One interesting way China is handling the international media is its repeated use of the faux 1992 Consensus. The 1992C is, of course, just another way to say Taiwan is part of China. But Beijing is not bluntly insisting “Say Taiwan is part of China.” Instead, Beijing is cloaking this claim in the “1992 Consensus” verbiage. For listeners, this softens the demand by calling it a consensus — even though nothing happened and only the unelected representatives of two Leninist authoritarian parties were present to disagree with each other. But nowhere does the international media ever make that clear…

Forward Taiwan, which works on issues affecting foreigners, notes on Facebook:

Apple Daily reports that a bill to amend the Naturalization Act has made it through the first reading in the Interior Affairs Committee.

1. Foreign spouses applying for citizenship would no longer need to prove that they can support themselves financially

2. A foreign national applicant for naturalization would renounce his or her original nationality one year after becoming a Taiwanese citizenship (currently original citizenship must be renounced before naturalization causing some applicants to become stateless).

3. The good moral character requirement to become a Taiwanese citizen would change to a negative requirement that the applicant has “no [record of] reprehensible conduct and no criminal record”.

4. A naturalized citizen whose citizenship is revoked would get a hearing before a committee at the Ministry of the Interior at which the naturalized citizen will have a chance to plead his or her case before revocation.

The report makes no mention of any provisions that would allow a naturalized citizen to be a dual citizen.

The text of the bill is not yet available and the bill will still need to be passed by the full Legislature to become law.

Would love to have dual nationality, like Chinese who marry Taiwanese.

• Indian columnist calls for hardball with China: use levers like Taiwan
• Taiwan whisky poised to conquer the world
• Apple scouts Taiwan for a new data center
• Indonesia pushes back against China in the SCS
• Blatant sexual harassment during China Airlines strike
• Taipei Times editorial: KMT too entrenched to change
• China, the US, and extrajudicial abductions
• Academia Sinica became latest institution to say economic growth this year will be crap
• Working more than six days in a row to be illegal
• Synaptic rides the south

The post Taiwan’s President Tsai Is Playing China appeared first on The Nanfang.

But China has insisted she recognize something called the “1992 consensus” reached between China’s Communists and Taiwan’s then-ruling Nationalists, under which both agreed there is only one China, with each having their own interpretation of what that means.

In a brief statement carried by the official Xinhua news agency, China’s Taiwan Affairs Office said that since May 20, when Tsai took office, Taiwan has not affirmed this consensus.

“Because the Taiwan side has not acknowledged the 1992 consensus, this joint political basis for showing the one China principle, the cross Taiwan Strait contact and communication mechanism has already stopped,” spokesman An Fengshan said.

Note first that Reuters, knowing the 1992C is faux, shies away from concretely reporting on it. No time or place of agreement is mentioned, all is vagueness. Moreover, this presentation is wrong: China has never recognized the codocil “each having their own interpretation”, which was invented and promoted by KMT politicians.

If you think about it logically, it appears that Tsai could totally agree, with Taiwan’s “own interpretation” being that Taiwan is not part of China. Once you realize how absurd that is, it is easy to see that what China wants to say is that Taiwan is part of China — the 1992 Consensus is just an old whine in a new blargle.

As I’ve always said, the 1992C exists only to put the pro-Taiwan forces in a box.

China is really engaging in media management: making China look more fierce than it is (cue the ZOMG TAIWAN IS TENZ! articles). China knows that the media will report “tensions” which in turn will cause people in Washington to argue that Taiwan ought to be suppressed. But this is 2016, not 2006, and China is causing trouble all along its borders. The case that Taiwan is the problem is difficult to make in the face of China’s omnibelligerent posture.

In fact Taiwan and China will continue to talk to each other across a range of actors and organizations. This is just another one of those non-punishment punishments, that cost China nothing — like reducing group tourist quotas while ignoring the travel agencies shifting to individual tourist visas.

ADDED: Ben Goren of Letters from Taiwan pointed out on Twitter that this news is being released now because Tsai is transiting the US… typical petty Chinese hogwash…

UPDATED: The NY Times has an otherwise good piece on it that cites Cabestan and Sullivan, two serious experts on Taiwan, but apparently there is no Google in their office….

China has several methods by which it could further constrain Ms. Tsai. It could seek to lure away Taiwan’s few remaining diplomatic allies with promises of lucrative infrastructure investments. It could also place restrictions on Chinese tourism to the island, which has increased significantly in recent years, becoming a bright spot for the otherwise struggling Taiwanese economy.

Tourists are a net loser for Taiwan, and exist only because China hopes to establish patronage links within the Taiwan economy, and to help the KMT further its patronage links in local areas. It seems that the alleged “positive effect” of Chinese tourism is now a Journalistic Fact and journalists will never discover that reality is the opposite.

Of course, the NYT reports the cut-off as “a sign of growing friction”. Wrong. The friction is always there, and always the same. It just manifests itself variously. But sexy headlines about tension attract clicks and sell papers.

UPDATED: The international media is as predictable as the sunrise. Here is Reuters imaginatively writing: Tensions between China and Taiwan rise again over ‘One China’ policy.

REF: AIT Burghardt on the 1992 Consensus just today.

The post China Cuts Off Communication with Taiwan Over President’s Failure to Acknowledge “One China” appeared first on The Nanfang.

Cambodia yesterday said it would deport 21 Taiwanese nationals arrested on fraud charges to China, ignoring attempts by Taiwanese officials to have them returned instead to Taiwan.

Cambodian authorities arrested 13 of the Taiwanese along with 14 Chinese on Monday last week.

Another eight Taiwanese suspects were detained on Saturday, Cambodia’s General Department of Immigration Director of Inspection and Procedure Major General Uk Heisela said.

“We have decided to deport them to China because they all are Chinese. The Chinese side has asked us to wait while they work out whether to send a plane or buy tickets for them,” Heisela told reporters yesterday.

He said Cambodia refused to draw a distinction between Chinese and Taiwanese, as the country adheres to a “one China” policy.

Note that the “Taiwanese = Chinese” is a position held by Cambodia. The article contains the Chinese statement:

“China requested Cambodia to send all the suspects to the mainland as most of the victims in this case are in China, and they obstructed our personnel from visiting the Taiwanese suspects,” the foreign ministry said.

