News that a close relative of a senior military intelligence official is living in a hostile country would be enough to set alarm bells ringing in most countries. Such a revelation would probably lead to the official in question being forced to recall his relative or being disciplined in some way.
Not so in Taiwan.
Reports this week that the daughter of Lee Wen-fang (李文芳), a section director at the Military Intelligence Bureau, is studying in China may have raised a few eyebrows among legislators, but other than some concerned voices being raised, no action was taken. Lee’s bosses in the armed forces seemed satisfied that the situation posed no threat to national security.
But then one shouldn’t be all that surprised by the lack of concern shown among security officials when the man at the very top of the national security ladder is himself compromised to a startling degree. Indeed, National Security Council Secretary-General Su Chi (蘇起) has skeletons in his closet that would have precluded him from ever obtaining such an important position in most democracies.
In November 2005, for example, then-Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislator Su reportedly stayed at the Central Chinese Communist Party (CCP) School guest house in Beijing for three days. During his stay he was alleged to have made a speech to senior CCP members and People’s Liberation Army leaders attacking the US for interfering in the Taiwan problem and opposing US arms sales to Taiwan on the strength of a referendum that failed only because of an unreasonable KMT boycott. This episode unsurprisingly caused top US officials to question Su’s loyalties.
With Su’s wife and brother relying on Chinese money — his wife recently completed a book tour and made money from selling food mixers there, while his brother teaches at a Chinese university — can Su really be expected to protect Taiwan’s national interest when facing off with Beijing?
With such a man in charge of national security, others could be forgiven for thinking their comparatively minor transgressions are acceptable.
Although cross-strait relations may have improved since President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) came to power last year, China still has more than 1,400 ballistic missiles trained on Taiwan and continues tailoring the modernization of its military machine with one specific aim in mind — the annexation of Taiwan.
Improved economic ties and closer contact have not changed China’s agenda and it is therefore folly for the Ma government to believe that China would not attempt to take advantage of easy opportunities such as the one presented by Lee’s daughter.
A failure to comprehend such threats betrays either a shocking naivete on the part of the government or that Ma and his government don’t consider China a threat, or worse still, both.
But with Ma also dependent on China’s goodwill so that he can deliver on his election promises, the whole notion that he and this government are capable of protecting Taiwan from a slow death at the hands of China’s creeping economic encroachment is plainly absurd.
The question of how a government is supposed to maintain national security and protect Taiwan from a hostile power like China when most of its top officials rely on Beijing in one way or another is a conundrum that not even the best spin doctors of the Ma administration have attempted to explain.
On May 7, 1971, Henry Kissinger planned his first, ultra-secret mission to China and pondered whether it would be better to meet his Chinese interlocutors “in Pakistan where the Pakistanis would tape the meeting — or in China where the Chinese would do the taping.” After a flicker of thought, he decided to have the Chinese do all the tape recording, translating and transcribing. Fortuitously, historians have several thousand pages of verbatim texts of Dr. Kissinger’s negotiations with his Chinese counterparts. Paradoxically, behind the scenes, Chinese stenographers prepared verbatim English language typescripts faster than they could translate and type them
More than 30 years ago when I immigrated to the US, applied for citizenship and took the 100-question civics test, the one part of the naturalization process that left the deepest impression on me was one question on the N-400 form, which asked: “Have you ever been a member of, involved in or in any way associated with any communist or totalitarian party anywhere in the world?” Answering “yes” could lead to the rejection of your application. Some people might try their luck and lie, but if exposed, the consequences could be much worse — a person could be fined,
Taiwan aims to elevate its strategic position in supply chains by becoming an artificial intelligence (AI) hub for Nvidia Corp, providing everything from advanced chips and components to servers, in an attempt to edge out its closest rival in the region, South Korea. Taiwan’s importance in the AI ecosystem was clearly reflected in three major announcements Nvidia made during this year’s Computex trade show in Taipei. First, the US company’s number of partners in Taiwan would surge to 122 this year, from 34 last year, according to a slide shown during CEO Jensen Huang’s (黃仁勳) keynote speech on Monday last week.
When China passed its “Anti-Secession” Law in 2005, much of the democratic world saw it as yet another sign of Beijing’s authoritarianism, its contempt for international law and its aggressive posture toward Taiwan. Rightly so — on the surface. However, this move, often dismissed as a uniquely Chinese form of legal intimidation, echoes a legal and historical precedent rooted not in authoritarian tradition, but in US constitutional history. The Chinese “Anti-Secession” Law, a domestic statute threatening the use of force should Taiwan formally declare independence, is widely interpreted as an emblem of the Chinese Communist Party’s disregard for international norms. Critics