Former Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull on Monday told a forum in Taipei that Taiwan’s viewpoint is more important for Asia-Pacific democracies than ever before. Giving attention to Taiwan’s perspective amid the turbulent international situation was likely a welcome message to the local audience. Taiwanese would be forgiven for wondering where their voice is among all the to-and-fro between the US, China and their respective allies on the geopolitical stage. War in the Taiwan Strait would, after all, be felt most directly and terribly in this country.
Turnbull also said that people need to “stand up for truth and call out lies for what they are.” That comment, made in the context of social media, is also applicable to international discourse driven by state actors, either explicitly in what Council on Geostrategy cofounder James Rogers has termed “discursive statecraft” — which he defines as “attempts by governments to articulate concepts, ideas and objects into new discourses to degrade existing political and ideological frameworks or generate entirely new ones” — or in the form of state-sponsored cyberattacks.
War in the Taiwan Strait could spiral out of control and become a global conflict. It is understandable that world leaders express concern in terms of the consequences for their own security.
During an interview with The Economist at the end of April, former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger said it is possible to “create a world order on the basis of rules that Europe, China and India could join [with the US], and that’s already a good slice of humanity. So if you look at the practicality of it, it can end well.” Kissinger followed up on that idea during an interview with the Wall Street Journal on Friday last week, in which he said he believed the issue of Taiwan should be left to time.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs pushed back, saying that Taiwan’s future is to be decided by Taiwanese through democratic means, and that it is the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) causing the tensions. There is not necessarily a contradiction between the ministry’s and Kissinger’s positions.
The CCP is certainly not sitting idly by. It had been employing discursive statecraft successfully for decades due to international compliance until the rise of “wolf warrior diplomacy,” the COVID-19 pandemic and its overreaction to then-US House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit in August last year. Since then, there has been a massive outpouring of international solidarity with Taiwan. Through individual, bilateral and multilateral mechanisms, more than 300 members of parliaments from 50 countries and the European Parliament have spoken out on behalf of Taiwan, the foreign ministry said. The US, too, has rallied allies to speak up for peace in the Strait and the Indo-Pacific region.
Time is changing the dynamics of China’s power, too. In addition to the geopolitical headwinds, it is facing economic and demographic challenges, with an aging society exacerbated by decades of the one-child policy, abandoned only in 2021. There is also the looming fallout from the massively over-leveraged real-estate sector and the internal dynamics of a distinctly innovation-suffocating centralized, communist, moralistic industrial policy, decided by a single individual to whom, so the reports say, few have the desire or the courage to show dissent or even bring bad news to.
Next year’s presidential and legislative elections will reveal much about what Taiwanese want. Opinion polls show that the majority would reject unification, but there is also a sense that many are spooked by the prospect of war, cracking under the weight of Beijing’s intimidation and the accumulated effect of its discursive statecraft.
US$18.278 billion is a simple dollar figure; one that’s illustrative of the first Trump administration’s defense commitment to Taiwan. But what does Donald Trump care for money? During President Trump’s first term, the US defense department approved gross sales of “defense articles and services” to Taiwan of over US$18 billion. In September, the US-Taiwan Business Council compared Trump’s figure to the other four presidential administrations since 1993: President Clinton approved a total of US$8.702 billion from 1993 through 2000. President George W. Bush approved US$15.614 billion in eight years. This total would have been significantly greater had Taiwan’s Kuomintang-controlled Legislative Yuan been cooperative. During
Former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) in recent days was the focus of the media due to his role in arranging a Chinese “student” group to visit Taiwan. While his team defends the visit as friendly, civilized and apolitical, the general impression is that it was a political stunt orchestrated as part of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) propaganda, as its members were mainly young communists or university graduates who speak of a future of a unified country. While Ma lived in Taiwan almost his entire life — except during his early childhood in Hong Kong and student years in the US —
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers on Monday unilaterally passed a preliminary review of proposed amendments to the Public Officers Election and Recall Act (公職人員選罷法) in just one minute, while Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) legislators, government officials and the media were locked out. The hasty and discourteous move — the doors of the Internal Administration Committee chamber were locked and sealed with plastic wrap before the preliminary review meeting began — was a great setback for Taiwan’s democracy. Without any legislative discussion or public witnesses, KMT Legislator Hsu Hsin-ying (徐欣瑩), the committee’s convener, began the meeting at 9am and announced passage of the
In response to a failure to understand the “good intentions” behind the use of the term “motherland,” a professor from China’s Fudan University recklessly claimed that Taiwan used to be a colony, so all it needs is a “good beating.” Such logic is risible. The Central Plains people in China were once colonized by the Mongolians, the Manchus and other foreign peoples — does that mean they also deserve a “good beating?” According to the professor, having been ruled by the Cheng Dynasty — named after its founder, Ming-loyalist Cheng Cheng-kung (鄭成功, also known as Koxinga) — as the Kingdom of Tungning,
RSS