This has been the position of China throughout — the position that adheres to established international practice and law — that the crimes were committed against Chinese in China, and thus, the criminals should be sent to there. China HAS NOT been saying loudly that the Taiwanese are really Chinese and thus Beijing has jurisdiction over them. Note that China has asked for deportation, not extradition. In the Kenya case, the Kenya government was able to deport the Taiwanese fraud suspects to China because they had entered the country illegally and thus could be returned to their last port of embarkation. Cambodia under the 1994 Immigration Law can simply deport anyone who enters the country under false pretenses, and dollars to donuts, these suspects not only did that, but also entered from Guangzhou, as the ones in Kenya did.

Next time guys, enter from Tahiti or Maldives, so you’ll be deported someplace nice… and don’t commit crime in China while based in a country that has become more or less a protectorate of Beijing.

J Michael Cole, who has been churning out articles at the News Lens, observed:

According to Cambodian immigration officials, 13 Taiwanese and 14 Chinese nationals were arrested for alleged Internet fraud on June 13 in a raid at their villa in Phnom Penh. Soon thereafter, Taiwanese representatives contacted their Cambodian counterparts to ensure its nationals were sent back to Taiwan. Agence France-Presse (AFP) reports that the Taiwanese officials were unable to meet with the suspects.

There is simply no reason to have these men shipped back to Taiwan, and the possibility of being shipped off to do real time in a Chinese prison might actually function as a deterrent to people entering this “profession.” MOFA should expend its resources on other things.

MOFA’s lack of leverage highlights the short-sightedness of the Ma Administration’s China-focused foreign policy, which — probably deliberately — neglected SE Asian nations. Fortunately the Tsai Administration has a strong push to reverse that neglect.

The post More Taiwanese Scam Suspects Shipped To China appeared first on The Nanfang.

Why am I thanking the media? By writing nonsense about our collapsing supply of tourists from China when it was actually rising (remember, these shrill notes date from the October announcement by the Tourism Bureau of a 95 percent cut), it provided free advertising for more desirable tourists for other countries, signaling them that Taiwan was a place less overrun with Chinese tour groups (while tourism from China declined in December, we got massive spikes in Japan tourism). Thus, despite the drop in obnoxious miserly tour groups from China, we still managed to show 1.87 percent overall tourism growth in May. A much lower number than previous months, but evidence that we don’t need those Chinese tourists. Tourism from Japan, Korea, and Southeast Asia is rising long-term, and with Tsai in power and the Go-South policy in full swing (the Tsai government is mulling easy entry for citizens of ASEAN nations) expect tourism from those areas to continue to increase. Even as I write this, some Malaysian friends of mine are climbing over Wuling on bikes…

What declined? Group tours fell by 31 percent, according to the government. But solo travelers were up 12 percent, according to spokesmen.

But the number of travelers from China visiting Taiwan on their own rather than as part of a tour group rose by 12 percent in May from the year-earlier period, the sources said Friday.

Airlines suspended flights between Taichung and China…

Chang said that since March, flights between Taichung Airport and Changsha, Zhengzhou, Jinan, Qingdao, Tiangin and Chengdo in China have been discontinued because of a low passenger load factor that resulted from an 8 percent drop in group tourists from China.

He was responding to a local media report that said airlines operating between Taichung Airport and Hangzhou, Nanjing and Ningpo had canceled 10 routes since March.

Although some media have been reporting that Chinese students will also be banned, the Ministry of Education said a week or so ago that it had no such information.

Perhaps the most enjoyable thing about the whole affair was the number of expat netizens tracking China tourism. Think anyone in the international media will write about how wrong the media was? No, they will crow about how awesomely insightful and correct they were. I can’t wait.

How low was the cut? China tourists in May reached 327,000, or the same as in December of 2015, also a low supposedly in response to the election (it rose again in January to 366,000) (source). It is much too soon to say whether this is seasonal variation or a real cut, although tour group numbers started falling in April (2.9 percent) according to one of the articles above. Nevertheless, it could simply be that tour companies themselves were nervous about the new president, and so stayed away. We will simply have to wait for the June numbers to come out.

PIXELS FORMING THE SHAPE OF MA YING-JEOU VISIT HONG KONG: this week also saw the big controversy over Ma Ying-jeou’s visit to Hong Kong. New Bloom reviewed the whole thing here:

This was the first time a former Taiwanese head of state had applied to leave the country during the three years after their term ended. Ma did not actually file the application twenty days beforehand, having planned to deliver a speech at the Society of Publishers in Asia’s Awards for Editorial Excellence on June 15th, but only having filed his application on June 1st. But the reasons cited for the rejection of his applications by government spokesmen revolved around Ma’s previous access to classified information and security concerns from Ma visiting as politically sensitive an area as Hong Kong. Likewise, Ma has outstanding lawsuits against him and the fear that he may flee the country in order to avoid lawsuits has been raised in the past. Nevertheless, with respect to that, the Taipei District Court later refused to approve of a court proceedings filed by DPP caucus whip Ker Chien-ming attempting to restrict Ma’s travel based on standing lawsuits filed against him.

…..

The KMT has seized upon Ma’s denial of travel in order to claim political persecution by the DPP, citing freedom of speech concerns and linking this to that former president Chen Shui-Bian was allowed to attend a banquet in Taipei earlier this month, despite that Chen is currently on medical parole for his jail term. Critics have also seized on the event to call Tsai hypocritical for claiming to value democracy and freedom of speech but denying this to Ma, as well as claiming that though Tsai claimed during her presidential campaign that she will heal political divisions in Taiwan, she is carrying out actions completely the opposite. It bears pointing out that much of the criticisms on such grounds disguise rather obvious pro-Beijing bias, however.

While the criticism from the KMT tended to focus on Tsai Ing-wen as the dastardly overmind of the decision, scholar Jon Sullivan at the U of Nottingham pointedly pointed out:

Former President Ma Ying-jeou’s application to travel to Hong Kong for a brief speaking engagement has been turned down by the new Tsai administration. It was a decision based on consultation with government security agencies and wasn’t Tsai’s unilateral decision. Technically Ma’s application did not meet the rules regarding the 20 day advance notice for former presidents within 3 years of leaving office. Lee Teng-hui was allowed to travel to the UK one month after stepping down in 2000 (by a DPP government); but the UK does not have the symbolism that HK does (it was where the meeting between KMT-CCP took place in 1992 that gives its name to the ‘1992 consensus’), and after all, HK is quasi governed by China. Ma is in possession of huge amounts of “classified knowledge” and the potential for either purposeful or accidental disclosure of information is much higher in HK than almost anywhere else in the world. This is not to imply that Ma has or had any intention whatsoever of disclosing classified information, but given that for 8 years Ma has espoused pro-China preferences it is no surprise that most Taiwanese are suspicious of a visit so soon after he stepped down to a location that has been used as a (often clandestine) meeting place for ROC/KMT PRC/CCP officials.

