The Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama was expected to arrive last night and visit southern Taiwan to bring comfort to the victims of Typhoon Morakot.
Despite the fact the Presidential Office indicated on Friday that he would not meet President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) during his visit, the Dalai Lama’s arrival is good news.
Very few people alive today could bring as much spiritual comfort to the victims of Morakot as the Dalai Lama. Southern Taiwanese would undoubtedly be uplifted by the presence of a man who stands for universal values of humanity and compassion. In fact, he would bring to the people what their president, who remained aloof and distant throughout the disaster, failed miserably to provide during those extraordinarily trying times.
Taiwan has long been a friend of the Dalai Lama and Tibetans; this is an occasion for the spiritual leader to reciprocate.
By granting him permission to visit, Taiwanese authorities have demonstrated that they remain willing — at least to a certain extent — to stand up to China. That willingness, however, could very well be the result of widespread popular dissatisfaction at its handling of Morakot.
In fact, approval levels for Ma and his Cabinet have tanked to such an extent that this time around they may have been in no position to turn the Dalai Lama down.
Furthermore, in allowing the visit, the Ma administration could score some political points domestically — something for which it is currently desperate.
Given the focus in political science circles on human agency in political conflict, external factors — developments that are unexpected and not part of the known variables (for example leadership, balance of power, allies, etc) but can have a dramatic impact on how conflict develops — are often overlooked. One such external factor is nature.
Since Ma came to office in May last year, the direction of the protracted political conflict in the Taiwan Strait changed substantially and, according to many, shifted in Beijing’s favor, with cultural and economic integration bringing about inevitable political adjustments (such as closer Sino-Taiwanese ties and a distancing of Tokyo).
At the height of this rapprochement, Taipei did everything in its power to keep things on track — even, as we saw, denying a visit by the Dalai Lama last year because it would risk creating problems with Beijing.
Now, however, the blow that Typhoon Morakot has dealt the Ma administration, which is no longer in a position to ignore popular discontent as it forges ahead with its cross-strait policies, is forcing the government to pay more attention to domestic politics.
The cost of denying a visit by the Dalai Lama now would have been far greater than it was back in December. An offshoot of this is that Taipei is being forced to make a policy decision that it knows will anger Beijing, which accuses the Dalai Lama of being a “splittist” and seeking to “break China apart.”
The ramification of this visit is that we will likely see the first crisis in cross-strait relations since the Beijing-friendly Ma came to office: Expect to see accusations from across the Strait of Ma siding with a “splittist,” or of breaking his promise to abide by the “one China” principle.
Attendant to this will be a hardening of positions, with both sides moving toward the political center — in other words, toward the “status quo” of old.
For Taiwanese independence, this is an immensely positive development, despite the great human cost that gave rise to it.
J. Michael Cole is a writer based in Taipei.
For Xi Jinping (習近平) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the military conquest of Taiwan is an absolute requirement for the CCP’s much more fantastic ambition: control over our solar system. Controlling Taiwan will allow the CCP to dominate the First Island Chain and to better neutralize the Philippines, decreasing the threat to the most important People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Strategic Support Force (SSF) space base, the Wenchang Satellite Launch Center on Hainan Island. Satellite and manned space launches from the Jiuquan and Xichang Satellite Launch Centers regularly pass close to Taiwan, which is also a very serious threat to the PLA,
Taiwan is beautiful — no doubt about it. In Taipei, the streets are clean, the skyline is gorgeous and the subway is world-class. The coastline is easily accessible and mountains can be seen in the distance. The people are hardworking, successful and busy. Every luxury known to humankind is available and people live on their smartphones. As an American visiting for the first time, here are some things I learned about the country. First, people from Taiwan and America love freedom and democracy and have for many years. When we defeated Japan in 1945, Taiwan was freed from Japanese rule. In
The ultimate end of a situation in which communists are in charge of a capitalist economy is economic depression, with China’s economic woes the prime example. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime has suspended monthly reports on youth unemployment, which had previously been at a record high, going beyond 20 percent and rising. It is often joked about in academic circles that when a national laboratory has made a great discovery, the institution will quickly call a news conference to announce it to the world, but when the research has been a total failure, the institution will keep it under wraps. The
Taiwan’s first indigenous defense submarine prototype, the Hai Kun (SS-711), is to be launched tomorrow and undergo underwater testing next month. It is a major breakthrough in upgrading the nation’s self-defense capabilities, and would make it more difficult for China to blockade Taiwan. Facing Beijing’s escalating military threats and ambitions of expanding across the Taiwan Strait, a domestically developed submarine was first proposed in the 1990s under then-president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝). The Indigenous Defense Submarine (IDS) program was formally initiated in 2016, as President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) took office, with the aim of creating a fleet of eight domestically developed submarines. The
RSS