Taiwan has nothing to gain from prolonged tension or full-scale war on the Korean Peninsula and it should firmly support its allies — South Korea, Japan and the US — in the confrontation, academics said.
A “new Korean War” over the sinking of a South Korean naval ship would hurt Taiwan because the US would have to refrain from strengthening military cooperation with Taiwan in exchange for China’s assistance in Korea, said Alexander Huang (黃介正), a professor at Tamkang University’s Graduate Institute of International Affairs and Strategic Studies.
North and South Korea are not likely to engage in an all-out war, but “a strategist will tell you to never say never,” he said. The odds are “98 percent against them waging war.”
North Korea understands very clearly that if it does launch a war, it would be slapped with a string of international sanctions and have to increase its food production dramatically, Huang said.
“And for South Korea, military conflict is the last thing Seoul wants to see,” he said. “To me, the current stalemate is more of a gesture from both leaders — North Korea’s Kim Jong-il and the South’s Lee Myung-bak — to secure domestic political benefits.”
Economically, a Korean war would impact not only the regional economy, but also the global economy, he said, adding that the idea that it would benefit Taiwan’s DRAM and LCD sectors was totally misguided “unless the entire Seoul metropolitan area is flattened.”
Relations between North and South Korea appear to have returned to the Cold War era, said Lai I-chung (賴怡忠), a researcher at the Taiwan Thinktank.
Despite the fact that the chances of an all-out war on the Korean Peninsula are slim, he urged Taiwan’s government to develop a national strategy in case of military conflict.
Lai said Taiwan should clearly express its support to South Korea, Japan and the US — as President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) did on Friday when he condemned violence in response to an interviewer’s question about the Korean Peninsula — so that the international community will not misunderstand Taiwan’s position.
Lai also urged Taiwan to support the Proliferation Security Initiative, a US-led multinational effort to stop the trafficking of weapons of mass destruction, as it did in 2003 when a North Korean cargo ship carrying chemicals was intercepted and detained at the southern port of Kaohsiung.
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,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods