President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) unusually strongly worded statement on Wednesday denouncing the Japan Coast Guard’s seizure of a Taiwanese fishing boat stands in stark contrast to his lukewarm attitude over the deportation of Taiwanese from Kenya to China earlier this month.
In the statement, Ma vowed to take immediate concrete measures to safeguard Taiwan’s fishing rights within a range of 12 to 200 nautical miles (22.2km to 370.4km) around the uninhabited Okinotori atoll, calling it the high seas.
The fishing boat was operating about 150 nautical miles southeast of the atoll when it was seized by Japanese coast guard personnel on Monday morning.
Ma rejected Tokyo’s claim that Okinotori is an island, saying that a coral reef with a total area of less than 10m2 — which he previously ridiculed as being as small as two ping pong tables — does not meet the criteria set by Article 121 of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, which defines islands as those which can “sustain human habitation or economic life of their own.”
A day before, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus also denounced Tokyo’s seizure of Taiwanese fishermen as a “pirate-like” action, and accused the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) of being tough on China, but soft on Japan.
Of course, Tokyo’s seizure of a Taiwanese boat operating near an atoll whose legal status is still disputed and demanding a so-called “security deposit” of ￥6 million (US$54,470) — which the fishing boat’s owner considered a “fine” — is brazen and reprehensible.
However, it is apparent that Ma and the KMT only took such a tough tone with Tokyo as a way to get back at the DPP for its harsh condemnation of China over the controversial deportation of 45 Taiwanese fraud suspects — an incident painted by the DPP as proof that Ma’s oft-touted cross-strait policies are an utter failure and an attempt by Beijing to belittle Taipei.
In the direct aftermath of the Kenya case, which is no doubt part of Beijing’s efforts to pressure president-elect Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) into following Ma’s cross-strait stance, the president only called for the immediate release of the Taiwanese suspects and said the government had lodged a stern protest against Beijing’s actions.
Ostensibly worrying about displeasing Big Brother, Ma said during an interview with Singapore’s Straits Times on Thursday last week that the Kenya incident was “not a matter of sovereignty, but rather a matter of division of labor.”
He also urged “certain Taiwanese” to refrain from treating the Kenya incident as an issue of sovereignty and thus making wrong judgements.
Ma’s absurd remarks were followed by equally preposterous statements by KMT Chairwoman Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱).
Instead of condemning China’s behavior, Hung on Wednesday last week accused the DPP and the New Power Party of “manipulating” the incident, calling the deported Taiwanese “scums of society” who should be condemned.
It seems that in the minds of Ma and the KMT, the human rights of Taiwanese and national sovereignty automatically become “non-issues” when China is involved.
Perhaps the DPP is indeed less critical of the nation’s major allies, such as Japan and the US, but the party has never taken the side of other countries in the event of international incidents. Besides, unlike China, Japan and the US do not have hundreds of ballistic missiles aimed at Taiwan or seek every possible opportunity in the international arena to bully and belittle the nation of 23 million people.
It is sad to see that Ma and the KMT only toughen up for the mere sake of revenge on the DPP and that they cannot even distinguish friend from foe.
Taiwan stands at the epicenter of a seismic shift that will determine the Indo-Pacific’s future security architecture. Whether deterrence prevails or collapses will reverberate far beyond the Taiwan Strait, fundamentally reshaping global power dynamics. The stakes could not be higher. Today, Taipei confronts an unprecedented convergence of threats from an increasingly muscular China that has intensified its multidimensional pressure campaign. Beijing’s strategy is comprehensive: military intimidation, diplomatic isolation, economic coercion, and sophisticated influence operations designed to fracture Taiwan’s democratic society from within. This challenge is magnified by Taiwan’s internal political divisions, which extend to fundamental questions about the island’s identity and future
The narrative surrounding Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s attendance at last week’s Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit — where he held hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin and chatted amiably with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) — was widely framed as a signal of Modi distancing himself from the US and edging closer to regional autocrats. It was depicted as Modi reacting to the levying of high US tariffs, burying the hatchet over border disputes with China, and heralding less engagement with the Quadrilateral Security dialogue (Quad) composed of the US, India, Japan and Australia. With Modi in China for the
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) has postponed its chairperson candidate registration for two weeks, and so far, nine people have announced their intention to run for chairperson, the most on record, with more expected to announce their campaign in the final days. On the evening of Aug. 23, shortly after seven KMT lawmakers survived recall votes, KMT Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) announced he would step down and urged Taichung Mayor Lu Shiow-yen (盧秀燕) to step in and lead the party back to power. Lu immediately ruled herself out the following day, leaving the subject in question. In the days that followed, several
The Jamestown Foundation last week published an article exposing Beijing’s oil rigs and other potential dual-use platforms in waters near Pratas Island (Dongsha Island, 東沙島). China’s activities there resembled what they did in the East China Sea, inside the exclusive economic zones of Japan and South Korea, as well as with other South China Sea claimants. However, the most surprising element of the report was that the authors’ government contacts and Jamestown’s own evinced little awareness of China’s activities. That Beijing’s testing of Taiwanese (and its allies) situational awareness seemingly went unnoticed strongly suggests the need for more intelligence. Taiwan’s naval
RSS