Panelists attending a forum on regional security yesterday called upon the public not to take lightly China's relentless "three wars" strategy.
The "three wars" strategy refers to Beijing's plan to threaten Taiwanese psychologically, block Taiwan's participation in international organizations and "brainwash" Taiwan and its allies through "united front" (統戰) propaganda aimed at extending its influence in Taiwan.
"The end goal of the Chinese government's `three wars' is to make Taiwanese believe that Taiwan is part of China," said Chen Lung-chu (陳隆志), president of the Taiwan New Century Foundation think tank, which hosted the forum.
prevention
"Strengthening Taiwanese people's sense of national identification is the best defense against the threats post by China's `three wars,'" Chen said.
Former Taiwan Solidarity Union chairman Shu Chin-chiang (
"The biggest problem is that Taiwan has become so democratic that everybody takes freedom for granted," Shu said. "This has also become the nation's greatest weakness."
"In addition, our government officials are not educated or well-trained enough to combat Beijing's brainwash strategy," Shu said.
Huafan University Research Center for Humanistic Education professor Lee Ming-juinn (
diplomatic game
Taiwan, for its part, did not focus on the legal angle to fight back, he said.
Whenever China established diplomatic relations with a country and signed official agreements, they always requested the country to concede that Taiwan was part of China, Lee said.
However, when Taiwan established diplomatic relations with a foreign country, the Taiwanese government did not request its new friend to acknowledge "a clear distinction between Taiwan and China," Lee said.
"China has been brainwashing the world to the effect that Taiwan is part of China. We should promote the truth, which is that Taiwan is independent," he said.
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
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