During a recent conference in Taipei, Gerrit Gong (
Not only do foreign think tanks and scholars have this concern; many opinion leaders in Taipei have reportedly been asked about this issue by US officials and congressmen.
If the US fights with China, which side will Taiwan take? Recent changes in Taiwan give the US reasons to ponder. The anxiety is not without basis.
On the issue of US arms sales, Taiwan's society remains divid-ed. The defection of former National Security Bureau (NSB) chief cashier Liu Kuan-chun (
This problem needs to be addressed, as do the strategic conflicts between the two main national security agencies, the National Security Council (NSC)and the Ministry of National Defense.
For example, Minister of National Defense Tang Yao-ming (
The chaos in national security affairs, strategies and policies reflects the conflict between unification and independence ideologies. Individuals' views on Taiwan's relationships with China and the US are almost always colored by their views on independence.
If the military and intelligence personnel cannot understand what they are working toward, no wonder the public and Tai-wan's allies feel anxious. The US-Taiwan alliance is not a legally-binding, permanent agreement, so should Taiwan one day reunify with China, for example, the arms that the US has sold Taiwan could fall into Beijing's hands.
No wonder the US government is so concerned about which side Taiwan is taking. If Taiwan is forced to take sides between China and the US, every person in Taiwan, especially the politicians, must ask themselves this question: Which side can help preserve Taiwan's existing and future economic prosperity, as well as safeguard the country's current democratic way of life and maintain the respect for the rule of law and human rights? The answer is clear; China can do none of these things.
To resolve these problems of confidence, Taiwan must ad-dress three issues. First, it must resolve the identity crisis. If Taiwan continues to expend its time and strength on the unification-independence dispute, internal political unrest and economic chaos will follow.
Next, the government must use the recent NSB security leak as a rationale to reform the military intelligence system.
Finally, coordination between the Presidential Office, Executive Yuan, MND and the NSC needs to be strengthened to avoid surprising statements on major policies.
If President Chen Shui-bian (
Vincent Lin is the deputy editor-in-chief of the Taipei Times.
Monday was the 37th anniversary of former president Chiang Ching-kuo’s (蔣經國) death. Chiang — a son of former president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), who had implemented party-state rule and martial law in Taiwan — has a complicated legacy. Whether one looks at his time in power in a positive or negative light depends very much on who they are, and what their relationship with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is. Although toward the end of his life Chiang Ching-kuo lifted martial law and steered Taiwan onto the path of democratization, these changes were forced upon him by internal and external pressures,
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁) has caused havoc with his attempts to overturn the democratic and constitutional order in the legislature. If we look at this devolution from the context of a transition to democracy from authoritarianism in a culturally Chinese sense — that of zhonghua (中華) — then we are playing witness to a servile spirit from a millennia-old form of totalitarianism that is intent on damaging the nation’s hard-won democracy. This servile spirit is ingrained in Chinese culture. About a century ago, Chinese satirist and author Lu Xun (魯迅) saw through the servile nature of
In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.” Moreover, the two authors observe that those who denounce such legal threats to democracy are often “dismissed as exaggerating or
The National Development Council (NDC) on Wednesday last week launched a six-month “digital nomad visitor visa” program, the Central News Agency (CNA) reported on Monday. The new visa is for foreign nationals from Taiwan’s list of visa-exempt countries who meet financial eligibility criteria and provide proof of work contracts, but it is not clear how it differs from other visitor visas for nationals of those countries, CNA wrote. The NDC last year said that it hoped to attract 100,000 “digital nomads,” according to the report. Interest in working remotely from abroad has significantly increased in recent years following improvements in
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