After winning re-election, US President George W. Bush has started reshuffling his administration. Earlier this week, he nominated National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice to replace Secretary of State Colin Powell, who is held in high regard internationally but has proved incompatible with other team members due to his mild style. It is generally believed that, under Rice's leadership, the new decision-making team will reshuffle the State Department to eliminate opposition and carry out Bush's hawkish policies.
At the moment, Rice should review the State Department's China policy and handle multilateral relations in East Asia with caution. Moreover, she should adjust the methods employed by Powell, who has made excessive concessions to China over the past six months, and resume the global strategic arrangement adopted at the beginning of Bush's first term.
When Bush came to power in 2000, China was defined as a strategic competitor. Washington was aware that Beijing was developing its global military arrangements to control more important energy resources, seriously threatening the US' advantage in dominating the world's energy security. China also repeatedly tested the US' bottom line with its military actions. As a result, the Bush administration made cooperation with Japan the core of its East Asia policy, expanding the US-Japan Security Treaty to the protection of neighboring countries. This led to an improvement in Taiwan's position. In its early stages, this policy effectively maintained the balance in the East Asian region, so that Washington would not favor either side in the China-US-Japan and Taiwan-China-US relationships.
But the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks changed the Bush administration's global strategic thinking. For the sake of US homeland security and in order to carry out a global terrorist hunt, the US worked hard to gain Beijing's support. This caused the US' East Asia strategy to gradually lose its footing, and Beijing's new leadership took advantage of the change to marginalize Taiwan's position in US policy.
While the Bush team was occupied with putting together a winning campaign this year, the State Department seemed to go its own way, frequently offering goodwill gestures to China and North Korea and even expressing opinions concerning the China-Taiwan relationship that went beyond the administration's bottom line by calling for peaceful cross-strait "unification" and saying that Taiwan was not a sovereign state.
Increased opposition to the arms procurement budget, the louder voices of pro-Beijing unification figures in Taiwan and the recent appearance of a Chinese submarine off the coast of Japan are disruptive to the regional stability which Bush sought to create when he first took office. Taiwan, Japan and other countries in the region have become concerned about the deteriorating state of stability.
An important goal for Bush in reshuffling his administration would be to resolve the long-standing battle between the State Department, White House and Pentagon. More importantly, Bush needs to redirect the US' policy in Asia, where it seems to have lost its direction to such an extent that it was hurting its allies in order to make goodwill gestures to its strategic competitor.
The main forum for the US to re-establish order in East Asia will be on the sidelines of the APEC summit, where Bush will have the opportunity of speaking individually with many Asian leaders. We hope that Bush will make the best use of this opportunity to warn its competitor while re-emphasizing its commitments to allies like Japan and Taiwan.
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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