Taiwan

A video conversation with Chas Freeman August 10, 2023 Chas Freeman is a legend of US diplomacy – since he served as interpreter for Kissinger and Nixon during their visit to China in 1972. He is also an academic and prolific writer and commentator. An intellectual that offers so much more than anybody serving as an ambassador in today’s NATO countries. You will find his homepage here with much about him and his thoughts. Although a staunch American, he is not the type Western mainstream media would turn to since he has the ‘wrong’ views on several essentially important things. I’ve also come to appreciate Neutrality Studies’ YouTube Channel. Browse it when you are anyhow there, but – first – listen carefully to this conversation that starts out with Henry Kissinger’s visit to China and moves on to very important aspects of Taiwan and beyond. Jan Oberg, Editor

Terry Gou July 22, 2023 Editor’s introduction I believe there is great confusion in the minds of many Westerners about Taiwan, its relation to China and the US’s real Taiwan policy. TFF has written about some of it in our Smokescreen Report here but you may also like to read this Wikipedia entry about the 1992 Consensus – and its problems – as well as the Chou Enlai-Nixon talks and agreements in February 1972 here and here. I would like, therefore, to recommend the article below by Terry Gou – a very successful Taiwanese businessman and politician who here promotes a peace and win-win perspective in contrast to his own government leadership and the Biden administration. Interestingly, it was published by The Washington Post (on July 17, 2023). Click! Jan Oberg, TFF director and editor

LONDON – Perhaps one needs to be a medieval theologian to understand the shifting nuances of Taiwan’s relationship with mainland China. Not one of Taiwan’s reigning, recent or likely future leaders is consistent for long. China’s leaders have long blown hot and cold. It would not matter if Taiwan were simply a small island of 23 million people. But since it is the largest single investor in mainland China, the present principal source of China’s technological revolution and is claimed by Beijing as being part of China, it is probably the world’s most dangerous potential flashpoint. If Taipei and Beijing spark each off, as they did in 1996 when the U.S. sent two carrier battle groups into the Taiwan Strait, then the U.S. could be drawn into a war with China. Washington is irrevocably committed to Taiwan’s autonomy, as long as that is what its people want. China, as its...

LONDON – In the short eight years of full democracy in Taiwan Saturday’s election will be the third. In each election the candidate that Beijing did not like won office. This time Beijing has made it clear that it doesn’t want to see President Chen Shui-bian re-elected. By the workings of normal electoral arithmetic he shouldn’t be. In the last election he won on a minority vote because the opposition- the successor party to Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang- was divided. This time there is no division and until recently many assumed Chen would lose. But once again China has been waving its fist and the chances are that Chen has a good chance of gaining a second term. The more Taiwan becomes democratic, the more the older generation of Chinese die off (a good many of whom crossed the strait as part of the fleeing troops of the Kuomintang defeated by the...

COPENHAGEN – Today Belgium feels the lash. Yesterday so did Denmark and tomorrow, we are promised, so will Taiwan. But none of these three sturdy, self-confident nations is going to buckle. If anything Big Brother publicly humiliating them has toughened their sinews. Belgium came under direct fire last week from Donald Rumsfeld, the U.S. Defence Secretary, who threatened to move NATO headquarters out of Brussels unless Belgium agrees to re-write its controversial human rights legislation that allows non-Belgians to be tried in Belgium for alleged war crimes on the basis of the now widely accepted principal of international jurisprudence, universal jurisdiction. The principle is enshrined in the statutes of the new International Criminal Court. (Although it gives the right of first crack of the whip to the courts of the country of the accused, an often overlooked point, particularly in the Bush Administration.)  It was also recognized by the British House...

London – At first the news from North Korea seemed like an almighty setback to thoIse who believe we can deal with grave security problems more by engagement rather than confrontation. Not only did it appear to knock the shine off Jimmy Carter’s Nobel Peace Prize, since his greatest achievement, apart from Camp David, was his successful diplomacy that brokered the 1994 freeze on the country’s nuclear bomb making, it appeared it might well open the doors again to those Republicans who eight years ago were arguing for the U.S. to bomb North Korea. A strange thing appears to have happened in those eight years. For all the bluster with President George Bush’s notion of an “axis of evil”, no longer is the talk this wild. The accent is all on diplomacy and an emphasising of what is still apparently being honoured in the old 1994 agreement, the freezing of plutonium...

LONDON – So in the end the Bush Administration decided it was not going to approve the sale to Taiwan of the much-touted Aegis-class destroyers and their state-of-the-art missile tracking system. The deciding reason was political, although there is evidence a-plenty they wouldn’t have done Taiwan that much good in the military arena either. They wouldn’t be delivered for another seven or eight years and it that time China could have deployed enough missiles to easily overwhelm their capabilities. Simply put, they would be nothing more than a political provocation – a hint of other defensive systems to come- the anti-ballistic missile shield around America and theatre missile defence around Japan and Taiwan. All of which in the end will be similarly self-defeating, as China builds more nuclear-tipped rockets to overwhelm them. Along the way the political relationship would deteriorate from “strategic partner” (Clinton) to “strategic competitor” (Bush) to “enemy” (future)....