Taiwan’s future should be decided by its people and its leaders should remind China of that if necessary, former American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) chairman Richard Bush said yesterday in a POP Radio interview in Taipei.
Taiwanese have shown no interest in the “one country, two systems” formula that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) proposed in January, Bush said.
Neither Xi’s time in office nor the 20th anniversary of the National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in 2022 should be relevant to a decision by Taiwanese regarding the “one country, two systems” formula, Bush said.
Photo: CNA
“Fundamentally, there’s nothing about an anniversary or milestone that should govern the timing of what the Taiwan people decide about unification,” he said.
The effects of unification would be enduring, so Taiwanese should decide only when they are ready, he said.
“If Beijing tries to pressure Taiwan into making a decision in 2021 or 2022, Taiwan’s leaders should remind Beijing that it’s up to the mainland to convince the Taiwanese people of the merits of its proposal,” Bush said.
China’s conditions for participation in discussions on a plan for Taiwan seem to give Beijing officials the sole right to decide who should be at the table, he said.
The people in the pan-green camp should not be excluded, Bush said.
On the issue of the tensions between the US and China, Bush said that he does not see it as a clash of civilizations, but rather as a difference of interests between a “reviving China and a status quo US” in the same geographical space.
“China now has abilities that it did not before,” he said. “China is projecting its military power into the first island chain, where the US has dominated for decades, and this produces frictions.”
Even if China became democratic, “it might pursue the same interests versus the US that the Communist Party of China is pursuing today,” he said.
Regarding trade issues, Bush said that US companies, many of which used to be strong supporters of US-China relations, now believe that trade and technological cooperation with China is no longer mutually beneficial, so they want Washington to press Beijing so the playing field could be leveled.
As a result, Washington’s views toward Beijing have become more negative, dovish politicians have become a little hawkish and hawkish politicians have become more hawkish, he said.
Asked to comment on the Hong Kong Government’s proposed amendment of the territory’s Fugitive Offenders Ordinance, Bush said that it is an indication that Beijing is working hard to restrict the political freedoms of Hong Kongers and undermine the rule of law.
This is a significant change compared with the situation prior to 2016, when Beijing showed respect for the rule of law and the civil rights of Hong Kongers, he 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:
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