Beijing, under the cover of the Hong Kong government, has launched a surprise attack on Taiwan using the case of Hong Kong resident Chan Tong-kai (陳同佳), who is suspected of murdering his pregnant girlfriend, Poon Hiu-wing (潘曉穎), while on vacation in Taiwan last year.
Suspicions in Taipei were raised when Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam (林鄭月娥) refused to provide reciprocal legal support to Taiwanese prosecutors, while her administration has assiduously provided “assistance” to Chan to travel to Taiwan to turn himself in to the authorities.
Beijing has two goals:
First, it hopes to box in the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ahead of January’s presidential election and provide the pan-blue camp with a beachhead from which to launch a counterattack.
Second, Beijing is trying to diminish Taiwan’s sovereignty, which, ironically, would hurt the pan-blue camp as much as the pan-green camp.
Under the smokescreen of insisting that Chan travel to Taiwan to turn himself in, Hong Kong Secretary for Security John Lee (李家超) announced the formal withdrawal of the extradition bill in Hong Kong’s legislature. The alleged murderer is clearly being used as a pawn by the Lam administration and Beijing, and they are milking it for all its worth.
The tactics appeared to have caught the government off guard — the immediate reaction was chaotic and it was thoroughly wrong-footed as it scrambled for a suitable response.
The controversial extradition bill and ensuing protests in Hong Kong might have been a gift for President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) and her administration ahead of the elections on Jan. 11, but officials at all levels of government have taken the tactics of Beijing and the Hong Kong government lightly.
In stark contrast, the pan-blue camp, seemingly well-prepared, unleashed a coordinated barrage of artillery, spearheaded by former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), who was surprisingly fast out of the gate in criticizing the government. Bizarrely, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) still seems blissfully unaware that it is a secondary target of Beijing’s.
The joint attack by Beijing, the Hong Kong government and the KMT on the government was initially successful, and they were smug with self-satisfaction. However, once the government got back on the front foot, it launched an effective counterattack the day before Chan’s release, asking Hong Kong to allow Taiwanese law-enforcement officers to travel to the territory to collect evidence and escort Chan on a flight to Taiwan.
Lam’s administration of course refused permission and Hong Kong-based Anglican clergyman and Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference member Peter Koon (管浩鳴) popped up, claiming to speak on Chan’s behalf.
Koon announced that Chan had no confirmed date to travel to Taiwan.
Beijing was clearly pulling the strings.
The case of Chan’s “forced surrender,” choreographed by Beijing and executed by the Hong Kong government, will continue to play out for some time.
National policy adviser Huang Cheng-kuo (黃承國) said that at the end of September Koon informed him that he had already been in contact with Lee and Li Attorneys-at-Law. Mainland Affairs Council Minister Chen Ming-tong (陳明通) has made the same comment. Why would a suspect who said he planned to surrender himself to Taiwanese authorities need to use Koon as a go-between? This detail alone suggests that there is more going on than meets the eye.
Beijing and the Lam administration’s use of Koon is the final piece of an elaborate trap designed to ensnare the Tsai administration. This is clearly not a matter of judicial procedure.
First, the Lam administration rejected Taiwan’s offer to provide evidence and then it refused to provide Taipei with evidence it had collected. Next, it gave Chan the go-ahead to travel to Taiwan independently, even as Koon was shuttling back and forth between the two sides. Given these arrangements, would it be possible to go on with the case even if Chan were to make it to Taiwan?
Chan is nothing more than a pawn in a political game. The Lam administration’s push for him to travel to Taiwan has nothing to do with ensuring justice for the murdered Poon and her family. It is a page from the same playbook as Lam’s and Beijing’s violent suppression of pro-democracy demonstrators.
After trying to use Taiwan to defuse the bomb that sparked the anti-extradition bill protests, the second wave of Beijing’s attack will likely soon begin. However, Taipei should not assume that election meddling by Beijing this time will be a carbon copy of its actions in the run-up to last year’s local elections.
The Tsai administration must be particularly vigilant and should not assume that the pan-blue camp is down and out. Tsai should expect a significant attack from Beijing ahead of the elections.
Following his extraordinary ascent to power, Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) has amassed vast power to become the supreme leader of his country and he is now in total control. Despite his total power, the pan-blue camp is a spent force — a clear failure of Xi’s Taiwan policy, so it is not strange that Beijing is moving heaven and earth, expending an exorbitant amount of money and resources, to scupper the DPP’s election campaign.
Buying off Taiwan’s diplomatic allies is primarily intended to ensure that Xi has sufficient quantities of red meat to throw at his nationalist domestic audience, and it is the clever use of the Chan case to sow division that is the fiendishly clever scheme that could allow Beijing to control the presidential election.
If the Chan situation had been timed to occur just before the final stretch of campaigning, it might have been the death knell for Taiwan, which lacks a national security plan for such a scenario.
As the Chinese general Sun Tzu (孫子) wrote: “You should never entrust to hope that the enemy will not come; instead you must trust in yourself, prepare your army and ensure it is ready to fight. You will thus be able to deter the enemy, who will see that your force would repel any attack from his army.”
The DPP must prepare to face the threat of election interference by Beijing. This means that it will be fighting on two fronts: fending off attacks from the pan-blue camp and the red camp in Beijing. Taiwan’s national security apparatus must quickly prepare for the coming attack and make sure that it is in a position to rapidly assess the situation and formulate a response. Also, every government agency should be given a specific area of responsibility to avoid underestimating the enemy and ensure constant vigilance.
The Tsai administration’s initially confused reaction to the Chan case gives cause for concern. If the government could not even get a handle on Chinese Communist Party (CCP) go-between Koon, whose membership of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference should have been a gigantic red flag, what hope does it have of implementing robust controls against better-disguised CCP proxies during the election campaign?
Beijing’s fine-grained understanding of Taiwan extends deep into every corner of the nation, as demonstrated by the politically motivated arrest of Morrison Lee (李孟居) while on vacation in Hong Kong in August. Lee is a political adviser to Fangliao Township Mayor Archer Chen (陳亞麟) in Pingtung County.
Most damning of all, the fact that Minister of the Interior Hsu Kuo-yung (徐國勇) and a national security adviser agreed to meet with Koon, on separate occasions, apparently totally oblivious of his ties to Beijing, perfectly encapsulates the woeful level of threat awareness within government. The Tsai administration needs to get with the program, fast.
Translated by Edward Jones
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
As former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) wrapped up his visit to the People’s Republic of China, he received his share of attention. Certainly, the trip must be seen within the full context of Ma’s life, that is, his eight-year presidency, the Sunflower movement and his failed Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement, as well as his eight years as Taipei mayor with its posturing, accusations of money laundering, and ups and downs. Through all that, basic questions stand out: “What drives Ma? What is his end game?” Having observed and commented on Ma for decades, it is all ironically reminiscent of former US president Harry