China has always used its relative economic advantage to attract investment from Taiwanese industry and to purchase a lot of Taiwanese products. If this were treated as normal foreign direct investment and trade exchanges, there would be nothing wrong with it.
However, industrial relocation to China has caused an outflow of Taiwan’s technology. China often lures Taiwanese companies by promising to make purchases without later placing orders, and this is creating problems for local industry that relies heavily on the Chinese market.
This phenomenon has started to spill over into the world of academia. Exchanges between Taiwan’s and China’s academic circles are nothing new. Some Taiwanese academics travel more frequently to Beijing, Nanjing or Shanghai than to Kaohsiung or Taichung.
After having influenced a large number of Taiwanese academics, China has switched its focus to Taiwanese university students. In recent years, private Chinese companies and government agencies have offered opportunities for so-called “internships” to Taiwanese university students during winter and summer vacations, furnishing free transportation, accommodation and even allowances. Under the banner of cross-strait exchanges and broadening horizens, some students chase after these schemes like flocks of ducks.
Meanwhile, some Chinese academics are submitting papers to Taiwanese journals in an attempt to “exchange views.” I am the editor-in-chief of a Taiwanese journal, and it has received submissions from several Chinese academics in recent months.
However, their papers are all written using simplified Chinese characters and they fail to follow the journal’s writing format and style. Furthermore, some papers begin with the words: “Our country.” Based on the concept that academic exchange transcends borders, the journal has asked submitters to change the simplified Chinese to traditional Chinese characters, revise the text to meet the requirements of our journal’s format and change “our country” to “China.”
The response from academics in China is that their papers conform with international standards and follow the “national format.” Some said that they did not know how to change the format and asked us to do it for them.
We courteously replied that there is no international standard for such publications, and that we were not sure which country they referred to when they said that they followed the “national format.” We also told them clearly that if they did not change the format, we would not submit their papers for review.
Domestically published articles that contain the term “our country” clearly refer to Taiwan, and it is clear that the intention of these Chinese academics is to conflate Taiwan with China in order to confuse readers. If Taiwanese journals publish these kind of papers, the nation will soon turn into a Chinese province without even realizing it.
Who has distorted academic exchanges with their arrogant attitude? Who has allowed academic exchanges to take on political overtones? Who has pushed talented Taiwanese to China, while then complaining about the outflow of local talent?
Through such deification, Taiwanese politicians have placed themselves above the gods in temples, chapels and churches, while politically influential businesspeople calculate the rate of return of their political donations and distribute the products of their tainted and inferior brands. Do you really know what you all are doing?
Wu Pei-ing is a professor in the Department of Agricultural Economics at National Taiwan University.
Translated by Eddy Chang
Because much of what former US president Donald Trump says is unhinged and histrionic, it is tempting to dismiss all of it as bunk. Yet the potential future president has a populist knack for sounding alarums that resonate with the zeitgeist — for example, with growing anxiety about World War III and nuclear Armageddon. “We’re a failing nation,” Trump ranted during his US presidential debate against US Vice President Kamala Harris in one particularly meandering answer (the one that also recycled urban myths about immigrants eating cats). “And what, what’s going on here, you’re going to end up in World War
Earlier this month in Newsweek, President William Lai (賴清德) challenged the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to retake the territories lost to Russia in the 19th century rather than invade Taiwan. He stated: “If it is for the sake of territorial integrity, why doesn’t [the PRC] take back the lands occupied by Russia that were signed over in the treaty of Aigun?” This was a brilliant political move to finally state openly what many Chinese in both China and Taiwan have long been thinking about the lost territories in the Russian far east: The Russian far east should be “theirs.” Granted, Lai issued
On Tuesday, President William Lai (賴清德) met with a delegation from the Hoover Institution, a think tank based at Stanford University in California, to discuss strengthening US-Taiwan relations and enhancing peace and stability in the region. The delegation was led by James Ellis Jr, co-chair of the institution’s Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region project and former commander of the US Strategic Command. It also included former Australian minister for foreign affairs Marise Payne, influential US academics and other former policymakers. Think tank diplomacy is an important component of Taiwan’s efforts to maintain high-level dialogue with other nations with which it does
On Sept. 2, Elbridge Colby, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development, wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal called “The US and Taiwan Must Change Course” that defends his position that the US and Taiwan are not doing enough to deter the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from taking Taiwan. Colby is correct, of course: the US and Taiwan need to do a lot more or the PRC will invade Taiwan like Russia did against Ukraine. The US and Taiwan have failed to prepare properly to deter war. The blame must fall on politicians and policymakers