On visiting the White House
On Wednesday last week, the Financial Times published an article titled “Washington press Taiwan presidential frontrunner on White House comments,” written by Demetri Sevastopulo in Washington and Kathrin Hille in Taipei. The article raised an interesting question: Who exactly is the person in Washington pressing a Taiwan presidential candidate on his White House comments?
“Top Taiwanese officials are not allowed to make official visits to Washington, as part of the equation that has guided US policy on Beijing and Taipei since 1979,” the article said.
However, according to US Public Law No. 115-135, also known as the Taiwan Travel Act, to encourage visits between the US and Taiwan that the US Senate and House of Representatives unanimously passed, senior US officials are allowed to travel to Taiwan and vice versa.
On April 26, South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol and first lady Kim Keon-hee visited the White House, and on May 18, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida visited the White House, too. This was exciting news in Taiwan, encouraging Taiwanese to work more closely with the US. It is something that Japan and South Korea can, and Taiwan should be able to do.
Taiwan is an important trade partner of the US. On June 1, Washington signed a trade agreement with Taipei. The two governments said that the US-Taiwan Initiative on 21st-Century Trade would strengthen commercial relations by improving customs, investment and other regulations. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co, the world’s largest contract chip manufacturer, is also helping the US build a massive US$40 billion factory in Arizona.
As a free and vibrant economy, Taiwan is a democratic success story. It is the eighth-largest economy in Asia and the 20th-largest in the world by purchasing power parity, with the IMF classifying Taiwan as an advanced economy and the World Bank counting it among high-income economies.
Dennis Wilder was well known in Taiwan as the former US National Security Council senior director for Asian affairs. On Aug. 30, 2007, Wilder said: “Taiwan, or the Republic of China, is not at this point a state in the international community. The position of the United States government is that the ROC, Republic of China, is an issue undecided, and it has been left undecided, as you know, for many, many years.”
These days he has been quoted as saying the US administration is very anxious about Lai. Why?
According to the San Francisco Peace Treaty, the US was assigned as the principal occupying power of “Formosa and the Pescadores.” Of course, working closely with the White House is the No. 1 job of Taiwan’s elected president and Taiwanese expect that he or she would have a chance to visit the White House.
It is incorrect to say that Taiwan today is the endgame of the Chinese Civil War, the conflict between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). Historically, it is the unfinished business of the US in the West Pacific after World War II.
As Sevastopulo and Hille raised the question of the Taiwanese presidential candidate’s comment about visiting the White House, does it mean that Taiwan should head for Zhongnanhai in Beijing instead of the White House in Washington?
Next year would mark four centuries since Dutch Formosa was established in 1624. As a Taiwanese, I strongly hope that Taiwan’s elected president would one day be able to visit the White House.
John Hsieh
Hayward, California
Hoping for a typhoon day
As Typhoon Doksuri approaches Taiwan, it could be the first typhoon to hit the nation in three years. Whether there would be a typhoon holiday is another hotly debated topic.
The regulation for typhoon holidays is based on Article 3 of Operation Regulations on the Suspension of Offices and Classes in Times of Natural Disasters (天然災害停止上班及上課作業辦法), in which natural disasters do not only include typhoons, but also floods, earthquakes, mudslides among others. The point is: Should people be wishing for natural disasters to strike so that they could get a day off work or class?
Those who are secretly wishing for a day off might not necessarily wish for catastrophic damage. The typhoon holiday that they hope happens when the weather forecast predicts torrential rain and strong winds, but in reality little rain and wind occurs.
This kind of mentality could have been spawned by Taiwan’s long working hours, with employees hoping to “gain” an extra day off aside from national holidays and weekends.
However, disasters are often unpredictable and could bring devastating consequences. To wish for a holiday without suffering damage is a thing too good to be true. Rather than keeping our fingers crossed for a holiday, we should be putting efforts into making preparations for the typhoon to keep potential damages to a minimum.
Tseng Heng-chih
Taipei
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan. In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new
If you had a vision of the future where China did not dominate the global car industry, you can kiss those dreams goodbye. That is because US President Donald Trump’s promised 25 percent tariff on auto imports takes an ax to the only bits of the emerging electric vehicle (EV) supply chain that are not already dominated by Beijing. The biggest losers when the levies take effect this week would be Japan and South Korea. They account for one-third of the cars imported into the US, and as much as two-thirds of those imported from outside North America. (Mexico and Canada, while
I have heard people equate the government’s stance on resisting forced unification with China or the conditional reinstatement of the military court system with the rise of the Nazis before World War II. The comparison is absurd. There is no meaningful parallel between the government and Nazi Germany, nor does such a mindset exist within the general public in Taiwan. It is important to remember that the German public bore some responsibility for the horrors of the Holocaust. Post-World War II Germany’s transitional justice efforts were rooted in a national reckoning and introspection. Many Jews were sent to concentration camps not
RSS