On Nov. 12, after a 12-month investigation, Bureau of Investigation agents arrested Chen Shu-chung (陳穗瓊), 55, a Military Intelligence Bureau official, and Tseng Chao-wen (曾昭文), 58, a former bureau worker. The pair allegedly stole classified information about Taiwanese intelligence agents working in China. This affair is but one in a long series of cases in which military officers and intelligence agents were recruited by Chinese intelligence authorities to subvert the government.
In February 2000, Director of the Investigation Bureau Wang Kuang-yu (
According to the government's statistics, there are some 260,000 Chinese citizens residing in Taiwan. Approximately a quarter of this total represents legal entrants who are businessmen, researchers and academics, and their relatives. About 190,000 are women married to Taiwanese. Another 6,117 are Chinese spouses of Taiwanese women. Each Chinese bride is allowed to bring parents aged 70 and over and children under age 12.
Based on 3,600 Chinese brides who are allowed to emigrate each year, the Mainland Affairs Council estimates that 1.5 million Chinese immigrants will be living in Taiwan 10 years from now.
While the bulk of such Chinese immigrants may be legal entrants, the influx of such a large numbers of Chinese citizens will inevitably alter the political balance between those who prefer to unify with the PRC and those who wish to preserve Taiwan's freedom.
Taiwan's open-door policy has also been abused. Many Chinese enter Taiwan through bogus marriages. In one case, a Taiwanese woman married a different Chinese every year and the Chinese husband disappeared after arrival in Taiwan. Some 15 percent of Chinese brides also disappear.
Then there is illegal smuggling of people, narcotics and weapons into Taiwan. National Security Council Secretary-General Kang Ning-hsiang (
A few years ago, a US sinologist estimated that China has deployed 6,000 special forces troopers inside Taiwan. It would be prudent for the Taipei government to assume this estimate may be understated in view of what the active opening of Taiwan has wrought in the last three years. The presence of a large number of People's Liberation Army (PLA) troops poses a serious threat to Taiwan's survival as a sovereign state, especially in the event of military conflict in the Taiwan Strait.
In July the US Department of Defense submitted its annual report to congress on China's military power. Section V of the report is an assessment of the security situation in the Strait. The report describes a Beijing doctrine of total warfare against Taiwan, integrating military, political, economic and psychological coercion strategies.
The PLA military strategy is to launch a multipronged blitzkrieg including information warfare, a naval blockade, an air and missile campaign, and a rapid attack with airborne and amphibious forces and special operations troops. The objective is to coerce Taipei into submission and present Washington with a fait accompli in a matter of days.
Whether this strategy of "rapid war, rapid resolution" can succeed depends on how vulnerable Taiwan's centers of gravity are to China's assault.
Mark Stokes, the Pentagon's chief of the Taiwan desk, has defined centers of gravity as critical nodes or points of failure which could paralyze the entire system. An attack on a critical node will impair all other critical nodes and compound destruction of morale, undermining Taiwan's national will to fight and pressuring the political leadership (the primary center of gravity) to capitulate. Once the leadership calculates that further resistance will not alter the outcome, but merely increase the people's suffering, it may surrender Taiwan's sovereignty on Beijing's terms.
According to Stokes' analysis, there are four secondary critical nodes: the defense and security apparatus, the economy, political opposition and international support. It may be instructive to examine how each critical node may be targeted.
The PLA missiles and bombers might focus initially on the country's command and control centers, communications and early warning facilities, as well as its air bases and air defense sites. Other targets may include missile sites, transportation nodes, electrical power grids, logistics centers, oil reserves and water reservoirs. But there are passive measures that Taiwan can adopt to lessen the damage from PLA assaults.
Beyond that, Taipei must deal with the potential problem of morale among military officers and men who were either born in China or born to Chinese parents. Some may be confused about "who and what they are fighting for." It will also be prudent to anticipate that some elements of the military could try to sabotage Taiwan's war effort, and to develop countermeasures to cope with such a contingency.
The attack on infrastructure mentioned above could make life intolerable for the civilian population and increase pressure on the political leadership to give up the struggle. This was an important factor in Serbia's capitulation in the Kosovo air campaign. The increasingly close economic relations between China and Taiwan also gives the former additional leverage to pressure the latter by, for example, freezing the assets of Taiwanese businesses that operate in China.
The political opposition includes the KMT and PFP, businessmen with investments in China and most of the electronic and print media, which favor unification with China. Beijing will manipulate these elements to force Taiwan's political leadership to submit to Beijing's demands. The Patriots Society and similar pan-blue extremists may resort to violence to undermine the government's ability to wage war.
Many current and former US officials and academics believe that the US cannot prevent the rise of China as a great power; that as China reforms its economy, political liberalization will inevitably follow and that an increasingly democratic China will not threaten the US' security interests. Taiwan is a barrier to the development of long-term peaceful US-China relations.
Multinational corporations with heavy investment in China also tend to parrot Beijing's propaganda and support China's expansionist ambitions. Beijing will mobilize such friends in the US and Japan to discourage third-party intervention as soon as it launches a full-scale invasion of Taiwan.
It is plausible that under simultaneous onslaughts on all four critical nodes, Taiwan's political leadership could lose heart and give up the struggle to defend the nation's hard-won freedom.
If the leadership refuses to yield, the PLA also has the option of paralyzing the key leaders through precision air strikes and ground assaults by its special operations forces.
The above scenario should make clear why the open-door policy is suicidal. Taiwan has too many enemy agents and troops already embedded deep inside its critical nodes.
And yet both the Mainland Affairs Council and the opposition parties favor further opening of the nation's gates through rapid implementation of direct flights between China and Taiwan, despite the misgivings of the Ministry of National Defense.
Beyond the enemies within, Taiwan's Trojan horse is made even more menacing on account of a nearly irrational complacency about the prospects of a PLA attack; a seeming lack of appreciation for the economic miracle and transformation of a one-party dictatorship into a democracy where the Taiwanese can live in freedom; and hence a feckless attitude toward the country's national defense.
Ultimately, the internal division and lack of a firm national will to defend freedom could doom the country's future.
It is high time the people of Taiwan take a close look at the gigantic Trojan horse inside the nation's gates and take steps to demolish it.
The presidential election next March is a good place to start.
Li Thian-hok is a freelance commentator in Pennsylvania.
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
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,
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus in the Legislative Yuan has made an internal decision to freeze NT$1.8 billion (US$54.7 million) of the indigenous submarine project’s NT$2 billion budget. This means that up to 90 percent of the budget cannot be utilized. It would only be accessible if the legislature agrees to lift the freeze sometime in the future. However, for Taiwan to construct its own submarines, it must rely on foreign support for several key pieces of equipment and technology. These foreign supporters would also be forced to endure significant pressure, infiltration and influence from Beijing. In other words,
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