It was refreshing to read the Washington Post interview yesterday that President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) gave senior associate editor Lally Weymouth on Monday, although nothing earth-shattering was revealed and there were no “scoops.”
It was also frustrating.
In the interview, her first with an international media organization since taking office, Tsai reiterated that Taiwan did not accept the Permanent Court of Arbitration’s ruling last week on the South China Sea, rejected the idea that Beijing has set a deadline for her government to accept the so-called “1992 consensus” and discussed the economy.
Nothing Tsai said would come as a surprise to Taiwanese.
However, it was a refreshing interview in the sense that Weymouth, a member of the Graham family that owned the paper for 81 years and who worked as a diplomatic correspondent, first for Newsweek magazine and then for the Post, has a long track record of interviewing heads of state and asking relevant, if not always hard-hitting, questions that others might not ask — and because the interview gives the broader world a glimpse of Tsai that wire agency reports usually do not have space for, even those written during Tsai’s campaign for president.
It was also refreshing to see the Post, in its introduction to the interview, use the phrase “so-called” before “1992 consensus,” instead of taking it as a given, as wire agencies have done in the years since former Mainland Affairs Council chairman Su Chi (蘇起) coined the term in 2000.
The intervening years of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) propaganda, especially the eight years under former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), have made it very difficult to erase the rest of the sentence that usually follows “1992 consensus”: “in which Taipei and Beijing agreed that they are part of ‘one China,’ but with different interpretations.”
Perhaps if journalists began to substitute “then-KMT government” for “Taipei” in this phrase, it might make it easier for the rest of the world, if not Beijing, to understand that when there is a change of government, political positions and goals also shift.
If one accepts that the position of a Tory government in the UK might be very different from that of its Labor predecessor — say in regards to agreements made about being part of the EU — then one should accept that a Democratic Progressive Party administration will differ from a KMT administration.
The KMT ran Taiwan for decades, but it no longer speaks for this nation or most of its people.
Yet the interview was frustrating because there was an implicit bias in the questions — as is so often true in international coverage, and sometimes domestic as well — that it is Taipei that must make all the effort, all the concessions, in cross-strait relations.
Weymouth asked Tsai if she felt she was closing the gap between Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China and how she planned to handle day-to-day relations with Beijing.
Yet it is not Tsai or the Taiwanese that do not want to communicate, it is Beijing that has slammed the telephone down.
It is Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) government, like those of his predecessors, that only wants to hear its viewpoint regurgitated back at it. It is Beijing that cannot accept that negotiations and discussions do not require capitulation by one of the parties.
Tsai showed she has a far better grasp of reality than Xi in her answers to questions about the economy and trade ties with China. She recognizes that times have changed and new models and solutions must be found or developed.
One only wishes that her counterparts in Beijing could do the same.
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