A further aspect is that the KMT has demonstrated before that it is happy to bypass the duly elected government to conduct “diplomacy” with China. … But overall, there are genuine security issues and particular sensitivities with Hong Kong–and Ma would presumably have been aware of this when putting in his application.

The whole thing was a clever set up: Ma wins either way. If they let him go, he sucks up to China and disparages Tsai and Taiwan. If they don’t let him go, they whine and and say Tsai hurt Taiwan’s democracy. As they actually did…

Ma’s office expressed regret over the decision. A spokeswoman said it showed “not only disrespect to the former leader, but damages Taiwan’s democratic image in the world”.

KMT vice-chairman Hau Lung-bin said the decision showed “a lack of self-confidence and goodwill” from Tsai.

Ma was his usual tone-deaf self when he appeared over the internet at the event.Even as a Hong Kong bookseller was back in Hong Kong describing his months of torture at Chinese hands, he laughed at the Tsai government’s security concerns and said that Hong Kong was a safe place. Joshua Wong, the Hong Kong democracy leader, blasted him for the remarks. J Michael Cole, now editor of the News Lens, pointed out that Ma blew an opportunity to support embattled publishing and journalism in Taiwan. Naturally….

AND THE INTERNET LAFFED OUT LOUD II: Another one of those ZOMG TAIWAN IS TENZ! PLS NERF! articles came out last week in the National Interest to general laughter. It was straight out of 2006:

Even though President Tsai espouses a more moderate approach to cross-Strait relations than her DPP predecessor, her policies and especially the actions of her party threaten cross-Strait relations. For example, after her swearing in last month, President Tsai established a mechanism to resolve maritime disputes with Japan. ROC Premier Lin Chuan also dropped charges against anti-Beijing protesters and described his newly appointed representative to the United States as an “ambassador,” suggesting that Taiwan is a sovereign country with all the attendant diplomatic privileges. While not constituting a regime shift in government policy, moves such as these undermine Beijing’s confidence in its ability to work with the newly elected government. Both sides enjoyed closer relations during the previous KMT administration of President Ma Ying-jeou from 2008 to 2016, and the PRC will do what it can to precipitate a return to KMT rule. There is some indication that Beijing will aggressively pressure the new president and explore how far it can go in imposing its own terms on the relationship. It has already begun to limit cross-Strait travel and renewed diplomatic relations with Gambia, ending a tacit truce against further diminishing the ROC’s small list of diplomatic partners.

Oh noes! Tsai established a mechanism to resolve maritime disputes with Japan! Do you think Beijing will invade immediately, or will they just blockade us? You know you’ve gone round the bend when you think Taipei and Tokyo agreeing on a dispute mechanism is “provocative”. The writer is a grad student in the Elliot School at GWU, where I am sad to say I graduated from, and which was made of sterner stuff in my day (yes, you know you’re old when you can use the phrase “in my day”). Michal Thim and I wrote a response, which I hope the National Interest runs…
______________
Daily Links:

• Taipei Times on brewing in Taiwan
• First steps taken to lowering the voting age.
• CDC warns of snake and scrub typhus threats.
• CPI: Leninism and cross-strait relations
• Military academies facing student shortage
• KMT wising up? A pro-KMT group demands shut down of PTT, the most popular bulletin board where students discuss everything about life, politics, Taiwan, you name it. It is deep deep green for the most part.
• New Bloom: KMT stalling on the asset issue?
• New Bloom: LIMA Taiwan indigenous working group interview
• Calin Brown on gender biases in Taiwan
• Cole on China vs Philippines in the South China Sea
• Bruce Jacobs: is the Truth and Reconciliation Commission really necessary?
• Foreign firms getting their tech stolen in China. Who could have predicted that? Only every book on China for the last 30 years. It’s hard to find an adjective to describe such stupidity.

The post Chinese Tourism to Taiwan Down, Thankfully appeared first on The Nanfang.

The KMT was established on the mainland in 1911 and retreated to Taiwan after its defeat by Mao Zedong’s Communists.

The KMT was established in 1912, disbanded, and then reformed in 1919. I think the writer means to say the Republic of China, not KMT [UPDATE: Linda van der Horst says the mistake was caught but not corrected in time for publication]. The next error is far more serious…

An overwhelming majority of Taiwanese do indeed share blood with the Chinese across the strait. Chinese migration to the island started in the 17th century, when the Dutch arrived on “Formosa” (Portuguese for beautiful) and needed farmers to cultivate the land. The indigenous tribes that they found were hunter-gatherers and not farmers, so the Dutch sailed across the strait and in some cases literally captured Chinese farmers that they brought back to farm the island.

Nope. The indigenous tribes were accomplished farmers operating resource rich societies plugged into trading networks that crossed southeast Asia, not hunter-gatherers, a fact easily learned (for example). The Chinese were imported because the Dutch colonialists needed a tractable population dependent on the Dutch, that would produce a surplus, farming that land in a way the Dutch could count and tax. Unlike the aborigines, who would happily trade but would not consider themselves taxable subjects, and resisted Dutch rule.

Massive kudos to her for using the phrase “pro-Taiwan” to describe Lee Teng-hui. One beer on me if we ever meet….

Those are minor issues. The piece itself presents what has become the conventional view of the “rising Taiwan identity”, especially in the media. Being Taiwanese means having aboriginal ancestors…

“If your ancestors have been in Taiwan long enough [pre-1949], then there is a big chance you will have indigenous blood,” said Chun-chieh Chi, professor in ethnic relations at the National Dong-Hwa University in Taiwan. Every era – indigenous, Dutch, Spanish, Hokkien Chinese, Japanese, Nationalists – left its own imprint on Taiwan’s inter-marrying population.

…this search for aboriginal ancestors is a way to assert a non-Chinese identity through nostalgic search for an alternative ancestry, but the truth is that a huge chunk of the post-1949 population also carries Austronesian gene markers, because the peoples of South China from which many in that population come, prior to the Han in-migration that began in the last quarter of the first millenium CE, were Austronesian peoples just like the Taiwan aborigines. The various Boat People of southern China, as in Hong Kong, for example, are thought by some scholars to be remnant populations of these peoples.

