China has perverted Taiwan’s history, former US deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asia Randall Schriver said.
Most US officials often and “mistakenly” repeat the Chinese mantra that Taiwan is an inalienable part of Chinese territory, Schriver said in a paper issued by the Project 2049 Institute in Washington.
“But how many American officials know that out of the last 400 years of Taiwan’s recorded history, Taiwan was governed by authorities on Mainland China for less than 10 years?” he said.
“This has undeniably been to the benefit of the people of Taiwan,” he said. “Spared the ravages of CCP [Chinese Communist Party] rule, Taiwan has developed into a modern, successful democracy with a thriving market economy, respect for human rights and religious freedom.”
Schriver, president of the Project 2049 Institute, said Taiwan is “a model global citizen.”
The paper said that China’s military parade tomorrow to commemorate the victory of allied forces over Japan in World War II would be missing a fully accurate depiction of the circumstances surrounding the Chinese victory.
“We should be offended to the point of objecting,” he said.
China’s “distortion of history” should not go unnoticed, Schriver said.
There is no doubt that most Chinese are sincere in wanting a full and accurate account of the actions of the Japanese Imperial Army during the war, he added.
“But Chinese interlocutors would have us believe that only the Japanese struggle with facing the past,” Schriver said.
“The truth is that they are not alone; the worst offenders in distorting, rewriting or in many cases nullifying history for political purposes are the Chinese themselves,” he said.
“This bears more scrutiny because these practices remain largely in effect and are extremely consequential today,” he said.
Schriver said that the CCP is unwilling to candidly discuss the period between 1949 and the present.
“One of the tragic realities of the CCP era is that more Chinese people died unnecessary deaths from CCP authoritarian rule than at the hands of foreign occupiers during the war in the Pacific,” he said.
Schriver cited the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen Square Massacre.
“This is not a happy contest and not meant to minimize Japanese treatment of the Chinese people during the war — but we would be wise to keep proper perspective when engaged on history issues,” he said.
Schriver said that China works hard at “suppressing historical truth,” but that there is virtually no international pressure on Chinese leaders to address their shortcomings.
China’s party and government apparatus are dedicated to promoting a negative image of Japan by actively distorting Japan’s very positive qualities and contributions to China and the world since World War II, he said.
Schriver called on the US government and other experts to “call out” Chinese leaders for “political warfare directed at our allies, our friends and us.”
Western historians who are seeking Japan to provide an accurate and just history of World War II in Asia should apply the same standards for assessing historical accuracy to Chinese history, he said.
“Our friend and security partner Taiwan will have its role supplanted, despite the fact that it was Republic of China forces that suffered 90 percent of the casualties at the hands of the Japanese,” Schriver said.
“The Chinese People’s Liberation Army did little fighting and only accounted for 10 percent of the total war casualties,” Schriver 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