Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is scheduled to begin his visit to the US today. While Taiwanese media in general have failed to take notice of the visit, former president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) has voiced concerns both about what may happen between Jan. 16 next year, when the presidential and legislative elections are held, and May 20, when the next president is sworn in, and the possibility that China will capitalize on Xi’s US visit to make the US put pressure on the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) to acquiesce to the so-called “1992 consensus,” thus issuing a belated warning to Taiwan’s presidential candidates.
However, these warnings might be just a preamble to what is to come. After Xi’s meeting with US President Barack Obama, more complicated and urgent matters would follow, challenging the ruling Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and opposition parties, especially the DPP, which mainstream US political and academic opinion believe will return to power next year.
Does the DPP have comprehensive strategies to address such matters? Is the party capable of meeting the challenges, or is it going to continue to do as others do and remain ambiguous? Perhaps the nation should pay more attention to this issue than to Xi’s trip to the US.
An important issue is cyberwarfare, which will be the focus of the meeting between Xi and Obama.
Obama has adopted an unprecedented harsh stance on cyberwarfare by saying: “I guarantee you we will win if we have to.”
He even used phrases such as “destructive attacks” and “commercial espionage” to describe Chinese cyberattacks, and threatened to use sanctions as retaliation.
When US officials met with Chinese Secretary of the Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission Meng Jianzhu (孟建柱), who was sent by China to prepare for Xi’s US visit, US officials reportedly also took a tough stance.
Although sanctions have been postponed, apparently for the sake of Xi’s upcoming meeting with Obama, the US and China are both key Internet players and therefore the whole world is waiting to see what their next moves in cyberwarfare would be.
What kind of dialogue would they have and what sort of rules would they establish? Also, what are their red lines, how would the US retaliate if their red line is crossed, and how would the Chinese react to a US retaliation? These are all pressing matters that Taiwan must under no condition consider itself an outsider to.
It is not hard to realize that the government has spent a considerable amount of money on cybersecurity over the past decades. Yet why are the ruling and opposition parties so indifferent to the unavoidable US-China cyberwarfare strategies?
The question is whether the DPP, which is rejoicing over its likely return to power, would realize that a possible cyberwar — even though it might look like a conflict between the US and China — would affect Taiwan at both domestic and international levels — including Taiwanese industry, commerce and even human rights.
Is the nation ready to deal with these difficult problem from policymaking and legislative perspectives?
Taiwan and the US have maintained open communication channels within the international Internet governance framework as it matured over the past 20 years, but Taiwan and its role in global Internet management has indisputably been marginalized. If this situation continues to deteriorate, a grat deal of problems will crop up.
This is precisely why Taiwan needs to discern how the US — as the US presidential race heats up and the US government’s China policy comes under scrutiny — would go about using its retaliatory actions and economic measures to meet its Internet security goals.
If the US imposes sanctions on China, would Taiwan have a strategic position in terms of Internet or commerce in relation to possible sanctions? How would Taiwan cope if the US-China conflict intensifies and retaliatory sanctions come into play?
More importantly, cyberwarfare would not be a short-term phenomenon. It would persist, evolve and play a critical role in international relations.
The DPP has been regarded by the US as a pragmatic actor and a likely winner in next year’s presidential election, but does the DPP incorporate the necessary cyberwarfare strategies into its policy outlines, or has the issue never been considered? Is the DPP only chanting slogans about open government and information transparency?
Will it in fact act more like the Taipei City Government, which misuses the Personal Information Protection Act (個人資料保護法) and the Freedom of Government Information Law (政府資訊公開法), talks about two sides of the Taiwan Strait being one big family, is about to integrate Taipei’s EasyCard with the Shanghai Public Transport Card and treats Internet security as a joke?
Lee’s concerns are related to a potential constitutional crisis that could break out between the election in January and the transfer of power in May, and they should be taken seriously.
The way Taiwan needs to cope with the many challenges that would arise from Xi’s meeting with Obama are matters of a national character, which are perhaps more pressing and difficult to address than ridiculing the unfashionable politicians of the KMT, or asking former national security commissioners to tackle the EasyCard crisis involving a Japanese adult video actress.
Liu Ching-yi is a professor in the College of Social Sciences at National Taiwan University.
Translated by Ethan Zhan
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) trip to China provides a pertinent reminder of why Taiwanese protested so vociferously against attempts to force through the cross-strait service trade agreement in 2014 and why, since Ma’s presidential election win in 2012, they have not voted in another Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate. While the nation narrowly avoided tragedy — the treaty would have put Taiwan on the path toward the demobilization of its democracy, which Courtney Donovan Smith wrote about in the Taipei Times in “With the Sunflower movement Taiwan dodged a bullet” — Ma’s political swansong in China, which included fawning dithyrambs