Beijing’s adamant insistence on the “one China” principle continues to put it at odds with Taipei’s quest for international space despite an apparent thaw in cross-strait relations since President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) took office in May 2008, US diplomatic cables recently released by WikiLeaks showed.
Since May 2009, Taiwan has been invited to attend the World Health Assembly (WHA) meeting on an annual basis, but no progress has been made in two other cases for its participation in the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
The push for the nation’s participation was made public in September 2009, when the Ma administration decided to drop, for the first time in 17 years, the nation’s annual bid to join the UN.
Before the decision was made, government agencies appeared to work without a sense of direction in terms of advancing the country’s international space, a cable dated on May 1, 2009, by the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) showed.
Then-AIT director Stephen Young said in the conclusion that “we expect to continue to be approached by Taiwan agencies looking to push their cause to the front of the queue.”
The cable said that at a meeting on April 30 between AIT officials and Lily Hsu (徐儷文), then-deputy director-general of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ (MOFA) Department of International Organizations, Hsu told the officials “although Taiwan has succeeded in its goal of obtaining observer status in the May 18-27 WHA meetings ... it has no clear ‘next step’ on international space at this time.”
Hsu said the ministry was in the process of interagency consultations to determine and prioritize the nation’s international space strategy, with the idea to develop a list of international organizations in which expanded participation would bring tangible benefits to Taiwanese, the cable showed.
According to the cable, Hsu told the AIT that the ministry “had heard from other sources that Beijing considers Taiwan’s WHA participation to be an exception. Beijing does not want a spillover effect to other international organizations.”
At the meeting, Hsu also asked for US help to ward off further Chinese encroachment on Taiwan’s interests and status in the World Organization for Animal Health, of which Taiwan “has been a longstanding and productive member,” the cable said.
“MOFA is not naive enough to believe that gaining WHA observership this year means everything is open to Taiwan now,” the cable showed Hsu as saying.
According to the cable, the AIT learned from MOFA that Taiwan might want to play a bigger role in the ICAO, the International Maritime Organization, or the International Criminal Police Organization, and it was told by the National Immigration Agency that Taiwan wished to participate in the International Organization of Migration.
Another cable dated Dec. 24, 2008, originating from the US embassy in Beijing, showed China’s Taiwan Affairs Office Director Wang Yi (王毅) saying that “to solve the international space problem, the two sides must stick to the one-China framework ... because the improvement in cross-Strait relations thus far has been on the basis of the one-China principle.”
“The international community accepts the ‘one-China consensus,’ and UN-affiliated organizations also ‘legally accept one China’ ... On the international stage, ‘the rules are set and cannot be changed.’ Without the ‘one-China principle,’ there would be ‘chaos.’ ‘We are willing to work to resolve this issue on the basis of one China,’” Wang was quoted as saying.
In a cable dated March 24, 2009, Liu Zhentao (劉震濤), director of Tsinghua University’s Institute of Taiwan Studies, told US officials at the US embassy in Beijing that Taiwan’s participation in international bodies apart from the WHA would still be addressed on a “case-by-case basis,” depending on the rules governing participation in the various organizations.
The same cable quoted Ding Kuisong, vice chairman of the China Reform Forum, as saying that Taiwan’s participation in the WHA, and possibly in other international organizations, would have to be worked out on a “year-by-year” and “case-by-case” basis.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
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,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift