Despite signs the Chinese authorities are allowing unprecedented access to information about next month’s elections in Taiwan, Beijing remains intransigent on certain issues it regards as lines in the sand and it is taking action to ensure that its control remains unchallenged.
A senior editor at Caijing (財經), an independent Beijing-based publication that focuses predominantly on finance and politics, was recently invited by the Lung Yingtai Foundation in Taipei to visit Taiwan for a month to experience the elections, said Bruce Jacobs, a professor of Asian languages and studies at Monash University in Australia and a specialist on Taiwan.
Founded in 2005 by a group of entrepreneurs and intellectuals, the foundation is committed to fostering cultural exchanges, intellectual dialogue and enlivening a positive civic spirit within a democratic framework. The foundation has previously invited Chinese academics and journalists to visit Taiwan on cultural exchanges.
However, the senior editor’s application to visit Taiwan was rejected by China’s Taiwan Affairs Office (TAO), Jacobs said.
Undaunted, the editor, whose identity could not be revealed for this article, decided to travel to Taiwan via Hong Kong. Within 48 hours of the editor’s arrival, the TAO had reportedly faxed a document to the magazine’s office asking it to explain what the editor was doing in Taiwan.
The office’s quick reaction raises the possibility that Chinese agents have been closely monitoring the activities of the foundation, or that someone in Taiwan alerted the authorities in Beijing to the senior editor’s arrival in the country.
Such monitoring on behalf of China would not be unprecedented.
In late September, Central Police University associate professor Wu Chang-yu (吳彰裕) was arrested for providing China’s Ministry of Public Security with information on the movements of Chinese dissidents in Taiwan.
The magazine had originally planned to run an article on how Taiwan’s democracy evolved, Jacobs said, adding that the foundation’s invitation to the senior editor was part of that effort.
However, ostensibly as a result of pressure from Beijing, Caijing has now canceled its coverage of the election until after Jan. 14, saying the subject is “too sensitive.”
The magazine, reputed for its hard-hitting investigative journalism and occasional criticism of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), has reportedly become the target of some factions within the ruling party, as some consider the magazine a tool of their enemies ahead of the 18th CCP Congress.
Contacted for comment yesterday, the foundation denied it had invited anyone from Caijing to visit Taiwan, saying the TAO’s decision to turn down a visa application by a reporter could be the result of the quota system regulating the number of Chinese journalists allowed in Taiwan.
The Taipei Times has been unable to determine whether the senior editor is still in Taiwan.
Jacobs himself appears to have become a victim of pressure by Chinese authorities on the magazine.
Early last month, a “commissioning editor” at the magazine approached Jacobs and asked him to write a “full and frank” article on Taiwan’s elections, with some emphasis on how Taiwan democratized.
“I asked [the editor] about the question of censorship and was assured they wanted the bold truth,” Jacobs said by e-mail. “With these assurances, I prepared a version and ... the only place I held back was in not calling the Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) and Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國) regimes ‘colonial.’”
The commissioning editor made a few suggestions and Jacobs submitted a slightly modified version, he said, adding that at no point was there any indication of censorship.
However, the magazine informed Jacobs on Tuesday that it had not published the article because of the “sensitiveness of the election.”
Jacobs believes the article, like Caijing’s coverage of the elections, is likely to be published after the elections take place.
AGING: As of last month, people aged 65 or older accounted for 20.06 percent of the total population and the number of couples who got married fell by 18,685 from 2024 Taiwan has surpassed South Korea as the country least willing to have children, with an annual crude birthrate of 4.62 per 1,000 people, Ministry of the Interior data showed yesterday. The nation was previously ranked the second-lowest country in terms of total fertility rate, or the average number of children a woman has in her lifetime. However, South Korea’s fertility rate began to recover from 2023, with total fertility rate rising from 0.72 and estimated to reach 0.82 to 0.85 by last year, and the crude birthrate projected at 6.7 per 1,000 people. Japan’s crude birthrate was projected to fall below six,
US President Donald Trump in an interview with the New York Times published on Thursday said that “it’s up to” Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) what China does on Taiwan, but that he would be “very unhappy” with a change in the “status quo.” “He [Xi] considers it to be a part of China, and that’s up to him what he’s going to be doing, but I’ve expressed to him that I would be very unhappy if he did that, and I don’t think he’ll do that. I hope he doesn’t do that,” Trump said. Trump made the comments in the context
SELF-DEFENSE: Tokyo has accelerated its spending goal and its defense minister said the nation needs to discuss whether it should develop nuclear-powered submarines China is ramping up objections to what it sees as Japan’s desire to acquire nuclear weapons, despite Tokyo’s longstanding renunciation of such arms, deepening another fissure in the two neighbors’ increasingly tense ties. In what appears to be a concerted effort, China’s foreign and defense ministries issued statements on Thursday condemning alleged remilitarism efforts by Tokyo. The remarks came as two of the country’s top think tanks jointly issued a 29-page report framing actions by “right-wing forces” in Japan as posing a “serious threat” to world peace. While that report did not define “right-wing forces,” the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs was
PREPAREDNESS: Given the difficulty of importing ammunition during wartime, the Ministry of National Defense said it would prioritize ‘coproduction’ partnerships A newly formed unit of the Marine Corps tasked with land-based security operations has recently replaced its aging, domestically produced rifles with more advanced, US-made M4A1 rifles, a source said yesterday. The unnamed source familiar with the matter said the First Security Battalion of the Marine Corps’ Air Defense and Base Guard Group has replaced its older T65K2 rifles, which have been in service since the late 1980s, with the newly received M4A1s. The source did not say exactly when the upgrade took place or how many M4A1s were issued to the battalion. The confirmation came after Chinese-language media reported
RSS