The way that President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) is pushing Taiwan’s claims to the Diaoyutai Islands (釣魚台) could damage bilateral relations with the US, academics said on Tuesday in Washington.
While the US is doing all it can to calm the sovereignty dispute over the Diaoyutais, known as the Senkakus in Japan, academics at the Taiwan Roundtable at the Sigur Center for Asian Studies in Washington said Ma may have been overly active in making Taiwan’s case.
“Ma’s call for trilateral peace talks [with Japan and China] is more in line with what the US wants to see happening,” George Washington University’s Robert Sutter said.
Even so, there has been a “muted response” from the US and there is continuing debate over just how much Washington welcomes the idea, Sutter said.
Weighing the pros and cons of the situation, the US could be seeing Taiwan as a problem in this issue, he added.
“You could come to the conclusion that the US government would prefer that Taiwan not further complicate the situation,” he said.
He stressed that US President Barack Obama’s overwhelming priority was to end the “turmoil and contention” over the islands and bring the issue under control.
At a time when Washington is trying to iron out problems surrounding the islands, Taiwan taking a more assertive stance “is something that is probably not welcome,” Sutter said.
Ma’s actions of sending coastguard boats to protect fishing vessels approaching the islands and becoming involved in a water canon fight with the Japanese “do not fit well with what the US wants to do.”
Sutter said Taiwan could be seen by the US as being “disruptive.”
He added that it was easy for Taiwan to be seen as “unimportant and to be ignored” and this could be one reason Ma was being forceful over the islands’ sovereignty.
“Being part of the process is every bit as important as the outcome,” Towson University’s Steven Phillips said.
Taiwan does not have to win the Diaoyutais conflict, but it does not want to be seen as losing, he added.
Ma’s actions over the islands were “an attempt to raise up Taiwan’s international status” as much as they were an attempt to win sovereignty, Phillips said.
Phillips said that as the weakest of the three claimants in terms of the size of its economy and military, there was a danger that the issue could damage Taipei’s credibility.
“Taiwan might raise its international profile, but it could be harmful in the long run to its relations with the US and Japan,” Phillips said.
The German city of Hamburg on Oct. 14 named a bridge “Kaohsiung-Brucke” after the Taiwanese city of Kaohsiung. The footbridge, formerly known as F566, is to the east of the Speicherstadt, the world’s largest warehouse district, and connects the Dar-es-Salaam-Platz to the Brooktorpromenade near the Port of Hamburg on the Elbe River. Timo Fischer, a Free Democratic Party member of the Hamburg-Mitte District Assembly, in May last year proposed the name change with support from members of the Social Democratic Party and the Christian Democratic Union. Kaohsiung and Hamburg in 1999 inked a sister city agreement, but despite more than a quarter-century of
Taiwanese officials are courting podcasters and influencers aligned with US President Donald Trump as they grow more worried the US leader could undermine Taiwanese interests in talks with China, people familiar with the matter said. Trump has said Taiwan would likely be on the agenda when he is expected to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) next week in a bid to resolve persistent trade tensions. China has asked the White House to officially declare it “opposes” Taiwanese independence, Bloomberg reported last month, a concession that would mark a major diplomatic win for Beijing. President William Lai (賴清德) and his top officials
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) yesterday expressed “grave concerns” after Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財) reiterated the city-state’s opposition to “Taiwanese independence” during a meeting with Chinese Premier Li Qiang (李強). In Singapore on Saturday, Wong and Li discussed cross-strait developments, the Singaporean Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement. “Prime Minister Wong reiterated that Singapore has a clear and consistent ‘one China’ policy and is opposed to Taiwan independence,” it said. MOFA responded that it is an objective fact and a common understanding shared by many that the Republic of China (ROC) is an independent, sovereign nation, with world-leading
‘ONE CHINA’: A statement that Berlin decides its own China policy did not seem to sit well with Beijing, which offered only one meeting with the German official German Minister for Foreign Affairs Johann Wadephul’s trip to China has been canceled, a spokesperson for his ministry said yesterday, amid rising tensions between the two nations, including over Taiwan. Wadephul had planned to address Chinese curbs on rare earths during his visit, but his comments about Berlin deciding on the “design” of its “one China” policy ahead of the trip appear to have rankled China. Asked about Wadephul’s comments, Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Guo Jiakun (郭嘉昆) said the “one China principle” has “no room for any self-definition.” In the interview published on Thursday, Wadephul said he would urge China to
RSS