China is using “all means at its disposal” to obstruct US officials attempting to visit Taiwan, FBI Director Christopher Wray said on Tuesday last week. Beijing is using “bribery, blackmail and covert deals,” among other sophisticated methods, to prevent visits that would “appear to legitimize Taiwanese independence from China,” Wray said. China imposes its will on US officials with its leverage over their constituents, who hope to gain access to the Chinese market, he added.
This is more worrisome for the US than Taiwan, as it speaks to China’s influence over US politics. However, some US politicians are clearly beyond Beijing’s reach, such as US senators Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz — both have consistently called on US President Donald Trump to take a tougher stance on China. Beijing earlier this week said it would impose sanctions on Rubio and Cruz, a move which international media have called “symbolic,” since neither of the politicians are likely to be affected by it in any meaningful way.
“The Communist Party of #China has banned me from entering the country. I guess they don’t like me?” Rubio tweeted, seemingly to mock the sanctions.
“Bummer. I was going to take my family to Beijing for summer vacation, right after visiting Tehran,” Cruz tweeted.
An opinion piece published on Wednesday last week in the online magazine The Diplomat said that the US and China are already in a “new cold war.” This cold war, like that between the US and the Soviet Union from 1947 to 1991, is a contest for supremacy between the world’s most powerful states, and a struggle over values and power, researcher Alan Dupont wrote. This struggle is likely to continue for decades and result in a “second bifurcation of the world,” he wrote.
Both countries want to avoid war, and to that end they should work together. However, given the evident threat that China poses to democracy and its demonstrated intent to interfere in other countries’ politics, it would be prudent for the US to decouple from China as much as possible. It might be possible for the US government to use legislation to prohibit cooperation between politicians and constituents that have vested interests in China, or to impose further sanctions or heavier tariffs on China.
It has already restricted imports and exports of certain technological products from and to China out of information and national security concerns. However, greater economic decoupling from China would necessitate the relocation of supply chains — which Trump has already called for.
Regardless of how far the US’ decoupling from China goes, Taiwanese officials should seek to maintain close ties with friendly US politicians, like Rubio, Cruz and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. If possible, Taipei and Washington could coordinate efforts to identify politicians who have been compromised by Chinese agents, in Taiwan and in the US.
Taiwan could also take the proactive approach of arranging visits to the US by its own officials, rather than waiting for US politicians to visit Taiwan. This would be within the scope of the US’ Taiwan Travel Act, and would be equally effective in asserting Taiwan’s independence from China. Such visits would be best left unannounced, to prevent Chinese attempts at stopping them and any trouble they might cause for the US officials involved. Interactions could also take place by teleconferencing and made public afterward.
China acts to influence not only politicians in the US, but also those who are close to them, so that they might “act on China’s behalf as middlemen to influence the official,” Wray said. The US, Taiwan and like-minded allies must always remain a step ahead of Chinese agents, monitoring the Chinese Communist Party in the same manner that intelligence agencies would monitor an organized crime syndicate.
Chinese agents often target Taiwanese officials who are motivated by financial gain rather than ideology, while people who are found guilty of spying face lenient punishments in Taiwan, a researcher said on Tuesday. While the law says that foreign agents can be sentenced to death, people who are convicted of spying for Beijing often serve less than nine months in prison because Taiwan does not formally recognize China as a foreign nation, Institute for National Defense and Security Research fellow Su Tzu-yun (蘇紫雲) said. Many officials and military personnel sell information to China believing it to be of little value, unaware that
Before 1945, the most widely spoken language in Taiwan was Tai-gi (also known as Taiwanese, Taiwanese Hokkien or Hoklo). However, due to almost a century of language repression policies, many Taiwanese believe that Tai-gi is at risk of disappearing. To understand this crisis, I interviewed academics and activists about Taiwan’s history of language repression, the major challenges of revitalizing Tai-gi and their policy recommendations. Although Taiwanese were pressured to speak Japanese when Taiwan became a Japanese colony in 1895, most managed to keep their heritage languages alive in their homes. However, starting in 1949, when the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) enacted martial law
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The central bank and the US Department of the Treasury on Friday issued a joint statement that both sides agreed to avoid currency manipulation and the use of exchange rates to gain a competitive advantage, and would only intervene in foreign-exchange markets to combat excess volatility and disorderly movements. The central bank also agreed to disclose its foreign-exchange intervention amounts quarterly rather than every six months, starting from next month. It emphasized that the joint statement is unrelated to tariff negotiations between Taipei and Washington, and that the US never requested the appreciation of the New Taiwan dollar during the
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