On Tuesday, Prague Mayor Zdenek Hrib expressed his support for Taiwan on Twitter amid an outbreak of COVID-19 in the nation. In a reference clearly targeted at the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Hrib wrote: “I am appalled that politics is obstructing the delivery of vaccines to Taiwan. Prague supports Taiwan and our sister city Taipei.” Hrib is known to be friendly toward Taiwan, as are some other Czech politicians, including Czech Senate President Milos Vystrcil, who declared “I am a Taiwanese” in the Legislative Yuan in Taipei on Sept. 1 last year.
For that, he was threatened by Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅), and even though Wang, at the time visiting Europe, was subsequently asked to avoid such behavior, there was little pushback from European leaders.
On Wednesday last week, Minister of Foreign Affairs Joseph Wu (吳釗燮) attended a forum organized by the European Values Center for Security Policy in Prague, prompting a complaint from the Chinese embassy in Prague. Czech lawmaker Jakub Janda, the center’s executive director, responded curtly to the complaint on Twitter: “We do not care about your opinion on our event, you will not dictate who our friends & guest are. Taiwan is our ally.”
These are small indications that the worm is turning. If politicians, such as Taiwan’s friends in Prague, are showing their growing distaste for the CCP’s bullying and domineering ways, then so, at long last, are those on the bigger stage of major international forums such as the G7 summit that concluded on Sunday. In the summit’s joint communique, the US and European participants delivered a historic rebuke of China and — significantly — mentioned Taiwan, the first time G7 leaders have done so.
Taiwan’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the importance of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co in international supply chains, exacerbated by awareness of the need to reorganize and protect them, have contributed to raising the nation’s profile on the global stage.
However, to a large degree, it is the CCP’s threatening behavior and its “wolf warrior diplomacy” that have placed such intense scrutiny on Taiwan as an exemplar of democratic values, and the importance of its geopolitical and technological strategic value for an international community increasingly concerned over China’s rise.
Taiwan has long known the CCP to be a wolf in sheep’s clothing, but Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) has allowed the facade to slip, revealing its true nature to the rest of the world. Xi’s recent urging of officials to soften the party’s image and make it more “trustworthy, lovable and respectable” are remarkable in how blind they are to the degree to which trust in the CCP has deteriorated. If the wolf attempts to drape the wool back over its shoulders, it will look foolish. The world knows what lies beneath.
Prior to the pandemic, Xi was making considerable headway in portraying China and its proposed China-centric international world order as an alternative to the US-led order to which the major European democracies adhered. Especially with former US president Donald Trump pulling out of international alliances, Xi was laying the foundations to depict China as a responsible member of the international community capable of assuming a leading role on issues such as multilateral cooperation, financial stability and global warming. The G7 joint communique signals that this attempt is dead in the water.
It would be naive to think that all was rosy within the EU, and in its relationship with the US, as the bloc is unsure of the US’ ability to continue being a stable and reliable ally, following the stress tests placed on that relationship by Trump’s isolationism. However, the CCP is the fresh mortar holding the shaky edifice together: Xi has given them a common cause.
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