China will replace the US as the most dominant power in world politics in the latter part of this century, a US professor of international politics said yesterday.
Jacek Kugler of the School of Politics and Economics at the Claremont Graduate University made the remarks during a book launch held in Taipei yesterday. Kugler is one of the authors of Preventing a Perfect Storm in the Taiwan Strait: A Power Transition Perspective.
While the peaceful resolution of the Taiwan issue would enhance the opportunity for China to take a larger global role within current international rules, a failure to achieve such a resolution would substantially enhance the likelihood of another world war, he said.
Saying that US preeminence was expected to decline over the next two to four decades, Kugler said there was increasing concern that the US' leadership role in world politics would be severely tested.
Such structural transitions, however, generate the necessary -- but perhaps not sufficient -- conditions for great power confrontations, he said.
"Taiwan is at the center of this emerging storm," Kugler said. "As China approaches parity [with the US] it may attempt to use coercive means to re-incorporate Taiwan."
Such action, he said, would force the US to either look the other way and not intervene to protect Taiwan, or commit its military to Taiwan's defense.
"Taiwan today sits at the crossroads of history. The actions of its leaders are pivotal not only for the Chinese populations on both sides of the Strait, but also for the populations of the larger world community," he said.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift