US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo last week met with allies in Japan as part of a dialogue aimed at preventing China’s expansion in the South China and East China seas, as well to discuss the COVID-19 pandemic.
However, he scrapped his plans to go on to South Korea and Mongolia after it was announced on Oct. 2 that US President Donald Trump had tested positive for the virus, something that helped stir some resentment in the US against China.
Pompeo’s pitch for a united opposition against China makes it clear that the US understands the ever-present danger of communist China’s expansionism, and that there is still time to block its ambitions.
When then-US president Richard Nixon visited China in 1972, it was the first wrong step toward the modern world’s love affair with “red China”; the transmogrified Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is now leading a nation that has become the world’s favorite monster.
Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) has said that “during its 5,000 years of civilization, China has never had an ‘invasionist’ or expansionist gene in its body,” adding that it is obvious that Westerners do not understand Chinese civilization and culture.
Pompeo has said that there is a new “iron curtain,” and that if the free world does not work to change China, the free world will be changed by China.
In reality, China’s huge foreign spending, massive propaganda and Belt and Road Initiative is an expansionist attempt to grow its global influence.
Already five of the UN’s 15 specialized agencies are headed by a Chinese. Beijing’s ability to control the UN is growing by the day, as it is turns the world body into a “red megaphone” to spread its ideology in an effort to replace the US and redefine the principles of global governance.
In the UN Human Rights Council, it has frequently blocked other countries from speaking up about Taiwan, Hong Kong, Xinjiang and Tibet, as the CCP tries to overturn the universal values of democracy and freedom, revealing its evil mindset for all to see.
Even worse, communist China declares that national sovereignty means that a government should be allowed to reject minority views — an attempt to justify the CCP’s brainwashing in the name of internal security and use of “harmony and unity” as an excuse to ban anyone or anything that does not align with its values.
For example, under Hong Kong’s new National Security Law, anyone in the world could contravene the law by voicing their sympathy or support for Hong Kongers’ fight for democracy.
The CCP is basically trying to impose global self-censorship on freedom of expression.
Free and democratic states must realize that Marxism is once again spreading around the world, and that its main driver is the CCP.
Its emperor, Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) will ignite a crisis involving all humanity.
However, it can be foreseen that the CCP’s dictatorial tyranny will bring about the collapse of China in the same way that it brought about the collapse of the Soviet Union, leading to another period of division.
To confront the CCP’s expansionist ambition to dominate the world, the Democratic Progressive Party government must have the vision, courage and insight to recognize that it must join Pompeo in calling on anti-communist forces to speak up for the places and people that are being threatened and enslaved by communist China.
To do so is both an accusation against a China that has long suppressed and threatened Taiwan with military force and a way for Taiwan to survive.
It is time to turn Taiwan into the anti-communist fortress that Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) wanted, which would also highlight the insignificance of all the boot-licking pro-China entertainers, academics and retired generals — and even the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT).
Chen Ching-kuen is an assistant professor.
Translated by Perry Svensson
Because much of what former US president Donald Trump says is unhinged and histrionic, it is tempting to dismiss all of it as bunk. Yet the potential future president has a populist knack for sounding alarums that resonate with the zeitgeist — for example, with growing anxiety about World War III and nuclear Armageddon. “We’re a failing nation,” Trump ranted during his US presidential debate against US Vice President Kamala Harris in one particularly meandering answer (the one that also recycled urban myths about immigrants eating cats). “And what, what’s going on here, you’re going to end up in World War
Earlier this month in Newsweek, President William Lai (賴清德) challenged the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to retake the territories lost to Russia in the 19th century rather than invade Taiwan. He stated: “If it is for the sake of territorial integrity, why doesn’t [the PRC] take back the lands occupied by Russia that were signed over in the treaty of Aigun?” This was a brilliant political move to finally state openly what many Chinese in both China and Taiwan have long been thinking about the lost territories in the Russian far east: The Russian far east should be “theirs.” Granted, Lai issued
On Tuesday, President William Lai (賴清德) met with a delegation from the Hoover Institution, a think tank based at Stanford University in California, to discuss strengthening US-Taiwan relations and enhancing peace and stability in the region. The delegation was led by James Ellis Jr, co-chair of the institution’s Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region project and former commander of the US Strategic Command. It also included former Australian minister for foreign affairs Marise Payne, influential US academics and other former policymakers. Think tank diplomacy is an important component of Taiwan’s efforts to maintain high-level dialogue with other nations with which it does
On Sept. 2, Elbridge Colby, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development, wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal called “The US and Taiwan Must Change Course” that defends his position that the US and Taiwan are not doing enough to deter the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from taking Taiwan. Colby is correct, of course: the US and Taiwan need to do a lot more or the PRC will invade Taiwan like Russia did against Ukraine. The US and Taiwan have failed to prepare properly to deter war. The blame must fall on politicians and policymakers