Today’s presidential election is being watched anxiously in Washington, where policymakers are eager to preserve a rare area of calm in relations with China, but face charges of showing favoritism.
The US has been pressing China on a wide range of issues, including myriad economic disputes, Iran, North Korea and human rights. Taiwan, long a source of friction in US-China talks, has been relegated to perfunctory reiterations of policy since President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and his Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) won the 2008 elections.
“Privately the administration [of US President Barack Obama] would be delighted to see the KMT win the election,” said Robert Hathaway, director of the Asia program at the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson International Center for academics.
“But no one wants to say this in a public fashion, either for fear of becoming a factor in the election itself or because people here genuinely believe that we shouldn’t be having a role in this,” he said.
Relations with Washington are crucial for Taipei as the US is required under domestic law to provide Taiwan with means to defend itself.
The Obama administration has declined public comment on the election, but in recent months three senior US officials have visited Taiwan — a significant step as Washington does not recognize the country.
The Obama administration last month also moved toward allowing Taiwanese to visit the US without visas.
The initiatives have been viewed uneasily by the US Congress, where many lawmakers are sympathetic to the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) because of its history of promoting democracy in Taiwan.
US Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, chairperson of the House of Representatives’ Foreign Affairs Committee, said that while she supported measures that benefit Taiwan, US officials should be careful to show “strict political neutrality.”
“The Taiwanese electorate could interpret these as deliverables provided by the [Obama] administration to Taiwan’s current president just before he faces voters in the polls,” the Republican lawmaker wrote in a letter to US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.
US Representative Ed Royce, another Republican active on Taiwan, decried that neither Obama nor his Republican predecessor, former US president George W. Bush had shown “high aspirations” for ties with Taiwan.
“Relations with Taiwan are treated as a subset of relations with China, and ‘managed,’ rather than promoted,” he wrote in the Tokyo-based magazine The Diplomat.
“Regardless of who wins Saturday, that approach must change if US-Taiwan relations are to get back on track,” Royce said.
Bonnie Glaser, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that there was a flip side to charges of US bias — that initiatives on Taiwan have become easier ahead of the election.
China, which usually protests angrily at any hint of official recognition for Taiwan, barely let out a peep over recent US visits to Taiwan and took no major countermeasures over the latest arms package that the US approved in September — a US$5.85 billion upgrade of Taiwan’s fighter jets — which Glaser attributed to Beijing’s desire to support Ma’s re-election.
“I can’t say the complaints [of US bias] are completely unfounded, but people in the [Obama] administration would fairly say that the timing of the campaign has given us an opportunity,” she said.
Glaser said that DPP presidential candidate Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) has shown herself to be pragmatic and would inevitably seek smooth relations with Washington if she wins.
“She has a lot of experience dealing with the US. I don’t think she would hold a grudge,” she said.
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
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
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