The interesting point here, as the writer observes, is not so much Taiwanese are finding such ancestors but that they feel a need to. Foreigners often assert that aboriginal “blood” heritage makes the Taiwanese different, but the reality is that the deep and pervasive aboriginal cultural influence on Taiwanese culture is the key inheritance of the Taiwanese. These ideas about differences of “blood”, updated with the term “genes”, remain a form of primitive nationalist essentialism that should have no place in modern discourse. Though in fairness, ideas about “aboriginal blood” are generally asserted against the Chinese claim of “Chinese blood” for Taiwanese…

van der Horst couples a cite of Gerrit van der Wees of FAPA, the pro-Taiwan association in Washington DC, and polls…

The percentage of people identifying as Taiwanese has hit another record high, according to a poll released in late May by the Taiwanese Public Opinion Foundation – 80 percent of respondents said they identified as Taiwanese, whereas only 8.1 percent identified as Chinese, and 7.6 percent as both. This has been gradually on the rise since the 1990s, when a majority of people identified as Chinese or both Chinese and Taiwanese.

This rise in Taiwanese identity has gone hand in hand with the democratization of Taiwan after martial law was lifted in the late 1980s, because “people were able to openly express themselves and discover their identity under the new democratic period,” says Gerrit van der Wees, a former Dutch diplomat and lecturer in the history of Taiwan at George Mason University in Virginia.

The explanation of van der Wees (it is related to democracy), coupled with polls showing how it emerges in the 1990s, makes a neat narrative about the development of the “rising Taiwan identity” (bear in mind that people do not discover identities; they construct them). Never mind that the poll van der Horst uses is probably not reliable.

But what has gone before? What did the “rising Taiwan identity” rise from?

Note this paragraph, because it displays the function of the “rising Taiwan identity” as a media catchphrase/trope:

Chinese and Taiwanese national identity can co-exist, argues Dr. Shiao-chi Shen in his doctorate at Columbia University. “The decline of Chinese national identity is hence not the result of the rise of Taiwanese identity, but of the rise of China,” Shen argues. Its dominance and the “one China” principle “removed the important component of the Republic of China (ROC) from the Chinese national identity in Taiwan.”

van der Horst appears to be using this quote to argue that prior to the “rising Taiwan identity” the locals had an ROC Chinese identity. Which is totally bogus pro-KMT nonsense.

What occurred in the 1990s was not “rising Taiwan identity” but a shift in the nature of the Taiwan identity itself. Prior to democratization the people perceived themselves as Taiwanese and asserted this identity not against China, but against the KMT. Taiwaneseness was how you fought the KMT: the point of reference for the construction of the pre-democracy identity was KMT authoritarianism and exploitation, as recounted in countless works of the period. Indeed, politicians fighting the KMT were known as tangwai, “outside the party”, a term which still relates them to the Party. The KMT attempted to control all expressions of Taiwaneseness, from religious festivals to language, to subsume Taiwaneseness into Chinese culture, and to suppress independence. This massive apparatus of state control testifies to the broadness and strength of that identity.

In the 1990s democratization opened up new avenues for exploring the idea of Taiwaneseness and what it means. Several things happened in the 1990s. First, the DPP established itself as a legitimate and legal alternative to the KMT and standard bearer of Taiwan-centered politics. The rise of democratic politics meant that the Taiwan identity could no longer by defined as resistance to the System: the tangwaiwere now part of the system in the form of the DPP and its allies. Further, the KMT under Lee Tung-hui, who was president throughout the entire decade, co-opted many DPP programs and positions, and thus, appeared to be Taiwanizing. That made it difficult to oppose the KMT as an anti-Taiwanese party.

The reason polls from the early 1990s show a strong proportion of “Chinese” is because the old Taiwanese identity had learned long before to lie to the State and how to safely discuss their identity. With democratization, people started telling the truth to pollsters. Let me shamelessly steal Frank Muyard’s compilation of polls…
The 1989 numbers are from a UDN poll, which appears maybe to have flipped the dual identity/Chinese columns, but the high number is indicative — nobody was sure they could speak out about their Taiwan identity in safety. In 1989 Lee Teng-hui and diehard mainlander rightiest Hau Pei-tsun were still tussling for control of the KMT and the government. The non-mainstream (rightist) faction lost key struggles within the Party and in 1993 many exited to form the New Party. Observe that in the numbers collected by Muyard the Chinese identity collapses quickly — between 1992 (recall that there was still a national security law under which dissidents were kept in jail) and 1996 it falls by a third and by 2000 has completely disappeared except among old mainlanders. People don’t give up complex nationalist social identities within a single short decade. The shift occurred because people lied to pollsters and then stopped lying. Another sign of that is the fall in the “no response” answer…

The “dual” identity remains relatively stable, testimony not to some confusion about identity but to the many meanings of the term “Chinese”. Polls do not ask people to define “hua ren” or “Chunghua mintzu” as they relate to themselves, probably deliberately, to avoid providing evidence that “We’re Chinese” for Taiwanese means something like what “We’re Europeans” or “We’re Westerners” means for Frenchmen. Muyard points out, however, that over time, when you give those polled the choice of “Taiwanese” or “Chinese”, the number who choose “Taiwanese” has rising past 70%.

The second thing that occurred in the 1990s was the rise of China — here the good doctor Shen is half-right, bless his deep Blue heart. The new identity is not centered on resistance to the KMT anymore, but on resistance to and experience of China and “Chineseness”. Old school Taiwanese independence activists are full of hate for the KMT and constantly ask when Taiwan will be independent. New style Taiwan identity types regard the KMT as yesterday’s failed politics, tainted with China and Chineseness, and the independence question as settled: everyone in Taiwan is pro-independence and Taiwan is already independent. Scholar Frank Muyard identifies a key moment: in Nov 1987 people in Taiwan were finally legally allowed to visit China. From that point on, Taiwan people began to experience how different they were from Chinese, a process only accelerated by the arrival of millions of Chinese tourists on Taiwan, and the movement of hundreds of thousands of Taiwanese to China.

This difference between the old and new Taiwanese identities is also seen in the most recent generation of aborigines embracing the new Taiwanese identity and more slowly, the DPP, which is beginning to make inroads in aboriginal areas. The new Taiwan identity is not an anti-KMT identity but a pro-Taiwan identity, and the previous generation of aborigines was solidly pro-KMT.

