A year that began with uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, tsunami-like flooding in Australia and massive mudslides in Brazil, shows no signs of easing up. From Christchurch’s pulverizing earthquake to Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi’s scorched-earth policy and the escalating disaster in Japan, the world is being rocked on a daily basis. Old certainties can no longer be relied upon.
What is clear is that new standards are now required — in disaster preparedness, in damage-proofing nuclear power stations, in accountability both on the part of government and private industry and in the public’s expectations of themselves. While it is not possible to guarantee against every possibility, much more can be done and the last thing that is needed is bland reassurance from governments, whether in Japan, Taiwan, the US, Egypt, China or elsewhere.
President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) on Thursday held what he said would be a series of daily National Security Council meetings in response to the situation in Japan and promised to think ahead and provide the public with vital information.
We must “be honest about what we know and what we don’t know,” he said.
Yet honesty is often the first thing eliminated when dealing with a crisis. After all — in the midst of the almost hourly litany of bad news coming out of Japan — the Tokyo Electric Power Co has continued to hedge on the extent of the damage to and danger from the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear complex.
While we might question why it took almost a full week for Ma to convene the security council — especially since he said the decision-making process should be fast and decisive — we can applaud his willingness to be proactive. We can also demand that he keep his word.
There have been calls this week for Taiwan’s three nuclear power plants to suspend operations. The Atomic Energy Council and Taiwan Power Co have responded by saying the plants could withstand earthquakes of a magnitude of 6.0 or 7.0. That might have been good enough before, but the Fukushima Dai-ichi complex was also built to withstand a maximum magnitude of 7.0 — even though the Kanto earthquake of 1923 was magnitude 8.3 and the 1995 Kobe quake was magnitude 7.2.
Old scenarios will no longer suffice. So what can be done to shore up our plants to withstand a magnitude 9.0 quake? When the council was asked if Japan’s crisis would prompt it to upgrade safety standards for Taiwan’s plants, the council’s minister said it was studying the possibility. While that may have been an honest answer, more study is not the solution.
From the 921 Earthquake to Typhoon Morakot, there have been calls for a national disaster preparedness agency instead of the ad-hoc emergency response task forces that are set up for each natural disaster. Yes, Japan is undergoing a multiple worst-case scenario, but that is exactly why ad-hoc task forces should be seen as obsolete. It is time to demand expertise — and then follow the advice.
We don’t have to look at Japan to see what can happen when expert advice goes unheeded. As author Germaine Greer wrote in the Guardian, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology said in June last year that La Nina would dump “buckets” on the country after 10 years of drought, and yet so many people were still surprised at the extent and savagery of the flooding that devastated large swathes of Queensland.
The message in the plethora of bad news is that we must expect the unexpected and prepare for the worst. It’s a message that too many elected officials and members of the public don’t want to hear; they are more comfortable with platitudes. However, platitudes don’t have any place in this new world of ours.
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
Delegation-level visits between the two countries have become an integral part of transformed relations between India and the US. Therefore, the visit by a bipartisan group of seven US lawmakers, led by US House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs Chairman Michael McCaul to India from June 16 to Thursday last week would have largely gone unnoticed in India and abroad. However, the US delegation’s four-day visit to India assumed huge importance this time, because of the meeting between the US lawmakers and the Dalai Lama. This in turn brings us to the focal question: How and to what extent