The Bush administration has been sending contradictory messages to China in the last two years, damaging US strategic interests in East Asia. So Thursday's phone call between US President George W. Bush and his Chinese counterpart Hu Jintao (
In the call the US president stressed that Taiwan opposition leaders were fine but if any progress was to be made on achieving greater stability in the Taiwan Strait it could only be done by Beijing dealing directly with, as Scott McClellan put it, "the duly elected leaders in Taiwan, and that means President Chen [Shui-bian, (
Such sound advice comes as a breath of fresh air after the contradictory mess that has been US policy. We have commented before on how the US has concentrated on containing Chen and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) government and boosting the pan-blues -- to the extent of the State Department's last-minute intervention in last December's legislative election campaign against the DPP -- even though the pan-blues, as Greater China nationalists, have strategic interests exactly the opposite of the US. The passage of Beijing's "Anti-Secession" Law seems to have finally injected a little common sense into policy in Washington.
There is, however, still reason to wonder if the US is getting the picture. For taken in their most literal meaning, McClellan's words suggest that there might still be a a misperception of what the visits of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Lien Chan (
That misperception could be characterized as seeing the Lien and Soong visits as building up a momentum, or as part of a continuum that eventually will lead to Hu-Chen contacts. Yet that is exactly what China is not doing. The whole intention is to isolate Chen as much as possible, to throw a few bones at the Taiwanese to win their favor and to show Chen and the DPP as being impotent in achieving the thing that most people in the country want -- a better relationship with their major trading partner. It is part of China's strategy therefore, specifically not to reach out to Chen, because it wishes to paint him and his government as an irrelevancy.
Of course the US may be well aware of this and Bush's comments deliberately ingenuous, aiming to push China into a game it doesn't really want to play by appearing to not really understand what the game really is.
Certainly it is in the interests of the US to see tensions in the Taiwan Strait reduced by government-to-government talks, just as it is also vital to US interests that unification never takes place. The best possible outcome therefore would be a Taiwan permanently in green hands, and yet at least on "jaw, jaw" rather than "war, war" terms with China.
But how is this to come about? First,we would remind our American friends that while Taiwan is ready to sell wax apples to China and pet the pandas if they come, the "reunification, independence or status quo" surveys show no significant movement as a result of the opposition leaders' visits. Neither the overwhelming preference for the status quo, nor the poor support for unification either now or in the future, have significantly changed.
And secondly, we would also remind them that the arms budget has still not been passed and that this is the fault specifically of the KMT. We said a couple of weeks ago that it was time the US applied pressure to the KMT leadership -- visa and entry denials, and IRS audits of US business interests of KMT leading lights would be the weapons of choice. If the tactic to isolate Chen appears to be gaining too much ground, nothing would throw a spanner in the works as much as the KMT backing passage of the weapons procurement bill -- and a little arm-twisting might bring that about.
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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