A New York Times article published on Saturday said that Taiwan — “one of Asia’s most vibrant democracies” — has replaced Hong Kong as Asia’s “bastion of free speech.”
It is a welcome sentiment, with a few caveats.
First, it is not really new. Second, Taiwan’s status as a bastion still has a shadow over it. Third, Taiwan’s continued status as a democracy could do with some help in terms of how it is portrayed internationally. Fourth, international news agencies have their hands tied behind their backs when reporting about this “self-governing island,” due to increasing threats to press freedom from Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平).
Taiwan has been listed as a free country by the US-based non-governmental organization Freedom House for 20 consecutive years, with a perfect score of one out of seven — one being most free — for the past two years. In the last report, Hong Kong was classified as “partly free,” while China was designated as “not free.”
In last year’s World Press Freedom Index report published by Reporters Without Borders (RSF), Taiwan was given a ranking of three out of seven, where one represents most free and seven the least free. Hong Kong was given a ranking of four, China seven.
The RSF Web site writes of the decline of media freedoms in other Asian nations and calls China a “press freedom predator,” adding that the main threat to media freedom in Taiwan comes from China, which has been “exerting growing economic and political pressure on the Taiwanese media.”
If Beijing ever gets to annex Taiwan, you can say goodbye to the press freedoms celebrated in the New York Times’ article.
To the third point, it is a curious thing that very few — if any — Western media outlets use language in their reports about Taiwan that coheres with the perception held by the majority of Taiwanese that their country is an independent, autonomous sovereign nation.
Taiwan is described in the international press as “self-governed Taiwan,” “the self-governing island” or sometimes simply “the island.” It has also been called “Taiwan, a holdout for anti-communist forces after China’s civil war ended in 1949.” Alternatively, the language is tempered in phrases such as “the US treats Taiwan as a sovereign nation,” as if it is not such a thing at all.
Meanwhile, China is often referred to as “the mainland” or “mainland China,” rather than just China.
All of this has an effect on how Taiwan is perceived within the international community and pressure from China is of course behind this phenomenon.
The International Federation of Journalists in February launched its China Press Freedom Report for last year, entitled Ten-Year Edition: A Decade of Decline. The report talks of the “seemingly never-ending onslaught of restrictive orders and controls on movement, as well as threats and intimidation by way of job losses, blocking of accreditation and rejection of visas in the case of foreign journalists” in China.
In 2014, a Reuters report talked of how restrictions on media freedom for foreign reporters in China was attracting high-level concern in the US, “especially over worries that the government is denying visas for organizations that carry negative stories about China.”
At the time, China refused to renew the visa for Beijing-based New York Times journalist Austin Ramzy, citing a technical issue with the application. Another interpretation at the time was that it was revenge for the publication in 2012 of an expose of the wealth amassed by family members of the then-Chinese premier Wen Jiabao (溫家寶).
Ramzy is now the New York Times’ Hong Kong correspondent. He was one of the authors of the article mentioned earlier.
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