“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.”
Jan. 1 marks a decade since China repealed its one-child policy. Just 10 days before, Peng Peiyun (彭珮雲), who long oversaw the often-brutal enforcement of China’s family-planning rules, died at the age of 96, having never been held accountable for her actions. Obituaries praised Peng for being “reform-minded,” even though, in practice, she only perpetuated an utterly inhumane policy, whose consequences have barely begun to materialize. It was Vice Premier Chen Muhua (陳慕華) who first proposed the one-child policy in 1979, with the endorsement of China’s then-top leaders, Chen Yun (陳雲) and Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平), as a means of avoiding the
The last foreign delegation Nicolas Maduro met before he went to bed Friday night (January 2) was led by China’s top Latin America diplomat. “I had a pleasant meeting with Qiu Xiaoqi (邱小琪), Special Envoy of President Xi Jinping (習近平),” Venezuela’s soon-to-be ex-president tweeted on Telegram, “and we reaffirmed our commitment to the strategic relationship that is progressing and strengthening in various areas for building a multipolar world of development and peace.” Judging by how minutely the Central Intelligence Agency was monitoring Maduro’s every move on Friday, President Trump himself was certainly aware of Maduro’s felicitations to his Chinese guest. Just
A recent piece of international news has drawn surprisingly little attention, yet it deserves far closer scrutiny. German industrial heavyweight Siemens Mobility has reportedly outmaneuvered long-entrenched Chinese competitors in Southeast Asian infrastructure to secure a strategic partnership with Vietnam’s largest private conglomerate, Vingroup. The agreement positions Siemens to participate in the construction of a high-speed rail link between Hanoi and Ha Long Bay. German media were blunt in their assessment: This was not merely a commercial win, but has symbolic significance in “reshaping geopolitical influence.” At first glance, this might look like a routine outcome of corporate bidding. However, placed in
China often describes itself as the natural leader of the global south: a power that respects sovereignty, rejects coercion and offers developing countries an alternative to Western pressure. For years, Venezuela was held up — implicitly and sometimes explicitly — as proof that this model worked. Today, Venezuela is exposing the limits of that claim. Beijing’s response to the latest crisis in Venezuela has been striking not only for its content, but for its tone. Chinese officials have abandoned their usual restrained diplomatic phrasing and adopted language that is unusually direct by Beijing’s standards. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs described the
RSS