Lavishly praised by Beijing, bitterly debated in Taipei and calmly accepted in Washington, last week’s landmark trade deal between Taiwan and China is underscoring shifting relations between them and the US.
By slashing tariffs and offering preferential investment terms, the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) signed on Tuesday may bring Taiwan’s and China’s economies closer and pave the way for a formal end to hostilities.
However, as Beijing and Taipei grow closer — and China’s global clout increases — long-standing US security ties with democratic Taiwan are coming under pressure.
“There are high-ranking people in the US like senior retired military officers, who are speaking out against the relationship,” said military analyst Alexander Huang (黃介正), of Taipei’s Tamkang University. “The US government assures us that they do not reflect official policy, but it is important to take them seriously.”
For the moment, Washington is emphasizing the positive in the triangular relationship. The US State Department applauded the ECFA as an improvement in Taiwan-China relations and hoped the trend would continue.
For President Ma-Ying jeou (馬英九), the trade agreement crowns a two-year effort to build a relationship with long-time rival Beijing. Presidential Office Spokesman Lo Chih-chiang (羅智強) said better relations with China have strengthened Taiwan’s ties with Washington. He points to a recent US$6.4 billion sale of cutting-edge US weaponry.
“During the [former president] Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) era, the mutual trust between the US and Taiwan was totally gone,” Lo said. “Taiwan’s relations with the US got better only after President Ma Ying-jeou made efforts to improve cross-strait ties, as reflected in the progress in arms procurement.”
However, once Taiwan’s partner in confronting communist-ruled China, Washington now seeks Beijing’s help in confronting global problems — the financial crisis, nuclear proliferation, climate change. That gives Beijing leverage. It has launched a lobbying effort in Washington to squelch the long-standing US security relationship with Taiwan.
Ma’s willingness to court Beijing has caused some to suggest that Taiwan may go the way of Finland, which during the Cold War took positions at odds with the West so as not to anger the neighboring Soviet Union and ensure its survival as an independent country.
Some of Ma’s actions have fed the perception of a pro-Beijing tilt.
In April, he told a television interviewer that “we will never ask Americans to fight for Taiwan,” seemingly undermining Washington’s policy of ambiguity on whether it would aid Taiwan if China attacked.
He has also ordered Taiwan’s armed forces to shift priorities to disaster response and away from defending against a Chinese attack.
Overall military spending has dropped slightly under Ma, to about 2.6 percent of GDP from 3 percent, according to Taiwan military analysts.
From trade ties to defense, Taiwan’s opposition, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), says Ma is weakening Taiwanese sovereignty and thereby increasing the chances the democratic island will eventually have to accept China’s rule.
At risk for some US defense planners is US naval supremacy in the Western Pacific. Taiwan sits in the middle of the so-called first island chain that extends from Japan through the Philippines and that some analysts say is a bulwark against China’s eastward maritime expansion toward key Pacific shipping lanes.
Should China and Taiwan grow so close that the nation’s territorial waters would fall under the Chinese naval control, “the ability of the US navy to operate in that area of the Pacific would be constrained,” University of Miami China specialist June Teufel Dreyer said.
Others contend that “Finlandization” would benefit the US.
Bud Cole, a China specialist at the National War College in Washington, said Taiwan’s strategic value is overblown and that its absorption by China would not “significantly weaken the US strategic position in Asia.”
Taiwan-China reconciliation would also give Washington a reason to ditch arms sales to Taiwan and remove a major irritant in ties with Beijing, some said.
In a sign that reasoning is making headway, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Diane Feinstein last month called the most recent sale “a mistake.” A retired admiral, William Owens, has also called for ending the sales.
Former Pentagon official Thomas Mahnken believes reducing the sales would send the wrong signal to Japan and South Korea, long Washington’s key partners in the Pacific. Still, he said, Washington’s resistance may be waning.
“A key question is, how much longer will American political leaders be willing to take the Chinese pressure that comes with arms sales to Taiwan,” Mahnken said. “I’m really not sure.”
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