Make no mistake: China’s influence over Taiwan’s domestic affairs is growing, and quickly.
The modus operandi is all too familiar. Beijing gets wind of a proposed deal or event, cries foul and a government, company or charitable group that was about to complete a transaction of some sort with Taiwan is forced to renege on the deal.
This scenario has played out hundreds, if not thousands, of times in the six decades since Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) humiliated Nationalist regime decamped to Taiwan, forcing the Chinese Communist Party to declare Taiwan an “inalienable part of the Motherland.”
In the last 20 years or so as China’s economic and diplomatic clout has grown, the small number of countries prepared to ignore China’s threats and seal sensitive deals with Taiwan has diminished rapidly.
It has now reached the point where just one country — the US — is willing to suffer the consequences of Chinese saber-rattling by selling Taipei advanced weaponry. But these days, even in the face of well over 1,000 ballistic missiles and arguably the fastest modernizing military in history, Taiwan’s legitimate defense needs are forced to take a back seat as Washington places more value on maintaining cordial ties with authoritarians.
While Taiwan cannot be blamed for this trend — whether or not other countries are prepared to stare down Beijing’s threats is entirely their responsibility — Taipei is entirely responsible for the latest manifestation of this worrying phenomenon. The problem now is that this enduring international obstacle is beginning to rear its sinister head at home.
The risks of deepening ties with — and hence increased dependency on — China that came with the commencement of unofficial business links in the 1980s have, under the blinkered “China first” policy of the present government, begun to manifest themselves in new and more insidious ways.
The latest incident involves culture. The Kaohsiung City Government is considering pulling the documentary The 10 Conditions of Love about exiled Uighur activist Rebiya Kadeer from the Kaohsiung Film Festival after Chinese tourists supposedly canceled bookings en masse.
This is a confusing development, because this approach to the Uighur controversy is most inconsistent with Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chu’s (陳菊) embrace of the Dalai Lama last month.
Coupled with evidence that the central government refused foreign aid in the wake of Typhoon Morakot last month until after it consulted Beijing, as well as new Premier Wu Den-yih’s (吳敦義) recent meetings with influential Chinese political figures in Hong Kong before accepting his appointment, the question therefore emerges: Who is running Taiwan these days?
The relationship that Taiwan is forging with China and the Ma government’s indifference toward exercising this nation’s sovereignty mean that Taiwan is disappearing from the radar of international credibility faster than even skeptics could have imagined.
Each new deal that central and regional governments strike with Beijing resembles one of the strings that the Lilliputians used to tie down Gulliver: Every new thread, however innocuous in itself, makes it harder and harder for Taiwan to free itself.
That China has influence on the way other countries deal with Taiwan is one thing, but when domestic affairs, be they cultural, economic, political or diplomatic, have to be run past Beijing before proceeding, it’s time for the alarm bells to start ringing.
US aerospace company Boeing Co has in recent years been involved in numerous safety incidents, including crashes of its 737 Max airliners, which have caused widespread concern about the company’s safety record. It has recently come to light that titanium jet engine parts used by Boeing and its European competitor Airbus SE were sold with falsified documentation. The source of the titanium used in these parts has been traced back to an unknown Chinese company. It is clear that China is trying to sneak questionable titanium materials into the supply chain and use any ensuing problems as an opportunity to
It’s not every month that the US Department of State sends two deputy assistant secretary-level officials to Taiwan, together. Its rarer still that such senior State Department policy officers, once on the ground in Taipei, make a point of huddling with fellow diplomats from “like-minded” NATO, ANZUS and Japanese governments to coordinate their multilateral Taiwan policies. The State Department issued a press release on June 22 admitting that the two American “representatives” had “hosted consultations in Taipei” with their counterparts from the “Taiwan Ministry of Foreign Affairs.” The consultations were blandly dubbed the “US-Taiwan Working Group on International Organizations.” The State
The Chinese Supreme People’s Court and other government agencies released new legal guidelines criminalizing “Taiwan independence diehard separatists.” While mostly symbolic — the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has never had jurisdiction over Taiwan — Tamkang University Graduate Institute of China Studies associate professor Chang Wu-ueh (張五岳), an expert on cross-strait relations, said: “They aim to explain domestically how they are countering ‘Taiwan independence,’ they aim to declare internationally their claimed jurisdiction over Taiwan and they aim to deter Taiwanese.” Analysts do not know for sure why Beijing is propagating these guidelines now. Under Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), deciphering the
Many local news media last week reported that COVID-19 is back, citing doctors’ observations and the Centers for Disease Control’s (CDC) statistics. The CDC said that cases would peak this month and urged people to take preventive measures. Although COVID-19 has never been eliminated, it has become more manageable, and restrictions were dropped, enabling people to return to their normal way of life due to decreasing hospitalizations and deaths. In Taiwan, mandatory reporting of confirmed cases and home isolation ended in March last year, while the mask mandate at hospitals and healthcare facilities stopped in May. However, the CDC last week said the number