White House officials and members of the US Congress are concerned that President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) is becoming too close to China at the expense of relations with the US, says Gerrit van der Wees, a senior policy adviser to the Formosan Association for Public Affairs.
In an online article, van der Wees argues that these officials are pleased with DPP chairperson Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) vision of “rebalancing” Taiwan’s relations and moving closer to the US and its allies in the region.
Replying to an article posted last week by US academic Bonnie Glaser of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, van der Wees disputes her contention that the administration of US President Barack Obama has a “clear preference” for Ma. “I cannot agree,” he said.
Glaser wrote that the US announcement of Taiwan’s candidacy for the Visa Waiver Program (VWP) and the recent spate of high-level US visits to the country were signals that Washington wanted Ma to win a second term in office.
However, “US officials have clearly stated that the VWP announcement had its own timeline, and was simply the result of Taiwan fulfilling a set of criteria set by the US,” van der Wees says. “Indeed, the negotiations on Taiwan’s participation in the Visa Waiver Program were initiated by the [former president] Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) administration and took several years in coming. Of course it is likely that the Ma administration has worked harder to fulfill those criteria with the upcoming elections in mind.”
In addition, the high-level visits could be a result of the Obama administration listening more closely to Congress where members have been increasingly vocal in arguing for more such visits, he added.
Van der Wees said that Glaser’s article was “problematic” because it portrayed US officials as having “lingering worries” and being concerned about “Tsai’s unwillingness to be forthcoming about concrete policies towards the Mainland that she would pursue if elected.”
“Perhaps these US officials should wonder aloud whether the Chinese leaders are both willing and able to continue the stability in cross-strait relations the region has enjoyed in recent years. They might add that it is far from clear that the leaders in Beijing and their advisers fully appreciate the depth of the mistrust of their motives and PRC [People’s Republic of China] aspirations in countries surrounding China and particularly in Taiwan,” he added.
“Dr Tsai has shown herself to be a creative and pragmatic thinker, but the response — from Ma and from Beijing — has been to revert to old and empty ‘One China’ mantras,” van der Wees said.
The root cause of cross-strait instability, he added was that China does not wish to have a democracy on its doorstep and that it sees Taiwan as a springboard for its power projection into the Pacific.
“Taiwan is not threatening China in any way, except by being a vibrant democracy,” he said.
It is a fiction to believe that by accommodating China on the Taiwan issue, Washington could get it to be more cooperative on other issues, van der Wees said.
“China will play hardball on those other issues no matter what happens in Taiwan,” he said. “The only way to get it to play by international rules is for the US to play hardball in return.”
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater