The timing of a major missile test at Jioupeng (九鵬) base, Pingtung County, last Tuesday, could not have been more unusual, coming a little more than a week before Taipei and Beijing were to launch informal talks on a trade pact.
As it turns out, Taipei has since delayed the meeting until the end of the month, but the major artillery test — which reportedly included the highly sensitive Hsiung Feng-2E (HF-2E) surface-to-surface missile — does not appear to have been the cause. In fact, Beijing’s reaction, which one would have expected to be more strident than its opposition to a visit by Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, was to say nothing whatsoever.
The military has stuck to protocol and released very little information about the missile test, only mentioning that a malfunction forced the test to be abandoned. The Presidential Office, meanwhile, said it regretted that news of the missile test had been leaked, with the Apple Daily going as far on Wednesday as to claim that President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) had said he was “very satisfied” with the test.
The fact that a missile test on this scale was held at all under a Ma administration that seeks, above all, better relations with China, and at a time when the two sides are on the brink of signing trade pacts, is itself striking. Failure or not, it is difficult to reconcile the timing with Ma’s “pragmatic” approach to cross-strait relations.
Though it is shrouded in secrecy, it is hard to imagine that the test would have gone unnoticed by the US and China. Despite Washington’s opposition to Taiwan’s acquiring or developing offensive weapons — which the HF-2E is — we can assume that the US military, which maintains close ties with the Taiwanese military apparatus, was informed beforehand, perhaps during the US-Taiwan Defense Industry Conference in Virginia late last month, or at the Transnational Security Cooperation course provided by the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, a US-funded think tank based in Hawaii, earlier this year.
Such a test would also have been difficult to hide from China. Despite the remoteness of the base, which is located in the southeastern part of the country, such missiles would be picked up by Chinese radar.
The plan, therefore, appears to have been to keep the test secret and to avoid publicity lest it derail the careful, albeit precarious, balancing act engineered by Taipei, Beijing and Washington.
Which brings us to the most interesting side of the story: the source of the “leak,” which the Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister paper) and the United Daily News referred to as a “reliable military source.”
While leaks are nothing new in the military, whistle-blowers usually make classified information public for a reason. In this case, given the sensitive nature and timing of the test, it is conceivable that the originator of the leak meant to put a spoke in the wheel of cross-strait negotiations, which have proceeded despite public apprehension. Had this gambit worked, Beijing could have reacted in anger and threatened to cancel the talks on a trade pact and an economic cooperation framework agreement. That it didn’t — in fact, Beijing said nothing at all about what should have been a “provocative” test — shows just how important those pacts are for China.
Many questions remain. Did the test really fail, as the military tells us, or is this information, which contradicts initial reports of a success, meant to downplay the importance of the test and ensure that cross-strait talks on economic liberalization can continue apace?
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,
Xiaomi Corp founder Lei Jun (雷軍) on May 22 made a high-profile announcement, giving online viewers a sneak peek at the company’s first 3-nanometer mobile processor — the Xring O1 chip — and saying it is a breakthrough in China’s chip design history. Although Xiaomi might be capable of designing chips, it lacks the ability to manufacture them. No matter how beautifully planned the blueprints are, if they cannot be mass-produced, they are nothing more than drawings on paper. The truth is that China’s chipmaking efforts are still heavily reliant on the free world — particularly on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing
Keelung Mayor George Hsieh (謝國樑) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) on Tuesday last week apologized over allegations that the former director of the city’s Civil Affairs Department had illegally accessed citizens’ data to assist the KMT in its campaign to recall Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) councilors. Given the public discontent with opposition lawmakers’ disruptive behavior in the legislature, passage of unconstitutional legislation and slashing of the central government’s budget, civic groups have launched a massive campaign to recall KMT lawmakers. The KMT has tried to fight back by initiating campaigns to recall DPP lawmakers, but the petition documents they
RSS