When Taiwanese officials signed up to take part in next year’s Shanghai World Expo, there was always the probability that the Chinese would use Taipei’s participation to promote Taiwan as Chinese territory.
After all, this is the distorted view of reality that the Chinese government has relentlessly tried to impose on people in every corner of the globe over the last few decades.
So when officials discovered this week that, contrary to the contract signed by the two sides, Expo organizers had included Taiwan in the China Pavilion on their Web site, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise.
Nevertheless, protests were made, and although the organizers made hasty alterations to the Chinese Web pages (the English Web page still has Taiwan in the Chinese Pavilion), it is hard to believe this will be the last attempt to promote Taiwan as part of China during the event.
Although this would seem like a trivial matter to most people outside Taiwan, it is just the latest example of China’s long history of paying lip service to agreements it has signed.
Another recent example would be the Chinese government’s reneging on its commitment to provide uncensored Internet access to journalists during the Beijing Olympics.
Ever since its proclamation in 1949, the People’s Republic of China has made a habit of ignoring the terms of pacts and agreements it has forged.
The Seventeen Point agreement for the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet guaranteeing religious freedom and autonomy for Tibetans signed in 1951 is one of the earliest instances of this behavior.
In 1998, China signed the UN International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Yet just this week Chinese police charged dissident Liu Xiaobo (劉曉波) with subverting state power. His crime? Publishing a document calling for democratic reform, a goal fully in line with the articles contained in the covenant.
More recently, Taiwan and China have signed a number of cross-strait agreements on food safety and fighting crime, for example, yet Taiwan has seen little or no action from Beijing on repatriation of wanted white-collar criminals or compensation for last year’s exports of poisoned milk powder.
Time and again China has demonstrated that it cannot be trusted, yet the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government ignores this and plows ahead, signing ever more agreements.
That China cannot be counted on to implement such agreements in full, or may even renege on them completely, bodes ill for Taiwan’s future as the present government becomes more entwined with Beijing.
Still, there are those in the government that want to go even further, talking of military confidence-building measures, political talks and even a peace agreement.
These people are stretching the boundaries of credibility if they believe Beijing can be trusted to stick to the terms of important agreements, especially on a subject as sensitive as Taiwan.
The probability is even higher that, as in the case of the Shanghai Expo, the inclusion of Taiwan under China will have serious implications for this nation.
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan. In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new
If you had a vision of the future where China did not dominate the global car industry, you can kiss those dreams goodbye. That is because US President Donald Trump’s promised 25 percent tariff on auto imports takes an ax to the only bits of the emerging electric vehicle (EV) supply chain that are not already dominated by Beijing. The biggest losers when the levies take effect this week would be Japan and South Korea. They account for one-third of the cars imported into the US, and as much as two-thirds of those imported from outside North America. (Mexico and Canada, while
I have heard people equate the government’s stance on resisting forced unification with China or the conditional reinstatement of the military court system with the rise of the Nazis before World War II. The comparison is absurd. There is no meaningful parallel between the government and Nazi Germany, nor does such a mindset exist within the general public in Taiwan. It is important to remember that the German public bore some responsibility for the horrors of the Holocaust. Post-World War II Germany’s transitional justice efforts were rooted in a national reckoning and introspection. Many Jews were sent to concentration camps not