I’ve already talked too much, but let’s make one last point: what is the function of the “rising Taiwanese identity” as a media trope? Anthropologist Scott Simon pointed it out to me in a conversation on Facebook: the trope de-legitimates this Taiwan identity by rendering it as a “new” thing, recently emerged. Newness is bad for political legitimacy. Humans have a near-universal drive to locate legitimacy in something old, one reason Taiwanese are working out their new identity by searching for aboriginal ancestors: “look, we’re old in the land.” The antiquity of aborigines in Taiwan is thus pressed into service as a source of legitimacy for the new Taiwan identity. But the Sunflowers, that concrete manifestation of the “new identity”, themselves recognized its connection to the old anti-KMT identity when they ceremonially welcomed the previous generation of activists to the Legislative Yuan during the occupation. They know their roots, even if the international press is either ignorant or ignoring.

Of course, that idea of “newness” for the Taiwan identity also helps legitimate the old days of the old governing party. What? New media tropes helping the pro-China party? Plus ca change…

REF: My thanks to Robert Kelly, whose long comment on the post on Axelbank’s article inspired this piece.

The post The Evolution Of The New Taiwan Identity appeared first on The Nanfang.

If a poll were taken now to determine what status Formosans want for their island, I am sure that at least a two-thirds majority would favor independence. Of course, such a poll is impossible since just the mention of the words “independence” or “self-determination” on Formosa is taboo. But responsible Formosan leaders, both Kuomintang and opposition members, have told me that more than 90 per cent of the people desire the establishment of an independent Formosan republic — shunning both Communist and Nationalist Chinese ties.

This comment ought to give pause to the increasingly common claim in the media that support for independence in Taiwan is “rising” — everyone familiar with Taiwan history knows it has had majority support in Taiwan since the arrival of the KMT in 1945. The article is very comparable to Douglas Mendel’s 1970 classic The Politics of Formosan Nationalism in its brutally frank revelations of KMT rule on Formosa. Both Mendel and Axelbank lived on Taiwan at the same time. Axelbank writes:

From late 1960 till the middle of 1962 I was the bureau manager on Formosa for United Press International and I watched a steady flow of repressive acts directed against the population by the Nationalist government. I traveled widely over the island and spoke to hundreds of Formosans, including city mayors, provincial officials, merchants, doctors, soldiers, teachers, farmers, and pedicab drivers. Usually I took with me a Japanese interpreter since most of the Formosans preferred to speak Japanese although a few had received degrees at American universities and spoke fluent English.

Mendel reported that he too spoke Japanese in discussing the KMT. Think Taiwaneseness is a creation of the Chen Administration? Rising in the present era? Axelbank observes:

I have often started to address a group of Formosans as, “You Chinese . . .” only to be pointedly told: “We are Taiwanese, not Chinese.” (Taiwanese is the Japanese as well as Chinese name for Formosans.) There is, incidentally, very little intermarriage today between “mainlanders” — as the Chinese are called — and Formosans. Not long ago I heard a Formosan student say in a journalism class: “If I married a Chinese girl, my mother would lock me out of her house.”

As many scholars have observed, the colonizer creates the identity of the oppressed through the acts of repression which demonstrate to the locals that colonizer and colonized are different and the colonized are inferior. It was the Japanese and the KMT who taught the Taiwanese that they were Taiwanese. Axelbank describes the regime in pointedly colonial terms:

Thus, in the 1,500-man National Assembly — it elects the President and Vice President and amends the Constitution — there are fewer than forty Formosans. In the Legislative Yuan (Parliament) of over 500 members, no more than two dozen are Formosans. There is only one Formosan in the Cabinet — the Minister of the Interior. There are no Formosa-born ambassadors. And in the 600,000-man military today — of which Formosans provide more than 75 per cent of the ground troops — the number of Formosan officers above the rank of colonel can be counted on both hands despite the existence of nearly 1,000 generals and admirals. In many police units, such as the Peace Preservation Corps of the Formosa Garrison Command, Formosans are almost nonexistent.

This tradition continues today: recall that President Ma appointed mainlanders to most high appointed positions… Axelbank also met opposition leaders:

When I visited the home of a noted Formosan opposition provincial assemblyman, he turned up the volume of his radio “so that police won’t be able to tape-record our conversation.” He told me: “I sleep with two suitcases near my bed every night. In one bag I’ve packed things I’ll need if police come to arrest me and I have time to escape; the other’s filled with some personal items if the police toss me in jail.”

Axelbank’s narrative also echoes Mendel’s in that it shows how hollow the government’s economic claims were, in fact using government sources:

If land reform aided the farmers, excessive government demands in the form of taxes have to a large extent negated these gains. At the end of 1961, for instance, the government-controlled press admitted that increased “defense” taxes on the farmer had actually lowered his standard of living to almost what it was ten years before.

…..

Last year, to help meet its defense costs, the government levied a highly unpopular 30 per cent “counterattack surtax.” Formosans were irked not only because the tax hit their pocketbooks, but also because the tax was okayed by the Legislative Yuan (which passed it in ten minutes) where the number of Formosan members is about 5 per cent of the total.

Mendel points out that some work in his day showed that Taiwan did not regain the living standards it had known in the late Japanese era until the mid-1960s. Many people forget that the 1950s were not an era of export-oriented manufacturing but of an insular island economy floating on a sea of US cash, with few exports, governed by a regime that did little more than loot it. The export-oriented Taiwan Miracle really began after 1960 and especially after 1965 as Japanese and US firms invested heavily on the island.

The KMT government typically begins its economic data on Taiwan in 1950, hiding the huge economic crash that Taiwan suffered between 1945 and 1950 in the wake of war, the KMT looting of the island’s assets, and the move to Taiwan of hundreds of thousands of Chinese. Most scholars follow suit, perpetuating, inadvertently for the most part, this sly bit of KMT history-construction. Today it has been forgotten how impoverished 1950s and early 1960s Taiwan really was. For the Taiwanese of that day, they were not experiencing “growth” but a decade-long recovery to return to the living standards they had known in the late Japanese period.

Axelbank ends with a long discussion of the island’s future. After reviewing the potential successors to Chiang Kai-shek, he finishes with a plea to the US to encourage the regime to reform itself: disband the secret police, allow political activity, end martial law. At one point, he records:

Some Formosans, who assume that the island’s political complexion will remain unchanged for the next fifteen or twenty years, foresee that the time will come when younger generation Formosans — and mainlanders who have become “Formosanized” — will live in harmony under a government run predominantly by Formosans. Other Formosans are pessimistic; they darkly envision eventual control over the island by Communist China — unless the island is soon sliced off from its present “Chinese” connections.

Today we are living through the first, and struggling to avoid the second.

The post Taiwanese Have Been Fighting for Independence Since the 1960s appeared first on The Nanfang.

