Calls by what remains a small number of voices in the US academic community for Washington to “ditch” Taiwan for the sake of better relations with China reached a new low last week with the publication of an opinion piece in the New York Times by Paul Kane, a former international security fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School.
Earlier this year, a handful of articles were published in journals, including Foreign Affairs, making the case that realist US foreign policy required the abandonment of Taiwan to clear the way for a full relationship with China in difficult economic times. Reactions to those pieces then showed beyond doubt that the arguments advanced by those academics failed on several grounds, including moral.
As this newspaper argued in response to the previous articles, the 23 million people who inhabit this nation are not mere commodities who can be traded by larger nations on a diplomatic chessboard. Not only is the commodification of human beings morally bankrupt, it is also a recipe for disaster, as the subjects — treated as pawns in the machinations of great power politics — are unlikely to regard such decisions with equanimity.
Just as Cambodia was treated as mere sideshow to the Vietnam War by the administration of then-US president Richard Nixon, creating, among other things, the political conditions that allowed for the emergence of the genocidal Khmer Rouge, regarding Taiwan in the same manner for the sake of diplomatic or economic returns by Beijing is dangerously shortsighted and naive. For one, no Taiwanese would accept the imposition of a political system that is not only alien to them, but that is also repressive and undemocratic. Not to mention that Beijing is unlikely to become a responsible stakeholder simply because Taiwan has been “returned” to the “motherland.”
It was not originality that set Kane’s op-ed apart from its predecessors, but rather how poorly it fared in every respect. So much so, that in the backlash that ensued, it managed to make academics who do not see eye-to-eye on Taiwan agree with one another. Even in economic terms, Kane’s proposed strategy of “selling out” Taiwan so that Beijing would forgive the US’ trillion-dollar-plus debt would, as Business Insider showed on Friday, only succeed in crippling China’s banking system.
It boggles the mind that a reputable publication like the New York Times would open its coveted editorial space to a “defense expert” whose credentials are far less than meets the eye. Kane, who has a bachelor’s degree in political economy from the University of Maryland, was a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School for only one year and did not obtain a degree there. He served in Iraq for one year, in 2003, in political affairs. Sources describe him as a “poseur” and a “climber” who should not have been allowed to set foot in Harvard to begin with.
The question, then, is why, given the author’s rather dubious academic credentials and the many flaws in the article, the Times allowed what can only be described as facetious hogwash to appear in its pages. Should it bother to get Taiwan’s story right, there are a good number of academics in the US and abroad to whom it could have turned for columns on China and Taiwan. Kane is not one of them.
His piece, rather than convincing decision makers, achieved the opposite and undermined the paper’s credibility in the process.
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