Early 2007 found me in Washington attending meetings with US officials and I asked a question concerning a rumor doing the rounds at the time: Is the US preparing to co-manage Taiwan with China? I was assured that it was not. From the way last month’s presidential election proceeded, and indeed from the result, it is quite evident that this is precisely what is happening, even if nobody actually cares to verbalize it. Clearly, the US and China have found themselves, in President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), a CEO to oversee the proceedings and they have already put their plan into action.
In the run-up to the elections, China was already openly and brazenly interfering in Taiwan’s affairs through a raft of measures. The US government, too, engaged in some rather suspicious and irregular activities several months prior to the election, actions that were unsettling and unnerving.
I came across an example of this when in Washington in July last year. I caught wind of a suggestion that China’s Taiwan Affairs Office (TAO) Director Wang Yi (王毅) had asked the US to grant Taiwan visa waiver status before the election as a way to help Ma secure a second term in office.
However, in the middle of December, just three weeks prior to the elections, the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) announced that Taiwan had been placed on the list of countries nominated for the US’ visa waiver program.
In another example, in the middle of September last year, a senior White House official told the Financial Times that concerns had been raised over Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) presidential candidate Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) willingness and ability to handle cross-strait relations, an opinion subsequently denied by the US Department of State. This kind of two-handed tactic, publicly embarrassing Taiwan’s opposition presidential candidate, who was in Washington at the time, was tantamount to interfering in the presidential election.
Third, just before the elections, several visits to Taiwan were arranged for high-level US officials, something quite irregular and not really seen in the past 10 years. The visitors included US Agency for International Development Administrator Rajiv Shah and US Deputy Secretary of Energy Daniel Poneman. During their stays they heaped praise on nuclear power in Taiwan, looking to all appearances to be endorsing Ma’s nuclear energy policies.
The US has always prioritized its own national interests in its foreign policy. However, interfering in the elections of other democratic countries is not only undemocratic, it also damages US interests. In the next four years, if the US really has designs on co-managing Taiwan with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the interests of “cross-strait peace,” it is gambling with the democratic values that Americans supposedly hold so dear. Not only that, but the stake in this gamble is Taiwan’s hard-won democracy and freedom. In future, it may not be a question of who is to be president, but more a question of who is to be the US-China CEO stationed in Taiwan.
I would ask the US government to use a little more wisdom and conviction in its dealings with Taiwan, given our good relationship in the past. Why enlist the CCP as partners in trying to beat us down? I would also ask those policymakers in the US behind these tactics to think long and hard about what they are doing here and to not forget that at least 40 percent of the electorate in Taiwan used their vote to protect democratic freedoms and reject the idea of compromise with malevolent powers.
Winston Dang is a former Environmental Protection Administration minister and foreign relations adviser to the Democratic Progressive Party.
Translated by Paul Cooper
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁) has caused havoc with his attempts to overturn the democratic and constitutional order in the legislature. If we look at this devolution from the context of a transition to democracy from authoritarianism in a culturally Chinese sense — that of zhonghua (中華) — then we are playing witness to a servile spirit from a millennia-old form of totalitarianism that is intent on damaging the nation’s hard-won democracy. This servile spirit is ingrained in Chinese culture. About a century ago, Chinese satirist and author Lu Xun (魯迅) saw through the servile nature of
In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.” Moreover, the two authors observe that those who denounce such legal threats to democracy are often “dismissed as exaggerating or
Monday was the 37th anniversary of former president Chiang Ching-kuo’s (蔣經國) death. Chiang — a son of former president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), who had implemented party-state rule and martial law in Taiwan — has a complicated legacy. Whether one looks at his time in power in a positive or negative light depends very much on who they are, and what their relationship with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is. Although toward the end of his life Chiang Ching-kuo lifted martial law and steered Taiwan onto the path of democratization, these changes were forced upon him by internal and external pressures,
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus in the Legislative Yuan has made an internal decision to freeze NT$1.8 billion (US$54.7 million) of the indigenous submarine project’s NT$2 billion budget. This means that up to 90 percent of the budget cannot be utilized. It would only be accessible if the legislature agrees to lift the freeze sometime in the future. However, for Taiwan to construct its own submarines, it must rely on foreign support for several key pieces of equipment and technology. These foreign supporters would also be forced to endure significant pressure, infiltration and influence from Beijing. In other words,
RSS