US Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar’s official visit to Taiwan last week was a visible manifestation of deepening ties between the two countries. As one might expect, the visit enraged Beijing: China’s state-run media blasted the US for its “desperate playing of the ‘Taiwan card.’”
The bad news for Beijing is that, given the state of international affairs, Taiwan-US relations can only get better.
China is governed by a totalitarian regime that is hell-bent on annexing Taiwan, while the US is a friendly nation that shares Taiwan’s values of democracy and liberty. Even if the collective IQ of the Taiwanese public were to plummet by 50 points overnight, it is unlikely that Taiwan would opt to dance with the devil.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) appears not to have gotten the memo. During his regular “cross-strait relations and Taiwanese security” speech to the Rotary Club of Taipei East on Monday last week, Ma set a cat among the pigeons by ominously warning that if China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) were to invade Taiwan, the PLA would win a decisive victory in the opening battle.
Ma added that there would be no time for Taiwan to wait for the US military to ride to its rescue, and that in any case, the US military would not be sent.
By saying that the opening battle would also be the final battle, does Ma mean to say that Taiwan’s military is so incapable of resistance that it would fold like a cheap suit during the opening salvo?
Given Ma’s assessment of the situation, that the US would not send a task force to assist Taiwan, he is essentially saying that the nation is completely finished, doomed: Taiwan is toast.
How can it be that a former president thinks so little of his compatriots and is prepared to trash talk his country in this way?
As if slave-like fawning to his Beijing masters while in the presidency was not enough, Ma has continued to brown-nose the communists in his retirement. How can self-respecting Taiwanese not bridle at his behavior? It is woeful that Taiwanese are encumbered with such a contemptible ex-president.
Only a few days before the speech, when paying his respects to former president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) on Facebook, Ma wrote that the resolution issued by the National Unification Council under Lee’s leadership 28 years ago, on Aug. 1, 1992, laid the foundation for the “one China, different interpretations” that is part of the “1992 consensus.”
However, at the time, Lee and then-Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) chairman Huang Kun-huei (黃昆輝) kept repeating that there was no “consensus.” Even former MAC chairman Su Chi (蘇起), who created the deceit during his time as head of the council, in 2006 admitted that he had made it up.
To first pay tribute to Lee and then humiliate him by claiming that he did things that he explicitly denied is nothing short of despicable.
Several members of Ma’s family have US citizenship, so why is he so eager to force Taiwanese to become Chinese? If Ma is so eager to become Chinese, why not just move to China?
Chen Ching-kuen is an assistant professor.
Translated by Edward Jones
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