“I am not into wishful thinking and I am not naive. Our efforts have obviously generated a lot of goodwill across the Taiwan Strait,” President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) said on Tuesday, claiming that his conciliatory cross-strait policies were bearing fruit.
In this case, the piece of fruit was rather small: Ma had been referred to as “president” on APEC’s official Web site.
Shortly after it came to light, Ma chalked up this minor development as a victory for Taiwanese diplomacy. But then the fruit became rotten: the Web site changed, and the page that described Ma as the “president of Chinese Taipei” was nowhere to be seen.
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) administration was quick to find excuses for the temporary nature of its triumph, downplaying the significance of the setback rather than facing it squarely and pinpointing the reasons for the charade.
The Presidential Office insisted yesterday that the Web page — however short-lived — was “a diplomatic breakthrough nonetheless,” while the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the scrapping of the page was not directed at Taiwan because the entire section introducing APEC members had been taken down.
It is really quite sad to see the Ma government mastering and enhancing the petty point scoring, absurd rationalizations and complacency of the previous government over what was likely a small but “beautiful mistake” on the part of the unsuspecting APEC host country.
Meanwhile, China continues to have a field day slapping Taiwan around on the international stage as Taiwan’s diplomats pore through their dictionaries looking for other ways of saying “diplomatic breakthrough.”
While some political observers suspect that China was responsible for the removal of the Web page, others wonder whether some sort of much more elaborate conspiracy is at hand, with the Ma government in a two-step with Beijing’s strategists. Could it be, they wonder, that the whole thing was set up to make the Ma government look good at home by having him briefly addressed as president — thus making China look reasonable and friendly toward Taiwan — before having the page removed on the assumption that no one in Taiwan could be bothered to look at the page later on?
Such ludicrous theories suggest that far too many analysts have little real information to share. What can be confirmed is this: The Ma government has a greater interest in deploying security forces that violate citizens’ rights than standing up to China’s symbolic and procedural aggression at international forums such as APEC.
Ma has insisted that his “mutual non-denial” approach to diplomacy is working well and that China has responded to it positively.
This self-assessment does not sit well with available evidence. When Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait Chairman Chen Yunlin (陳雲林) met Ma earlier this month, he addressed him as “You ... you … you ...” rather than the large number of respectful options that were available to him.
The truth is that China is playing Ma like a musical instrument that is oblivious to its own sound. Another word for such a person is “naive” and another expression for such a person’s state of mind is “wishful thinking.”
When Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) sits down with US President Donald Trump in Beijing on Thursday next week, Xi is unlikely to demand a dramatic public betrayal of Taiwan. He does not need to. Beijing’s preferred victory is smaller, quieter and in some ways far more dangerous: a subtle shift in American wording that appears technical, but carries major strategic meaning. The ask is simple: replace the longstanding US formulation that Washington “does not support Taiwan independence” with a harder one — that Washington “opposes” Taiwan independence. One word changes; a deterrence structure built over decades begins to shift.
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