I believe mainland China is no exception. Today is June 4, and 27 years ago on this day, the Tiananmen Square incident occurred in Beijing. Because of it, many people lost their families; many people lost their hope for reform; and many people were forced to leave their hometowns and become exiles overseas. These were all things Taiwan too had experienced. That is why every Taiwanese person who saw those images on television 27 years ago felt empathy: Because we, too, had walked that path. We felt more clearly than anyone the thirst the students at Tiananmen Square had for democracy and freedom.

…….

As president, I won’t criticize the political system on the other side of the strait point by point. Instead I will express my willingness to sincerely and with my whole heart share with the other side of the strait the experiences of Taiwan’s democratization. The achievements of economic growth of today’s mainland China are apparent to everyone. With the effort of the ruling party on the other side of the strait, China’s citizens absolutely have a better quality of life than they did before. No one can deny this. Nor can anyone deny, however, that mainland China’s internal politics and society are currently under pressure to transform. If the other side of the strait can give the citizens of mainland China more rights, the people of the world will give mainland China more respect.

Hung Hsiu-chu, the former presidential candidate and current Chairman of the KMT, also had some thoughts on the June 4 Anniversary which she shared with the world. The Taipei Times reported…

“Putting aside the clashes in the past [between the Chinese Communist Party and the KMT], is the effort the KMT has made in Taiwan not also aimed at finding a better way to democracy and liberty for the children of zhonghua minzu?”

She called for a life full of “tolerance” and “respect” for all “Chinese children.”

“We have seen that the societies on both sides of the Taiwan Strait are walking toward this ideal. Since [China] has shown — different from before — its ability to be tolerant, could it then consider granting a more tolerant handling of this historical wound?” Hung wrote.

Former KMT spokesperson Yang Wei-chung (楊偉中) said “fury” is the only emotion he felt after reading Hung’s post.

He accused Hung of writing the post “with the tone of a lackey” who “begs for tolerance from the oppressor and the dictator.”

Yang also lambasted Hung for her “distorted understanding” of the historical connection between the crackdown and reform, claiming that hope for real, comprehensive reforms had all but been destroyed by the incident.

Hung’s penchant for mentioning herself in public announcements appeared again…

我也曾是政治受難者的家屬，我是深深感受過那種遭到社會否定，有苦無處訴之痛苦的，但這並沒有影響我為國家，為民族奮鬥進取的決心. 如果我個人的際遇還可以作為某種啟示的話，我多麼希望大陸當局能夠以更大的寬容. 早日撫平這個存在於大陸社會與改革開放歷史中的傷口，讓這些承受歷史傷痛的人們，也有為民族奉獻自己的機會，也讓我們生活在台灣的中華兒女們，

I am also from a family that has suffered from politics. I deeply felt that society was negative, with no one to hear my bitter complaints of pain. However, it did not affect my determination to struggle for the [ethnic Chinese] nation. If my personal fate can serve as a kind of revelation….

In true hardline KMT style she subsumed the people of Taiwan into the Chinese nation:

也讓我們生活在台灣的中華兒女們

…to enable us Chinese children living in Taiwan to…

That’s really the difference. In Tsai’s presentation, the common yearning for democracy is the common ground of the peoples of Taiwan and China. In Hung’s presentation, that common ground is the shared ethnicity, the Chinese nation of KMT ideology.

Sadly, Hung learned nothing from her father’s experiences at the hands of the KMT.

The post Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen vs. KMT Chairman Hung Hsiu-chu appeared first on The Nanfang.

Speaking of tourists, the April numbers are out. Let’s look at the massive cuts in tourism that China imposed on Taiwan as “punishment” for Tsai Ing-wen…

MARCH: China: 363,878 up 30.09% year on year
APRIL: China: 375,567 up 4.67% year on year

Yeah, that’s right. Tourism from China rose slightly in April. Can’t wait to see the May numbers.

The dip took place in the Hong Kong/Macao numbers, for reasons I do not know:

APRIL: 110,716
MARCH: 164,894
FEB: 114,431
JAN: 93,448

Remember that quote from the Reuters piece I looked at:

“The National Tourism Administration told us in February and March to cut the number of tourists we send to Taiwan,” an agent in the coastal city of Xiamen, which lies across the strait from Taiwan, told Reuters.

Obviously, being told to do something, and actually doing it, are two different things.
__________
Daily Links:

• New Bloom on the challenges facing Tsai
• Rebar Chairman and fugitive Wang You-theng killed in car crash.
• TISR: Taiwanese don’t want unification.
• Solidarity looks at Taiwanese pessimism in the recent poll.
• KMT attacks on my legislator for not being educated enough rebutted.
• Hiking the Pingxi crags
• Straits Times: Taiwan plans people centric drive to wean itself off China
• Taiwan dollar to get clobbered?

The post If China “Slashes Tourists” Any Further, Taiwan Will Be Overrun appeared first on The Nanfang.

The wide but erroneous evaluation of the affair of the Kenyan phone scammers as a move by Beijing to pressure Tsai Ing-wen simply shows how the frameworks the media uses to understand the China-Taiwan relationship conceal and distort the complexity of that relationship. They are easily hijacked by partisan commentators: in this case, pro-Taiwan commentators portraying it as a move against Tsai in order to heighten the sense of threat to the island nation, while their opponents used it to show how electing Tsai was a bad idea, since it angered China. 

For example, here is Jonathan Manthorpe, long sympathetic to Taiwan. After saying that Beijing cut tourists soon after her election (tourism from China rose in Feb but fell in March, tourism from HKK rose in Feb and March, YOY numbers are higher), he writes:

If Beijing’s tourist gambit misfired, another ploy did not. Taiwan has formal diplomatic relations with only 21 countries. Most nations have downgraded their diplomatic representation in Taipei as the price of having full bilateral relations with Beijing. Several small countries, however, found regularly switching diplomatic relations between Taiwan and China was a very profitable business. During his eight-years in office former Taiwan President Ma negotiated an unofficial end to this “dollar diplomacy.” But in March, the small African state of Gambia, which had previously recognized Taiwan, announced it was establishing diplomatic relations with Beijing. This move clearly came after pressure from China and is undoubtedly intended as a warning to Taipei that Beijing will step up its efforts to enforce Taiwan’s diplomatic isolation.

