In the aftermath of Saturday’s special municipality elections, the US government should establish new links with the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), a forum in Washington has been told.
Randy Schriver, president of the Project 2049 Institute and an expert on Taiwan, said that the DPP had shown its “strength and viability,” which has implications for the US.
At a Heritage Foundation discussion on the elections, Schriver said: “The US government needs to pay some attention to the potential return to power of the DPP.”
He said he was not making a partisan statement, but rather that he was basing his recommendations on what happened the last time the DPP was in power.
Schriver said that many senior political leaders in the US did not understand the DPP, its motivations or its core interests.
“And that led to some difficulties,” he said.
If the DPP should come to power again, the US should be careful not to repeat the mistakes it made in the past, Schriver said.
He said that Saturday’s voting suggested there was a possibility that President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) could be defeated in the 2012 presidential election and that the possibility “should be taken seriously.”
Ho Szu-yin (何思因), a former national security adviser and Lo Chih-cheng (羅致政), president of the Taiwan Brain Trust, analyzed the poll results, which saw the DPP win the most votes overall, while the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) won three of the five mayoral seats.
The elections will “have a major impact on Taiwan’s 2012 presidential race with all that entails for US-Taiwan and cross-Straits [sic] relations,” Heritage said in a statement.
Both Ho and Lo said the DPP had made an “impressive” comeback from the defeat it suffered in the 2004 presidential election. Lo said that the party had given a “great performance” and that “the KMT did not win and the DPP did not lose.”
Given the DPP’s “strong showing,” the KMT will now increase its interest in strengthening the US-Taiwan relationship, Schriver said.
“One of the charges from the green camp has been that the KMT has been going too far and too fast with China and not paying enough attention to traditional friends like the US and Japan,” he said.
As a result of the just demonstrated “domestic political dynamic,” KMT policies could be modified as the 2012 presidential election grows near, he said.
He added: “We in Washington are non-partisan and neutral in these affairs, but it is no secret that Beijing is not ... They have a preferred outcome for 2012.”
While he did not actually say it, he was clearly referring to a Chinese preference for the KMT over the DPP.
Schriver said that following the election, Taipei might push for more interaction with the US, while Beijing might create more tensions.
“This would return us to a more traditional state of affairs,” he said.
Taipei, New Taipei City, Keelung and Taoyuan would issue a decision at 8pm on whether to cancel work and school tomorrow due to forecasted heavy rain, Keelung Mayor Hsieh Kuo-liang (謝國樑) said today. Hsieh told reporters that absent some pressing reason, the four northern cities would announce the decision jointly at 8pm. Keelung is expected to receive between 300mm and 490mm of rain in the period from 2pm today through 2pm tomorrow, Central Weather Administration data showed. Keelung City Government regulations stipulate that school and work can be canceled if rain totals in mountainous or low-elevation areas are forecast to exceed 350mm in
EVA Airways president Sun Chia-ming (孫嘉明) and other senior executives yesterday bowed in apology over the death of a flight attendant, saying the company has begun improving its health-reporting, review and work coordination mechanisms. “We promise to handle this matter with the utmost responsibility to ensure safer and healthier working conditions for all EVA Air employees,” Sun said. The flight attendant, a woman surnamed Sun (孫), died on Friday last week of undisclosed causes shortly after returning from a work assignment in Milan, Italy, the airline said. Chinese-language media reported that the woman fell ill working on a Taipei-to-Milan flight on Sept. 22
COUNTERMEASURE: Taiwan was to implement controls for 47 tech products bound for South Africa after the latter downgraded and renamed Taipei’s ‘de facto’ offices The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is still reviewing a new agreement proposed by the South African government last month to regulate the status of reciprocal representative offices, Minister of Foreign Affairs Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) said yesterday. Asked about the latest developments in a year-long controversy over Taiwan’s de facto representative office in South Africa, Lin during a legislative session said that the ministry was consulting with legal experts on the proposed new agreement. While the new proposal offers Taiwan greater flexibility, the ministry does not find it acceptable, Lin said without elaborating. The ministry is still open to resuming retaliatory measures against South
1.4nm WAFERS: While TSMC is gearing up to expand its overseas production, it would also continue to invest in Taiwan, company chairman and CEO C.C. Wei said Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) has applied for permission to construct a new plant in the Central Taiwan Science Park (中部科學園區), which it would use for the production of new high-speed wafers, the National Science and Technology Council said yesterday. The council, which supervises three major science parks in Taiwan, confirmed that the Central Taiwan Science Park Bureau had received an application on Friday from TSMC, the world’s largest contract chipmaker, to commence work on the new A14 fab. A14 technology, a 1.4 nanometer (nm) process, is designed to drive artificial intelligence transformation by enabling faster computing and greater power