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Forum discusses Taiwan's sovereignty

Deliberately avoiding Taiwan’s sovereign status has been the predominant theme in US thinking and that trend would likely continue if Taiwan’s leader agrees with the stance, an analyst with the American Foreign Policy Council said yesterday.

“[US] leaders ... would rather not have to deal with Taiwan or do anything for Taiwan. They feel preoccupied elsewhere and they would like to believe that Taiwan could go on being a happy democracy without [the US] having to do anything with it,” said Stephen Yates, an analyst who is also president of DC Asia Advisory, a Washington-based consulting firm.

Yates made the remarks while presenting a paper entitled American Political Perspective on Taiwan’s Sovereign Status at the second day of a forum on Taiwan’s sovereign status organized by the Taiwan Thinktank at Taipei’s Howard Plaza Hotel.

He said many people in Taiwan mistakenly believe that the US government may offer support or benefits because of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) victory in the presidential election.

“The problem is the US isn’t looking for a partner [in Taiwan’s leader]. It is looking for someone to be quiet and leave us alone,” he said.

Yates, who is the former deputy assistant for national security affairs to US Vice President Dick Cheney, disagreed with the US position, saying that it is not consistent with support for democracy and would not be good for US interests over the long term.

Yates said that the US position was a problem for Taiwan because “they [those in the US] don’t see Taiwan as having a separate sovereign status.”

“They understand their government view as ... Taiwan was a province of Qing empire, Japanese colony and had ROC jurisdiction, but Taiwan has never been recognized as a separate sovereign entity,” Yates said.

He said that the US impression in this regard was shaped by the idea that it had wanted to help Taiwan gain sovereignty, but the government had not accepted that help.

Yates said the people of Taiwan today inherit the bitter fruits of dictator Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) rule as he resisted the US preference in the 1950s to recognize Taiwan’s sovereign status and he also rejected US efforts to secure Taiwan’s separate membership in the UN even as China became a member in the 1970s, Yates said.

Paul Monk, managing director of Australian think tank Austhink Consulting, presented a paper on the future of Taiwan’s sovereign status from the perspective of geopolitics.

He said that China’s claim that it has the inherent right to sovereignty over Taiwan and the notion that Taiwan is a democratic trading state that should have a right to determine its own destiny are both “second order issues” in the larger scheme of things, Monk said.

“The fundamental issue is the geostrategic significance ... of Taiwan in the eyes of Chinese grand strategists and the major powers other than Taiwan, for it is this which will almost certainly determine the fate of the island in the next 10 to 20 years,” Monk said.

Monk suggested that China offer Taiwan de jure independence and seek to cultivate its goodwill as a neighbor to serve its own best interests.

“That way, the freedom of the people of Taiwan would not be threatened, and overweening Chinese ambitions would not give Japan the jitters or cause the Philippines and other regional states including Australia to look with great apprehension at its rising power,” he said.
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