Two US media commentators on Saturday called on Washington to rethink its China strategy and urged Beijing to resolve its issues with Taipei by peaceful means.
In an opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times, Gary Schmitt and Dan Blumenthal said US Senate committees will soon vote on US President Barack Obama’s nominees for the heads of the US departments of state and defense, as well as the CIA.
They said a main focus of the committees’ decisions would be on security issues in the Middle East.
Quoting from a 2005 speech by former US deputy secretary of state Robert Zoellick, Schmitt and Blumenthal said the US will also have to examine the Obama administration’s “pivot” to the Asia-Pacific region and its China strategy.
“China’s choices about Taiwan will send an important message too ... It is important for China to resolve its differences with Taiwan peacefully,” they quoted Zoellick as saying.
Despite warming ties between Taiwan and China, Beijing’s military buildup has not relented, Schmitt and Blumenthal said.
“China has taken an even more aggressive posture toward its neighbors, with confrontations with Japan in the East China Sea, and Vietnam and the Philippines in the South China Sea,” they said.
They also questioned China’s lack of transparency in terms of its military power, its attempt to keep its currency undervalued to favor its exports, limitations on foreign access to its markets and the lack of efforts in the fight against intellectual property piracy and commercial cyberespionage.
This assessment of China’s behavior “reinforces the [US] administration’s rationale for upping America’s strategic game in the Asia-Pacific region,” the commentators said.
The US Senate should be asking how the national security team will realize this goal despite cuts in the defense budget, they added.
The assessment also indicates that “to the extent [that] engagement is pursued, it should be with an eye to what is mutually and concretely beneficial, not with the expectation that the process itself will lead to China’s transformation,” they said.
“The first step for the new secretaries of state and defense in getting it right must be to understand what engagement can and can’t do, and to realize it is unlikely that China will become a member in good standing of the liberal international order until its leaders have made the decision to become liberal at home,” they said.
Schmitt is the director of the Marilyn Ware Center for Securities Studies and Blumenthal the director of Asian Studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
WANG RELEASED: A police investigation showed that an organized crime group allegedly taught their clients how to pretend to be sick during medical exams Actor Darren Wang (王大陸) and 11 others were released on bail yesterday, after being questioned for allegedly dodging compulsory military service or forging documents to help others avoid serving. Wang, 33, was catapulted into stardom for his role in the coming-of-age film Our Times (我的少女時代). Lately, he has been focusing on developing his entertainment career in China. The New Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office last month began investigating an organized crime group that is allegedly helping men dodge compulsory military service using falsified documents. Police in New Taipei City Yonghe Precinct at the end of last month arrested the main suspect,
Eleven people, including actor Darren Wang (王大陸), were taken into custody today for questioning regarding the evasion of compulsory military service and document forgery, the New Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office said. Eight of the people, including Wang, are suspected of evading military service, while three are suspected of forging medical documents to assist them, the report said. They are all being questioned by police and would later be transferred to the prosecutors’ office for further investigation. Three men surnamed Lee (李), Chang (張) and Lin (林) are suspected of improperly assisting conscripts in changing their military classification from “stand-by
LITTORAL REGIMENTS: The US Marine Corps is transitioning to an ‘island hopping’ strategy to counterattack Beijing’s area denial strategy The US Marine Corps (USMC) has introduced new anti-drone systems to bolster air defense in the Pacific island chain amid growing Chinese military influence in the region, The Telegraph reported on Sunday. The new Marine Air Defense Integrated System (MADIS) Mk 1 is being developed to counter “the growing menace of unmanned aerial systems,” it cited the Marine Corps as saying. China has constructed a powerful defense mechanism in the Pacific Ocean west of the first island chain by deploying weapons such as rockets, submarines and anti-ship missiles — which is part of its anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) strategy against adversaries — the
Former Taiwan People’s Party chairman Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) may apply to visit home following the death of his father this morning, the Taipei Detention Center said. Ko’s father, Ko Cheng-fa (柯承發), passed away at 8:40am today at the Hsinchu branch of National Taiwan University Hospital. He was 94 years old. The center said Ko Wen-je was welcome to apply, but declined to say whether it had already received an application. The center also provides psychological counseling to people in detention as needed, it added, also declining to comment on Ko Wen-je’s mental state. Ko Wen-je is being held in detention as he awaits trial
RSS