When the US House of Representatives passed much-needed (if troubled) healthcare legislation on Saturday, US President Barack Obama was offered a reminder of how relentlessly unromantic politics can be. His challenge was not to win over Republicans, but to stop Democrats from jumping ship. This, despite the Democratic Party gaining executive power with a clear mandate for reform.
Obama’s appeals to something more patriotic than “all politics is local” maneuvering only swayed one Republican; meanwhile, dozens of Democrats voted against the legislation, and for those who wavered, lobbying on points of self-interest as much as national interest was the order of the day.
Even so, the House of Representatives vote was a much-needed, if temporary, victory for the White House as Obama prepares to set out on a four-nation tour of Asia, including China and Japan. The Japanese leg of the trip is less problematic than it seems. The leftist government of Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama is quite predictably moving back to the center of reality of Japan-US relations; not even a fuss over US troop deployment in Okinawa amounts to as much as some observers fear.
It is in China that Obama’s mettle will be tested. North Korea’s weapons program may be the main game, but it is quite easy to overstate what can be achieved on this matter on this tour; the same applies to the other leading issues on the table.
For Taiwanese, the primary concern instead is what signals, if any, Obama will send on cross-strait relations. There is no reason why Obama and his aides would wish to make an impression with Beijing on Taiwanese affairs — other than to quickly acknowledge and deflect China’s perennial fears of a hardening of cross-strait policy. One thing that President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) time in office has delivered to Washington is a relative lull in the unification debate that gives it breathing space to do this, and so work cooperatively with China on practical matters.
It is therefore unrealistic to expect anything resembling Taiwan advocacy during Obama’s trip to China; if nothing else, this would be most undiplomatic on a first presidential tour of the US’ primary economic and military rival. The best Taiwan can hope for is a proxy discussion on human rights, though even this is likely to be low-key.
For the moment, Taiwanese can settle for a sotto voce approach by the US on cross-strait tensions. They do not expect gratuitous pronouncements of limitless military support and platitudes on shared values. They cannot expect the US to be a cheerleader when so much in the Taiwanese political environment is unstable and lacking in consensus.
What Taiwanese do expect is a US president who will not weaken himself and his country — and the region’s stability — by confusing diplomatic goodwill and compromise on key strategic points. This Chinese government remains canny, ambitious and ruthless; no sober observer should assume that its development as a world power entails reciprocal goodwill, least of all to a government whose power and wealth it covets but whose founding principles it despises.
Taiwanese are all too familiar with news of well-meaning envoys visiting China and leaving with a full stomach and a pat on the back for repeating slogans that the Chinese then use for domestic and international propaganda. In recent years the British and Australian governments have proven themselves to be particularly vulnerable to this. It is hoped that the Obama team, for its part, will resist the temptation of gaining “concessions” on unrelated issues by nodding along as Beijing inevitably introduces policies or slogans that injure Taiwanese interests.
In Asia, as with domestic politics, the key for Obama is to keep his allies on side and quietly let his rivals know who’s boss. However imperfect, that’s how things get done.
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