The US-China Economic and Security Review Commission on Thursday published its Annual Report to Congress, which should make for interesting reading not only in Washington, but also in Taipei — in the Presidential Office, the ministries of foreign affairs and national defense, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and elsewhere — especially chapters 5 and 6, which cover Taiwan and Hong Kong.
The commission’s members are not wearing the West’s decades-old blinders — that engagement with China could lead to meaningful reform — but see that Beijing has become a clear threat to democracy not just in Asia, but around the world.
Commission vice chair Robin Cleveland wrote in the report’s introduction that the aspirations of Taiwan and Hong Kong require the US to reconsider “the commitments we made under the one country, two systems model.”
The five recommendations that the report makes for US policy toward Taiwan urge the US Congress to have the US secretary of state report on actions to counter China’s isolation of Taiwan internationally, pass legislation to enhance Taiwan-US security cooperation and raise the threshold for congressional notification on defense sales to Taiwan to the highest level; direct the Pentagon to prepare a 15-year action plan to deter any attempt by Beijing to take Taiwan by force; and instruct the US director of national intelligence to study the impact of an event in the Taiwan Strait on the supply of high-tech products to the US.
The five recommendations on Hong Kong are equally far-reaching, the most important of which is the call for legislation to suspend the territory’s special economic status if Beijing resorts to armed intervention by the People’s Liberation Army or People’s Armed Police.
While the 12-member commission’s recommendations are non-binding, they do influence US lawmakers and policymakers — and should be a wake-up call to those in similar positions in other nations.
This year’s report was based on eight public hearings and the testimony of 77 witnesses, who ranged from US government officials to businesspeople to think tank members and other researchers. They must have made it clear to the commission that, as its chairwoman Carolyn Bartholomew told a news conference in Washington on Thursday: “If there were flickers of opening up in China, they have been firmly extinguished.”
Her statement, as with the report’s findings and conclusions, is a strong rebuttal to the KMT’s delusions that the cross-strait openings created during former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) terms in office could spur change in China.
It is also a rebuttal to those — whether in Taiwan, the US or elsewhere — who lay blame for the breakdown in cross-strait communications and the increase in cross-strait tensions solely at the feet of President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), rather than where it truly belongs, with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) and the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) leadership.
It is not Tsai and the DPP’s refusal to recognize the KMT’s fictitious “1992 consensus” that caused the freeze, but the delusion of Xi and his cohort that they understand the needs and wants of their “Taiwanese compatriots.”
The same blinkered approach that the CCP leadership has long had toward Taiwan has been in clear evidence in Hong Kong over the past few years.
Just as Beijing can no longer dismiss opposition to its demands to annex Taiwan as the fault of the DPP or pro-independence supporters — who are not one and the same — the past five months show that it cannot pretend that calls for greater democracy in Hong Kong are just the work of students and malcontents.
Beijing and the CCP have no one to blame but themselves.
On Sept. 3 in Tiananmen Square, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) rolled out a parade of new weapons in PLA service that threaten Taiwan — some of that Taiwan is addressing with added and new military investments and some of which it cannot, having to rely on the initiative of allies like the United States. The CCP’s goal of replacing US leadership on the global stage was advanced by the military parade, but also by China hosting in Tianjin an August 31-Sept. 1 summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which since 2001 has specialized
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
A large part of the discourse about Taiwan as a sovereign, independent nation has centered on conventions of international law and international agreements between outside powers — such as between the US, UK, Russia, the Republic of China (ROC) and Japan at the end of World War II, and between the US and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) since recognition of the PRC as the sole representative of China at the UN. Internationally, the narrative on the PRC and Taiwan has changed considerably since the days of the first term of former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) of the Democratic
A report by the US-based Jamestown Foundation on Tuesday last week warned that China is operating illegal oil drilling inside Taiwan’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ) off the Taiwan-controlled Pratas Island (Dongsha, 東沙群島), marking a sharp escalation in Beijing’s “gray zone” tactics. The report said that, starting in July, state-owned China National Offshore Oil Corp installed 12 permanent or semi-permanent oil rig structures and dozens of associated ships deep inside Taiwan’s EEZ about 48km from the restricted waters of Pratas Island in the northeast of the South China Sea, islands that are home to a Taiwanese garrison. The rigs not only typify
RSS