In the past few days, two high-ranking individuals — Tajinder Pal Singh Bagga, spokesman for India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s New Delhi branch, and SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk — have expressed very different attitudes toward Taiwan and China, and the relationship between them.
Bagga hung a banner celebrating Taiwan’s Double Ten National Day outside the Chinese embassy in the Indian capital on Monday, while in an interview with the Financial Times on Friday, Musk said that cross-strait tensions could be resolved by making Taiwan a “special administrative zone” of China.
It is not the first time Bagga has shown support for Taiwan. In 2020, he placed 100 signs bearing its national flag and the words: “Taiwan Happy National Day October 10” around the Chinese embassy. His actions were no prank; there was a serious intent and message behind them. Nor was he alone among his fellow Indians in holding this sentiment. Indian Internet users posted messages saying: “Happy Taiwan National Day” and “India stands together with Taiwan.”
The Indian news media, too, is aware of the distinction between Taiwan and China. Media executives were enraged when the Chinese embassy in New Delhi in 2020 issued what was essentially a diktat telling the media to observe and respect India’s official “one China” principle. The embassy’s audacity and presumptuousness had the opposite of its intended effect, as India’s media are free and independent.
Nor does Bagga stand alone among his political peers in his wariness of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Jawaharlal Nehru, Indian prime minister from 1950 to 1964, wanted to show good faith to the CCP when he advocated for the People’s Republic of China to replace Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) regime as China’s sole representative at the UN, but his enthusiasm was not shared by Indian lawmakers, and his dictum that “India and China are brothers” was shown for what it was by the 1962 Sino-Indian war. More recent events, such as the 2017 Doklam crisis, tensions along the Line of Actual Control in India’s eastern Ladakh and the CCP’s attempts to conceal the beginnings of the COVID-19 pandemic, have only hardened Indian politicians’ negative attitudes toward the CCP.
Like his peers and compatriots, Bagga knows the CCP and is aware of the menace it represents.
Musk has his sights set elsewhere. He is smart, resourceful and capable, and yet what he said about Taiwan makes him come across as, if not unthinking, then remarkably callous.
It is arguable that his suggestion makes rational sense — in the coldest way conceivable — but at the same time it is out of touch with the boundaries in which it must be made — geopolitical, moral, legal, humane, realistic, compassionate — that one has to wonder where the idea originated, because it was not solely born of a reasonable attempt at finding a solution, and it is utterly devoid of regard for the future of the international world order.
It only makes sense if you believe that Musk is firmly in Beijing’s pocket. Musk’s Tesla operations produce high volumes of its electric vehicles in its Shanghai Gigafactory, and China represents a major market for the company. Meanwhile, the CCP’s modus operandi is luring in foreign investment and then turning the screws to extract favors.
Predictably well received by Chinese Ambassador to the US Qin Gang (秦剛) and roundly rejected by politicians in Taiwan, Musk’s suggestion certainly resonates with the CCP’s narrative. It remains to be seen which other ways the CCP might ask Musk to bend to keep his operations in China running smoothly. He might even find keeping Twitter, should he finally close the acquisition deal, a free and open platform for the exchange of ideas an impossible endeavor. The CCP has strong feelings against unfettered freedom of expression.
Monday was the 37th anniversary of former president Chiang Ching-kuo’s (蔣經國) death. Chiang — a son of former president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), who had implemented party-state rule and martial law in Taiwan — has a complicated legacy. Whether one looks at his time in power in a positive or negative light depends very much on who they are, and what their relationship with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is. Although toward the end of his life Chiang Ching-kuo lifted martial law and steered Taiwan onto the path of democratization, these changes were forced upon him by internal and external pressures,
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁) has caused havoc with his attempts to overturn the democratic and constitutional order in the legislature. If we look at this devolution from the context of a transition to democracy from authoritarianism in a culturally Chinese sense — that of zhonghua (中華) — then we are playing witness to a servile spirit from a millennia-old form of totalitarianism that is intent on damaging the nation’s hard-won democracy. This servile spirit is ingrained in Chinese culture. About a century ago, Chinese satirist and author Lu Xun (魯迅) saw through the servile nature of
In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.” Moreover, the two authors observe that those who denounce such legal threats to democracy are often “dismissed as exaggerating or
The National Development Council (NDC) on Wednesday last week launched a six-month “digital nomad visitor visa” program, the Central News Agency (CNA) reported on Monday. The new visa is for foreign nationals from Taiwan’s list of visa-exempt countries who meet financial eligibility criteria and provide proof of work contracts, but it is not clear how it differs from other visitor visas for nationals of those countries, CNA wrote. The NDC last year said that it hoped to attract 100,000 “digital nomads,” according to the report. Interest in working remotely from abroad has significantly increased in recent years following improvements in
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