing peace and stability in the region. The delegation was led by James Ellis Jr, co-chair of the institution’s Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region project and former commander of the US Strategic Command. It also included former Australian minister for foreign affairs Marise Payne, influential US academics and other former policymakers. Think tank diplomacy is an important component of Taiwan’s efforts to maintain high-level dialogue with other nations with which it does
On Sept. 2, Elbridge Colby, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development, wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal called “The US and Taiwan Must Change Course” that defends his position that the US and Taiwan are not doing enough to deter the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from taking Taiwan. Colby is correct, of course: the US and Taiwan need to do a lot more or the PRC will invade Taiwan like Russia did against Ukraine. The US and Taiwan have failed to prepare properly to deter war. The blame must fall on politicians and policymakers