There was an even nastier example of Beijing’s vengeful nature in April, when Kenya was persuaded to force 45 Taiwanese on to planes to China. The 45 had been implicated in a fraudulent telemarketing scheme aimed at China. All were tried in Kenya and most acquitted. But China told the Nairobi government it wanted the Taiwanese, claiming they are Chinese citizens. Kenya herded the first batch of eight Taiwanese onto a China-bound plane on April 8. When another 28 Taiwanese, being held in jail, heard what had happened they barricaded themselves in their cells, Kenyan police stormed the prison and took the prisoners to the airport.

We already know that the deportation of the Kenya 45 to China had nothing to do with Tsai Ing-wen (here in the Diplomat). AFAIK Beijing never said that it insisted on having the Kenya 45 sent to China because they were “Chinese citizens”. It wanted from — it clearly and repeatedly stated for a year — because they had committed crimes against Chinese. That correct interpretation has even made it into TIME. Oh well….

Manthorpe’s summary of The Gambia situation is a bit misleading, though that is probably due to space. Gambia dumped Taiwan in 2013, dangling relations before Beijing, but Beijing said no until this March, three years later.

So the pro-Taiwan side, so the pro-China side. Here is the Economist with the same trifecta:

Since January, China has turned to its usual battery of economic, diplomatic and strong-arm methods to bring Ms Tsai into line. Tour operators report a sharp drop in the number of Chinese tourists. China has signalled an end to the “diplomatic truce” it had been observing by not competing with Taiwan for recognition from poor countries: in March it established ties with Taiwan’s former partner, the Gambia. It has also bullied Kenya into sending Taiwan citizens, detained on suspicion of fraud, to China. And, just before Ms Tsai’s swearing-in, it staged military exercises on the coast opposite Taiwan, as if rehearsing an invasion.

When two sides agree on non-facts, it’s time to re-assess…

The Gambia thing has been making my spider sense tingle for the last two months, but I set it aside to let it simmer for a while. Many questions occurred to me…

• If Gambia was aimed at Tsai, why have there not been more diplomatic poachings? Why did Beijing not unequivocally state it was aimed at Tsai?
• Why March? Why not November? Or June? If Beijing wanted to signal that it did not like Tsai, why not do it before the election, when it might have an effect? Why did it not wait until after she was elected, if it wanted to send a message?
• Why did Beijing wait over two years?

Gambia is run as a dictatorship by “The President of the Islamic Republic of The Gambia, His Excellency Sheikh Professor Alhaji Dr. Yahya AJJ Jammeh Babili Mansa”. Last month Foreign Policy published a piece on Jammeh’s regime, the worst dictator you’ve never heard of…

Since taking power in a bloodless coup in 1994, Yahya Jammeh has presided over the worst dictatorship you’ve never heard of. The eccentric Gambian president, who performs ritual exorcisms and claims to heal everything from AIDS to infertility with herbal remedies, rules his tiny West African nation through a mix of superstition and fear. State-sanctioned torture, enforced disappearances, and arbitrary executions — these are just a few of the favored tactics employed by his notorious security and intelligence services.

The economy is a wreck and social tensions are at an all-time high. International aid has been withdrawn, and the dictator is desperate. As this piece notes:

Since coming to power in 1994 following a coup d’état, Jammeh’s regime has been consistently accused of human rights violations, damaging its international image. This trend was aggravated in 2013 when Gambia left the Commonwealth, and then in 2015 when Jammeh threatened to withdraw Gambia from the African Union.

One of the regime’s fiercest critics recently has been the European Union (EU), with Brussels blocking €20 million ($23 million) in aid in 2010 and €13 million ($15 million) in 2013. Then, soon after the expulsion of the EU’s chargé d’affaires in June 2015, Brussels froze aid worth €150 million ($170 million).

This loss of revenue has been coupled with a 60% decline in tourism (which comprises 40% of GDP) in 2014 following the Ebola outbreak in West Africa and Gambia’s expulsion from the US preferential trade programme known as the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA).

Gambia is a mess…

Gambia broke with Taiwan in late 2013. Joel Atkinson, the longtime scholar of Taiwan’s aid programs, wrote in The Diplomat at the time:

Many suspected that China had withdrawn the tacit “diplomatic truce” it had extended to Taiwan’s President Ma Ying-jeou as a carrot for further progress towards unification. But China did not establish relations with Gambia, and it seems that China was not behind the move. Rather, it appears that Jammeh broke off relations with Taiwan after it would not provide more money. He either did this in a fit of pique or because he misunderstood the nature of the diplomatic truce and thought China would play along.

China was sincerely shocked and said that Jammeh had not contacted them. “We learned the news from foreign media reports,” said the Foreign Ministry. Thus, the last of my questions is answered by Atkinson: Beijing was genuinely supporting Ma.

Atkinson notes that Ma was serious in his desire to make sure aid pennies were properly accounted for. It appears that the loss of Gambia was one of the casualties of Ma’s insistence that aid programs be accountable. From one perspective, that looks noble, but the practical result is that it made many leaders long to switch sides — which strikes me as Ma’s real goal. Now that Tsai Ing-wen is in power, if Beijing starts switching, everyone will blame her, and not realize the ill will Ma has created with his approach.

The March 2016 decision to establish relations with Gambia was announced by Beijing with the usual boilerplate One China rhetoric (here in piece on opposition criticism of the dictator’s decision to switch to Taiwan). A local piece gave the what’s-in-it-for-us:

Gambia could make good use of this relationship to beef up most of the country’s socio-economic sectors and revamp especially areas where the economy is facing challenges.

Part of this effort could be, building and rehabilitating roads with double lanes, getting new ferries, constructing town halls in Banjul, KMC , Brikama, Farafenni and Basse, improving the energy sector, inviting Chinese doctors specialized in certain common diseases, sending Gambians to study and learn skills to assist in the field of agriculture, especially rice production, to attain food self-sufficiency.

We could also get bridges built in places such as Banjul-Barra, as well as get airlines in Gambia to cover the sub-region and other parts of the world.

Chinese investors can be encouraged to come to The Gambia and build factories to enable Gambian youths to work.

China had already been hard at work ramping up investments in Gambia (example). As soon as relations were re-established, China announced investments in the power sector.

I personally remember when China threatened to veto the deployment of a UN Peacekeeping force to Guinea-Bissau in 1999 simply because Guinea Bissau had established diplomatic relations with Taipei a couple of years before that. It is when the Gambian delegation spearheaded the formation of a group known as “Friends of Guinea-Bissau” at the UN Building. That group was geared towards influencing certain decisions at the level of the security council.

If you read the whole interview, and all the stuff on the internet about China and Gambia you will find that almost everyone read it as a strike at Tsai Ing-wen. Let me suggest another scenario.

