Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) has just concluded a five-day visit to Italy, Monaco and France. At a time of all-out confrontation in the US-China trade dispute, Beijing is trying to get European nations on its side by tackling them one by one.
However, on Thursday last week, just as Xi arrived in Italy, the Council of the European Union discussed a program of 10 actions that make up a hardline strategy toward China.
A few days earlier, on March 12, the European Commission released a paper that adjusts the EU’s strategy toward China by calling it an “economic competitor” and a “systemic rival promoting alternative models of governance.”
On March 14, the European Parliament approved by an overwhelming majority a resolution that urges the EU and its 28 member states to adopt a sanctions regime similar to that embodied in the US’ Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act, which calls for sanctions against governments and politicians who violate human rights.
The act is named after Russian tax accountant Sergei Magnitsky, who died in pretrial detention in 2009.
The act and similar laws adopted by other nations impose sanctions on officials of specific countries who are known to be responsible for serious violations of human rights.
Possible sanctions include denying them visas, banning them from entering the legislating country, freezing their assets and prohibiting them from making property transactions.
The US led the way by adopting the act in 2016, after which Estonia, the UK, Canada, Lithuania and Latvia enacted similar legislation, while other countries, such as France and Australia, are working toward that goal.
Reacting to the European Parliament resolution, Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Wang Ding-yu (王定宇) said that these laws sanction powerful human rights violators and can strengthen countries’ national security.
He said that if the whole world joins hands to ensure that those guilty of human rights violations and corruption have nowhere to run, and to stop their assets from circulating, it would be helpful in strengthening their national security and human rights.
“This is a great chapter in the history of human civilization,” Wang said.
Meanwhile, DPP Legislator Lin Chun-hsien (林俊憲) said that the US and European nations have seen the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for what it is and realize that many Chinese officials have hidden large amounts of financial assets in Western countries.
Given this understanding, Lin said that the European Parliament resolution was clearly aimed at China.
In 2017, the government banned three CCP officials known to have been involved in suppressing the Falun Gong spiritual movement from entering Taiwan.
In September of that year, a team of Taiwanese lawyers representing Falun Gong submitted to the US Department of State and the US Congress a list of 40 CCP officials, including former Chinese president Jiang Zemin (江澤民) and Luo Gan (羅幹), former secretary of the CCP’s Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission, who they accused of oppressing Falun Gong.
Taiwan should join this united front alongside some of the world’s main democracies. It should consider drawing up a Magnitsky act, or maybe call it the “Liu Xiaobo (劉曉波) human rights accountability act” in memory of the late Chinese dissident and Nobel Peace Prize winner.
Li Dao-yong is director of the City South Culture and History Studio.
Translated by Julian Clegg
In their recent op-ed “Trump Should Rein In Taiwan” in Foreign Policy magazine, Christopher Chivvis and Stephen Wertheim argued that the US should pressure President William Lai (賴清德) to “tone it down” to de-escalate tensions in the Taiwan Strait — as if Taiwan’s words are more of a threat to peace than Beijing’s actions. It is an old argument dressed up in new concern: that Washington must rein in Taipei to avoid war. However, this narrative gets it backward. Taiwan is not the problem; China is. Calls for a so-called “grand bargain” with Beijing — where the US pressures Taiwan into concessions
The term “assassin’s mace” originates from Chinese folklore, describing a concealed weapon used by a weaker hero to defeat a stronger adversary with an unexpected strike. In more general military parlance, the concept refers to an asymmetric capability that targets a critical vulnerability of an adversary. China has found its modern equivalent of the assassin’s mace with its high-altitude electromagnetic pulse (HEMP) weapons, which are nuclear warheads detonated at a high altitude, emitting intense electromagnetic radiation capable of disabling and destroying electronics. An assassin’s mace weapon possesses two essential characteristics: strategic surprise and the ability to neutralize a core dependency.
Chinese President and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Chairman Xi Jinping (習近平) said in a politburo speech late last month that his party must protect the “bottom line” to prevent systemic threats. The tone of his address was grave, revealing deep anxieties about China’s current state of affairs. Essentially, what he worries most about is systemic threats to China’s normal development as a country. The US-China trade war has turned white hot: China’s export orders have plummeted, Chinese firms and enterprises are shutting up shop, and local debt risks are mounting daily, causing China’s economy to flag externally and hemorrhage internally. China’s
During the “426 rally” organized by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party under the slogan “fight green communism, resist dictatorship,” leaders from the two opposition parties framed it as a battle against an allegedly authoritarian administration led by President William Lai (賴清德). While criticism of the government can be a healthy expression of a vibrant, pluralistic society, and protests are quite common in Taiwan, the discourse of the 426 rally nonetheless betrayed troubling signs of collective amnesia. Specifically, the KMT, which imposed 38 years of martial law in Taiwan from 1949 to 1987, has never fully faced its
RSS