As the navy’s indigenous submarine program gathers pace, President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) on Tuesday attended a naming ceremony for the Ta Chiang (塔江艦), an upgraded production version of the navy’s Tuo Chiang-class missile corvette, at Lung Teh Shipbuilding’s shipyard in Yilan County’s Suao Township (蘇澳). The name Ta Chiang is rich in local symbolism and is a fitting designation to represent Taiwan’s spirit of national defense.
The first character of the ship’s name is taken from the Tawa River (塔瓦溪) in Taitung County, which runs through the ancestral hunting grounds of the Paiwan people, who are renowned for their tenacity in the face of adversity, as well as their bravery and skillfulness in battle. The connection to the Paiwan will be a source of inspiration for the vessel’s crew.
The character ta (塔) also means “tower” in Mandarin Chinese, which evokes an image of a towering fortress riding through the waves, whose comrades-in-arms are willing to lay down their lives to safeguard the Republic of China’s democracy and tenaciously defend the nation’s sovereignty.
When naming vessels in the past, the navy stuck to the convention of combining the name of an ancient Chinese general with a geographical location.
While there is nothing wrong with this method, since the territory that the navy is tasked with defending is limited to Taiwan proper, Penghu, Matsu, Kinmen and affiliated outlying islands, if all new vessels could be named after aspects of Taiwan’s unique Aboriginal culture or geographical features, not only would they be more representative of Taiwan, but they would also arouse in the hearts of sailors, from admirals to noncommissioned officers, an ironclad will to guard their homes and defend their country.
A good example of the synthesis of local culture and the military are the F-16 fighter jets stationed at Chiashan Air Base in Hualien County. The F-16’s tails are decorated with a sun motif to represent the Amis people’s god of war and the sun, Malataw.
Adopting the solar deity helps to narrow the divide between the military and local residents, while fostering a feeling of mutual appreciation between service personnel and civilians.
If new military equipment can continue to use names and emblems reflective of local Taiwanese culture, this might also have a positive effect on recruitment by making the military feel more familiar to civilians.
The US armed forces frequently adopt indigenous nomenclature for their equipment. Perhaps the most famous example of this is the Boeing AH-64 Apache helicopter, also operated by Taiwan’s military and which was named after the Native American Apache people.
Ray Song is a graduate of National Chung Cheng University’s Institute of Strategic and International Affairs.
Translated by Edward Jones
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