If it wants to be independent, Taiwan must not base its policies on fear of China and the US, a researcher on Taiwan-US-China relations said.
"Fear should never be your policy, because [such a policy will be] doomed to disaster," Bruce Herschensohn, a public policy professor at Pepperdine University in California said, in an interview with the Taipei Times last Wednesday.
"If you have to count on continuing trade with China, then you are not being independent. If you have to count on the United States, you are not independent," he said.
Herschensohn, who served in the administrations of former US presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, said he knew many people in Taiwan preferred to maintain the "status quo," and the main reason for this was that they were worried that China might declare war.
"You would not be waving a white flag by [insisting on] the status quo, but it's pretty close, because you depend on it. What would happen to the PRC [People's Republic of China] if it changed the status quo?" he asked, adding that maintaining the "status quo" was a self-deluding notion.
Although Taiwan's actions in changing the titles of state-run enterprises has been denounced by some as an attempt to change the "status quo," Herschensohn said that China's increase of its military threat to Taiwan by adding two new missiles every week was also a change of the "status quo."
Herschensohn said that many nations and organizations that have diplomatic and formal relations with China also made policy decisions based on fear because they were afraid of losing opportunities to make money in China.
"Taiwan is not alone in that regard, but Taiwan can be different from them," he said.
"Taiwan could prove that it is the only nation in the world that has the guts to stand up to China. That will make a lot of countries, especially [other] democracies think: if Taiwan can do it, we can do it," he added.
In response to the argument that China would become more democratic as a result of maintaining business ties with Taiwan, which could also result in Beijing keeping its hands off Taiwan, Herschensohn said: "That is absolute nonsense."
Thinking that trade over the Taiwan Strait would lead to democracy in China is based on a poor understanding of contemporary history, he said.
The dictatorship of the former Soviet Union ended because of economic disaster, he said, and knowing that, "why should China bring about the end of its dictatorship because of its economic boom?"
Herschensohn said he believed in free trade with free countries, and added that Taiwan and the US should not be doing business with authoritarian China.
"I know others are doing it, but there's never a reason for doing something that is morally repugnant," he said. "We [Taiwan and the US] have created this superpower that we do not trust."
He said that the US' current policy in dealing with cross-strait relations was "so incorrect" that it was turning China into a super power.
Regarding the "one China" policy, Herschensohn said the US government's policy was wrong and should be changed.
He added that he was not opposed to the "one China" policy, as long as there is also a "one Taiwan."
As US citizens are dying in Afghanistan and Iraq to install democracy, it makes no sense to be opposed to Taiwan, which is already a democracy, because that would amount to opposing everything that the US has ever stood for, Herschensohn said.
When asked for comments on Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) presidential candidate Ma Ying-jeou (
"But how could you be moderate to someone who wants to have all of these missiles, 988 missiles, aimed at you?"
Herschensohn said he had not been impressed with Ma's remarks on many issues when he met him some years ago.
As for Hsieh, Herschensohn said he did not know him well enough to comment, although "it is very frightening for Hsieh to say that a city in China and a city in Taiwan are two cities in one country. He will need to explain this idea."
Herschensohn was referring to the concepts of "a constitutional one China" (
During his tenure as Kaohsiung City mayor, Hsieh indicated that Kaohsiung City and Xiamen City were two cities of the same nation in terms of the current Republic of China (ROC) Constitution.
In 2005, Hsieh brought up the idea of "a constitutional one China," which he said was what the ROC Constitution implied.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching