President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) wiped out almost 10 years of progress made under former presidents Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) and Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) in one fell swoop last week when he told a Mexican newspaper that the relationship between Taiwan and China “is a special one, but not [one] between two countries.”
By turning back the clock to before Lee’s 1999 “state-to-state relations” declaration, Ma’s statement was a marked departure from his pre-election pledges to defend Taiwan’s sovereignty, a fact the Presidential Office was quick to “clarify.”
In the same interview, Ma also referred once again to the fictitious “1992 consensus,” saying that both sides of the Taiwan Strait had agreed to accept the “one China, different interpretations” model supposedly enshrined in this fabricated agreement.
He was wrong. At no time has Beijing said it subscribes to the so-called “consensus” and China’s outright rejection of the Ma government’s self-
deprecating UN bid two weeks ago is clear proof that Beijing will brook no deviation from its definition of the “one China” policy.
But while the rest of the world recognizes rejection when they hear it, the Presidential Office persists in trying to disguise a failure as a success, dismissing Beijing’s sharp rebuff as an “isolated incident.”
George Orwell could have been talking about the Ma government when, in his influential 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” he wrote “political speech [is] largely the defense of the indefensible and consists largely of ... sheer cloudy vagueness.”
The Ma administration has purposely played word games with national sovereignty in the belief that it can earn mutual goodwill from China. As Ma’s campaign promises were predicated on Beijing’s willingness to throw Taiwan a few crumbs from its economic banquet, the government has had no choice. Yet 100 days on, Ma has nothing to show for his government’s ingratiating behavior.
Although China may not be playing Ma’s game, “progress” on another front — unraveling the Taiwan consciousness that has flourished over the last decade or so — seems to be gathering momentum.
Ma may have promised to follow his “three noes” — no unification, no independence and no use of force — during his presidency, but his policies risk making Taiwan so reliant on its giant neighbor that the nation could eventually have no choice but to strike up some kind of union. No amount of flowery language can obscure the risks involved in the government’s actions.
In his essay, Orwell wrote: “When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.”
Looking back, despite all Ma’s patriotic obfuscation in the lead up to election day, it should have been quite clear to anyone with a basic knowledge of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) that Ma and his party consider Taiwan a part of China, albeit the Republic of China and not the People’s Republic of China.
The cuttlefish may have spurted out enough ink to confuse people ahead of the presidential election in March, but with everything going wrong on the policy front, it will take quite a reserve of ink to last another three-and-a-half years.
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