Make no mistake: China’s influence over Taiwan’s domestic affairs is growing, and quickly.
The modus operandi is all too familiar. Beijing gets wind of a proposed deal or event, cries foul and a government, company or charitable group that was about to complete a transaction of some sort with Taiwan is forced to renege on the deal.
This scenario has played out hundreds, if not thousands, of times in the six decades since Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) humiliated Nationalist regime decamped to Taiwan, forcing the Chinese Communist Party to declare Taiwan an “inalienable part of the Motherland.”
In the last 20 years or so as China’s economic and diplomatic clout has grown, the small number of countries prepared to ignore China’s threats and seal sensitive deals with Taiwan has diminished rapidly.
It has now reached the point where just one country — the US — is willing to suffer the consequences of Chinese saber-rattling by selling Taipei advanced weaponry. But these days, even in the face of well over 1,000 ballistic missiles and arguably the fastest modernizing military in history, Taiwan’s legitimate defense needs are forced to take a back seat as Washington places more value on maintaining cordial ties with authoritarians.
While Taiwan cannot be blamed for this trend — whether or not other countries are prepared to stare down Beijing’s threats is entirely their responsibility — Taipei is entirely responsible for the latest manifestation of this worrying phenomenon. The problem now is that this enduring international obstacle is beginning to rear its sinister head at home.
The risks of deepening ties with — and hence increased dependency on — China that came with the commencement of unofficial business links in the 1980s have, under the blinkered “China first” policy of the present government, begun to manifest themselves in new and more insidious ways.
The latest incident involves culture. The Kaohsiung City Government is considering pulling the documentary The 10 Conditions of Love about exiled Uighur activist Rebiya Kadeer from the Kaohsiung Film Festival after Chinese tourists supposedly canceled bookings en masse.
This is a confusing development, because this approach to the Uighur controversy is most inconsistent with Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chu’s (陳菊) embrace of the Dalai Lama last month.
Coupled with evidence that the central government refused foreign aid in the wake of Typhoon Morakot last month until after it consulted Beijing, as well as new Premier Wu Den-yih’s (吳敦義) recent meetings with influential Chinese political figures in Hong Kong before accepting his appointment, the question therefore emerges: Who is running Taiwan these days?
The relationship that Taiwan is forging with China and the Ma government’s indifference toward exercising this nation’s sovereignty mean that Taiwan is disappearing from the radar of international credibility faster than even skeptics could have imagined.
Each new deal that central and regional governments strike with Beijing resembles one of the strings that the Lilliputians used to tie down Gulliver: Every new thread, however innocuous in itself, makes it harder and harder for Taiwan to free itself.
That China has influence on the way other countries deal with Taiwan is one thing, but when domestic affairs, be they cultural, economic, political or diplomatic, have to be run past Beijing before proceeding, it’s time for the alarm bells to start ringing.
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
RSS