“It takes two to tango.” So said President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) in an interview last Thursday with the Chinese-language Global View magazine when asked if his administration had wishful thinking on thawing relations with China.
After reading the latest statement by Chinese Ambassador to the UN Wang Guangya (王光亞), it is all too clear that Beijing has no desire to tango with Taiwan on terms that deviate in any way from Chinese demands.
In the letter dated Aug. 18 to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, Wang noted that the UN and its specialized agencies are intergovernmental organizations composed only of sovereign states.
He then said: “As a part of China, Taiwan is not a sovereign State. The claim by a very few countries that specialized agencies should allow the Taiwan region to ‘participate’ in their activities under the ‘principle of universality’ is unfounded.”
“The mainland and the Taiwan region are not yet reunited,” Wang continued, “but the fact that the two sides belong to one and the same China has never changed.”
He then asked Taiwan’s allies to observe “the principle of respecting State sovereignty and territorial integrity, and non-interference in other countries’ internal affairs.”
Wang’s remarks came as a hard, cold slap in the Ma administration’s face. Even more pathetically, Ma and his team took the hit without protest.
The Presidential Office yesterday declined to comment on Wang’s statement, leaving the incompetent Ministry of Foreign Affairs to issue a pallid statement asking for more negotiations.
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government has touted its UN strategy this year as moderate and pragmatic, forgoing the campaign for full UN membership and instead pitching for Taiwan to be allowed “meaningful participation” in the world body’s affiliates.
A top official at the National Security Council told reporters last week that the Ma administration, in dropping the push for UN entry, was hoping that Taiwan could secure an observer seat at the World Health Assembly (WHA) next year.
The official added that he was optimistic at the possibility of success.
Judging from Wang’s words, the chances are bleak: “On the basis of the one China principle, the Chinese Government reaches with the secretariat of the WHO a MOU, which provides facilitation to medical experts of the Taiwan region in their participation in WHO technical conferences and activities. The Taiwan region has unfettered access to health and medical information of the WHO.”
In other words, China is likely to use the same old excuse to shut Taiwan out of the WHA next year.
Ma has said on many occasions that his preferred kind of diplomacy focuses on practicality and flexibility, all the while maintaining Taiwan’s interests and dignity.
But having been slapped around by China after bending over backwards to look, sound and be cooperative, it is hard to find evidence of this.
At some point Ma and his government will have to start showing China — and the rest of the world, for that matter — that they have the guts to stand up to Beijing if it has no interest in cultivating mutual goodwill.
“History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes” (attributed to Mark Twain). The USSR was the international bully during the Cold War as it sought to make the world safe for Soviet-style Communism. China is now the global bully as it applies economic power and invests in Mao’s (毛澤東) magic weapons (the People’s Liberation Army [PLA], the United Front Work Department, and the Chinese Communist Party [CCP]) to achieve world domination. Freedom-loving countries must respond to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), especially in the Indo-Pacific (IP), as resolutely as they did against the USSR. In 1954, the US and its allies
A response to my article (“Invite ‘will-bes,’ not has-beens,” Aug. 12, page 8) mischaracterizes my arguments, as well as a speech by former British prime minister Boris Johnson at the Ketagalan Forum in Taipei early last month. Tseng Yueh-ying (曾月英) in the response (“A misreading of Johnson’s speech,” Aug. 24, page 8) does not dispute that Johnson referred repeatedly to Taiwan as “a segment of the Chinese population,” but asserts that the phrase challenged Beijing by questioning whether parts of “the Chinese population” could be “differently Chinese.” This is essentially a confirmation of Beijing’s “one country, two systems” formulation, which says that
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrived in China yesterday, where he is to attend a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) and Russian President Vladimir Putin today. As this coincides with the 50 percent US tariff levied on Indian products, some Western news media have suggested that Modi is moving away from the US, and into the arms of China and Russia. Taiwan-Asia Exchange Foundation fellow Sana Hashmi in a Taipei Times article published yesterday titled “Myths around Modi’s China visit” said that those analyses have misrepresented India’s strategic calculations, and attempted to view
When Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) stood in front of the Potala Palace in Lhasa on Thursday last week, flanked by Chinese flags, synchronized schoolchildren and armed Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) troops, he was not just celebrating the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the “Tibet Autonomous Region,” he was making a calculated declaration: Tibet is China. It always has been. Case closed. Except it has not. The case remains wide open — not just in the hearts of Tibetans, but in history records. For decades, Beijing has insisted that Tibet has “always been part of China.” It is a phrase
RSS