During former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe’s recent visit, President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) began by addressing Abe by the wrong title and then attempted to obstruct his meeting with Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文).
Having worked in confidential government posts related to diplomacy and protocol, I feel compelled to express my feelings about these breaches of diplomatic protocol by Ma’s Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government.
The DPP said that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs refused to arrange for Abe to meet with Tsai and when Abe attended a dinner at the DPP’s invitation, the ministry did not provide a car to take him there or a staff to accompany him. The former Japanese prime minister had to go to the dinner in a taxi.
According to my own experience, whenever the foreign ministry invites a guest, it provides a car and one or more staff members to accompany the guest and take notes. This was always the case whether the guest was a politician or an academic. To put it plainly, the person sent by the ministry to accompany a visitor acted as the visitor’s Taiwanese nanny. This person was charged with accompanying the guest on all of his or her engagements, keeping a record of what the guest said and did.
The former DPP government attached great importance to Taiwan’s relationships with the US and Japan. Only two other former Japanese prime ministers have visited Taiwan in the past 10 years — Yoshiro Mori, who came here in 2002 and 2006, and Taro Aso, who visited secretly in April this year. Given the difficult situation in which Taiwan finds itself diplomatically, Abe’s visit was a rare opportunity, so the government should have accorded the former prime minister its highest diplomatic courtesy.
The foreign ministry’s failure to cooperate when this important guest visited opposition lawmakers, forcing Abe to call a taxi to visit the lawmakers and others, was a serious breach of diplomatic protocol. The ministry has been trying hard to make excuses for this oversight. However, diplomatic work includes ensuring that diplomatic protocol is followed on every occasion. So it leads one to the conclusion that diplomats would not have allowed such a serious breach of protocol unless someone in high authority had instructed them to do so.
To make matters worse, when Ma met Abe, he twice addressed his visitor as, “Your Excellency, the deputy prime minister.” Could Ma, who prides himself on his global outlook and fluent English, really be unaware that Abe was Japan’s youngest post-World War II prime minister? It’s not really credible that he doesn’t know such elementary facts of international affairs as the names of former and serving Japanese prime ministers. The real reason for Ma’s slip-up is because he is cozying up to China, while distancing himself from the US and Japan.
I couldn’t help being reminded of Ma’s visit to Japan as KMT chairman in 2006 and his verbal and practical diplomatic faux pas on that occasion. At the time, Ma let it be known that he had met Abe, who was then-chief Cabinet secretary, but afterward the Chinese-language daily Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister newspaper) exposed this claim as untrue. In fact, Ma didn’t meet Abe at all.
Now, four years later, we have further confirmation that the earlier meeting never took place, otherwise how could Ma have failed to recognize the man who later served as Japanese prime minister?
Daniel Shen is a former senior staff member to the deputy secretary-general of the Office of the President.
TRANSLATED BY JULIAN CLEGG
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