This week’s talks between Taipei and Beijing constitute a precedent and US policymakers should insist that China now work out its differences with Taiwan on a “government-to-government” basis, American Enterprise Institute (AEI) director of Asian studies Dan Blumenthal said.
“A key element of China’s Taiwan policy has been to isolate the island and get all countries to accept the Chinese position that Taiwan is not a country, but a province of China,” Blumenthal said in a new study.
However, now that Taiwan and China have conducted government-to-government talks, China has moved toward accepting Taiwan’s de facto independent status as a country with its own national government, Blumenthal said.
A former senior director for China and Taiwan at the US Department of Defense’s Office of International Security Affairs, Blumenthal said in his study that many widely held assumptions about Taiwan are faulty.
The first false assumption is that Taiwan and China are sure to unify at some point in the future, he said.
Far from it, Blumenthal said, Taiwan is “standing tall” as an independent democracy with an elected president, a legislature and a national military.
Nor will economics drive Taiwan into China’s arms, he added.
“As economic ties have expanded, Taiwanese feel an ever stronger sense of uniqueness,” Blumenthal said. “Close contact did not make the heart grow fonder.”
“The more contact the Taiwanese have with China, the more they feel different from the Chinese, including when it comes to the openness of their society and how modern and advanced Taiwan is compared with China,” Blumenthal said.
“The other issue is a generational shift as fewer Taiwanese feel a historical emotional attachment to China. Reunification is now only possible for Beijing if it chooses to start a war,” he added.
Taiwan is not dependent on China’s economy, Blumenthal said, adding that Taiwanese businesspeople are “arguably the most agile in Asia” who are quite capable of moving their investments to other countries such as Vietnam, Myanmar and Indonesia.
Another assumption that Blumenthal sought to dispel was that Taiwan would have the defense policy that Washington wants it to have.
“Actually, Taiwan will have the defense policy it wants,” he said. “If the US will not provide Taiwan with the defense capabilities it needs, it will likely develop more dangerous options [as it did in the 1980s].”
Lastly, Blumenthal said that it is a false assumption that the US would not act to help Taiwan.
“This may be the most dangerous assumption of all,” he said. “There is a sense of fatalism and defeatism combined with a notion that ‘unification is inevitable’ setting in among foreign and defense-policy observers in Washington and around the world.”
Some experts argue that Taiwan is indefensible and that the US will not risk its relations with China over Taiwan.
“But there is a credible argument that Washington gets into conflicts because potential adversaries underestimate US willingness to abide by its commitments,” he said.
Blumenthal concluded that if China started a war over Taiwan, all previous assumptions would be quickly dispatched, and fear, anxiety, emotion, a president’s calculation over vital interests and allied concern would set in.
“It would be a mistake for China in particular to read too much into seeming US complacency now,” he said. “If Taiwan is under coercive threat, all calculations change.”
The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday said it is fully aware of the situation following reports that the son of ousted Chinese politician Bo Xilai (薄熙來) has arrived in Taiwan and is to marry a Taiwanese. Local media reported that Bo Guagua (薄瓜瓜), son of the former member of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, is to marry the granddaughter of Luodong Poh-Ai Hospital founder Hsu Wen-cheng (許文政). The pair met when studying abroad and arranged to get married this year, with the wedding breakfast to be held at The One holiday resort in Hsinchu
The Taipei Zoo on Saturday said it would pursue legal action against a man who was filmed climbing over a railing to tease and feed spotted hyenas in their enclosure earlier that day. In videos uploaded to social media on Saturday, a man can be seen climbing over a protective railing and approaching a ledge above the zoo’s spotted hyena enclosure, before dropping unidentified objects down to two of the animals. The Taipei Zoo in a statement said the man’s actions were “extremely inappropriate and even illegal.” In addition to monitoring the hyenas’ health, the zoo would collect evidence provided by the public
‘SIGN OF DANGER’: Beijing has never directly named Taiwanese leaders before, so China is saying that its actions are aimed at the DPP, a foundation official said National Security Bureau (NSB) Director-General Tsai Ming-yen (蔡明彥) yesterday accused Beijing of spreading propaganda, saying that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) had singled out President William Lai (賴清德) in his meeting with US President Joe Biden when talking about those whose “true nature” seek Taiwanese independence. The Biden-Xi meeting took place on the sidelines of the APEC summit in Peru on Saturday. “If the US cares about maintaining peace across the Taiwan Strait, it is crucial that it sees clearly the true nature of Lai and the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in seeking Taiwanese independence, handles the Taiwan question with extra
A road safety advocacy group yesterday called for reforms to the driver licensing and retraining system after a pedestrian was killed and 15 other people were injured in a two-bus collision in Taipei. “Taiwan’s driver’s licenses are among the easiest to obtain in the world, and there is no mandatory retraining system for drivers,” Taiwan Vision Zero Alliance, a group pushing to reduce pedestrian fatalities, said in a news release. Under the regulations, people who have held a standard car driver’s license for two years and have completed a driver training course are eligible to take a test
RSS