Thu, Aug 04, 2022 page6

• Taiwanese Americans bemoan reporting

  • The Guardian
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  US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s arrival in Taiwan on Tuesday has inflamed US-China relations anew, with China’s military announcing live-fire exercises around the nation and Chinese media condemning the visit as “stupid, reckless and dangerous.”

  Meanwhile, US commentators across the ideological spectrum, from Thomas Friedman to Tucker Carlson to Code Pink, have called Pelosi’s trip a reckless provocation to war.

  However, to Taiwanese Americans who have spent a lifetime grappling with the nation’s geopolitical status, the hyperbolic tenor of the debate over Pelosi’s visit is indicative of how little most Americans know or care about the people of Taiwan.

  “All of the hoopla and yellow journalism blowing up, it really only serves to bolster the Chinese acts of aggression,” said SueAnn Shiah (夏叔安), a 30-year-old writer and theologian who has made a film about Taiwanese-American identity. “People come in with very little to no background knowledge, and often with a hyperbolic, fearmongering attitude. And then I’m hearing a lot of my people in Taiwan who have an extremely different approach to this situation.”

  Taiwanese and Taiwanese Americans have long debated whether the nation should formally declare independence, seek unification with China or maintain the “status quo.”

  It is a heated debate that occurs under the daily threat of Chinese aggression, which is something that Americans — including anti-war protesters — often do not understand, Shiah said.

  “I just want Americans to de-center themselves for a second,” she said. “I’m not going to pretend that the United States does not participate in imperialism, but in the specific case of Taiwan, the war is not being mongered by the United States. It’s acts of imperialist aggression from China. For those familiar with complexities of Taiwan situation, we understand US support as a deterrent to war.”

  Taiwan is kept out of international bodies, while just a handful of countries officially recognize the nation. That ambiguity can be confusing, even to Taiwanese Americans.

  “When I was growing up, I kept hearing that the US agrees with China’s position that Taiwan is a part of China,” said Jessica Drun, a nonresident fellow at the Global China Hub of the Atlantic Council, a pro-NATO think tank. “It wasn’t until I came to [Washington] DC that I was able to parse out the truth that fundamentally the US does not take a position on Taiwan’s status.”

  Drun warned that China would use Pelosi’s visit to “shift the blame of any escalation or actions they take against Taiwan on to the United States, for supposedly violating the [‘one China’ principle].”

  “It’s important for us to push back on that narrative — we’ve never agreed,” she said.

  Others hope the administration of US President Joe Biden might help create a new paradigm for the debate around Taiwan’s future.

  Albert Wu (吳孟軒), a Taiwanese-American historian based in Taipei, said that Pelosi’s visit is a “huge deal symbolically.”

  However, the framing of the story around US-China conflict repeats a common problem in Western stories about Taiwan: It erases Taiwan’s perspective, Wu said.

  “Even in the coverage of this Pelosi situation, which has brought so much attention to Taiwan, there’s just very little about what the actors in Taiwan are actually thinking,” he said. “The narrative is, still: You need the US to come in and save Taiwan.”

  Instead, he would like to see a rethinking of international relations where Taiwan has a say in its future.

  “If the Biden administration could say: ‘OK, let’s try to get all of us on talking terms,’ or even try to broker some sort of conversation, I feel like that would be so much more exciting to people in Taiwan,” he said.

  Still, Wu is wary of how supporters of Taiwanese independence have shown a willingness to ally with American politicians based on their hawkishness toward China.

  “I feel very uncomfortable that we have to rely on people like [former US secretary of state] Mike Pompeo for security, and they have no qualms about it,” Wu said. “They’re like: ‘Anybody who supports Taiwanese independence, or anybody who even is willing to toe the line and be a little bit more belligerent and in your face with China, that is an ally.’”
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