In Dec of 2015 Jammeh declared Gambia to be an Islamic Republic (the population is 90% Muslim). Jammeh did this because he was desperate for cash, and Middle Eastern states are willing to give (from here):

Financial aid from the Middle East has already become more significant to the Gambia recently. According to an OECD report, the Gambia’s five biggest contributors of development finance in 2013 included two new faces (compared to 2006) – the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and the Arab Bank for Economic Development (BADEA) – while other Middle Eastern-based donors have also been growing in influence.

BADEA provided Gambia with $119 million in financing up to June 2015, with secretary-general Sidi Ould Tah saying the institution wants to strengthen solidarity between the Arab world and Gambia. And, amongst others, there has been a growing role for the Islamic Development Bank (IDB), which now has the 111 projects in Gambia.

The government has also been deepening bilateral ties in the Middle East. In November 2014, Jammeh visited Qatar, which has donated funds to 243 humanitarian projects. Meanwhile, the president has also travelled to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Turkey, and the UAE in the past few years.

In 2014 Saudi Arabia and Gambia signed a bilateral investment agreement and are now working on a taxation agreement (source). In 2010 Gambia broke ties with Iran, and Iran and Saudi Arabia are rivals. Gambia is also close to Turkey, which helps train its army and police (BBC). Kuwait also provides funds. BBC also observes that Gambia is isolated from its neighbors. Many of the reports on Gambia emphasize that the declaration of being Islamic Republic was intended to woo Iran as well as Saudi Arabia.

Al Jazeera notes that Beijing is worried about sectarian infighting in the Middle East, and that China sources ~50% of its oil from Iran and Saudi Arabia two rivals for influence in the region, and opponents across the great Sunni-Shiite divide of the Islamic world. The spread of Islamic militants across West Africa is also threatening to engulf Gambia, which as BBC observed above, is filled with unemployed youth ripe for such evangelism. Xinjiang is already a hotbed of anti-Beijing terrorism and militant groups across the Middle East already recruit there. Those groups have West African links as well.

A Newsweek piece last year made the connection, linking Xinjiang with Chinese interest in the Middle East and West Africa:

Africa has been beset by violence from militant groups based on a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam, including the Nigerian group Boko Haram and Al-Shabab, which is based in Somalia and also active in Kenya. However, according to Brautigam, the Chinese have their own problem with militancy in the restive Xinjiang region in the far west of the country.

Xinjiang has a significant population of Uighurs—an ethnic group that are largely Muslim—who have protested in recent years at perceived discrimination from Beijing. Beijing has described violence in the region as being the work of “terrorists,” with government officials claiming that some Uighurs have gone to fight with radical groups in the Middle East.

According to Brautigam, China is keen to link up African and Western concerns about groups such as Boko Haram and the Islamic State militant group (ISIS) with their own troubles in Xinjiang. “They also don’t want Al-Qaeda or ISIS or Boko Haram-type terrorism to reach China,” she says. “Right now they really haven’t, but that will be on their mind.”

China has also deployed hundreds of troops to South Sudan over the course of 2015, emphasizing its commitment to maintaining African stability.

This 2013 piece on China and Africa by David Shinn also makes the same connection, with many details on China’s security activities in Africa.

Saudi Arabia and Iran are Sunni-Shiite rivals for influence in Africa, especially West and North Africa where Islam is prevalent (BBC report). The BBC report says that Sudan — where China has troops — has moved into the Saudi camp, and Sudanese troops are serving in its war on Yemen.

China has publicly warned that the break between Iran and Saudi Arabia could well lead to further terrorism. Riyadh and Tehran are, as noted above, major oil exporters to China — and Saudi Arabia is a major backer of Sunni terrorist groups. Xinjiang’s Muslims are largely Sunni. China has a deep interest in West and North African terrorist organizations because of its burgeoning involvement in Africa and because of the globe-spanning linkages of Islamic terrorism.

Do the math.

It may seem strange, but Beijing might not have been considering Taiwan at all in its move — or rather, identified the snub to Taiwan as a nice bit of fallout, but not its main consideration. Its main consideration may well have been to counter the rising influence of Islamic money, particularly Saudi money in West Africa and in Gambia, and perhaps too because of the possible linkages between Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the Gambia.

There isn’t enough evidence to really identify exactly what Beijing’s motives were in resuming relations with Gambia, but it is interesting that it did so a few months after Gambia was declared an Islamic Republic and began urgently wooing Middle Eastern Islamic money.

If Beijing wanted to signal Tsai, why didn’t it pick up Gambia in the fall when it could have influenced the election, or after she was elected, to make it clear? Instead it did it when its ally Ma was a lame duck president. It’s a reminder of the media double standard on the KMT and the DPP — negative actions by Beijing are never negative signals to the KMT, only to the DPP.

The timing of the event doesn’t fit the scenario that Zhongnanhai is warning Tsai. It better fits Jammeh’s sudden yearning for cash from the Middle East and in particular, Saudi Arabia.

Whatever you may say about the alternative scenario I’ve offered here, there is no firm evidence whatsoever that Beijing’s resumption of relations with Gambia was a strike at Tsai Ing-wen. That remains an interpretion — widespread, to be sure — but Beijing has never formally stated it was aimed at Tsai. Ask yourself — did observers arrive at that conclusion because they based it on available evidence, or because they have a pre-existing framework for thinking about China-Taiwan affairs that says everything that happens involving China and Taiwan must somehow be fit into the Cross-Strait sovereignty dispute?

We both know the answer to that question.

The post Gambia’s Diplomatic Switch to China Had Nothing to do with Taiwan’s New President appeared first on The Nanfang.

The Aerotropolis is the largest land expropriation in the democratic era. Cheng’s turnaround, if it lasts, is likely due to central government pressure. The aerotropolis is a freeport that is a giveaway to land speculators and land developers, and with its suspension of many labor laws, is likely intended as a portal to let Chinese labor into Taiwan.

Stopping that aerotropolis is a key to the DPP’s remaining a serious party in Taiwan. It can’t just pretend to be the party of social justice and economic development for ordinary people. It actually has to be one. If Cheng flips on this, it will cost the DPP Taoyuan in 2018 and hurt its chances in the Presidential election.

J Michael Cole’s wonderful rant in 2013 is well worth revisiting (also my post on his). As originally envisioned (the draft bill is here) the project was going to let Chinese infrastructure firms bid on it, which would have been a disaster, one of the many pro-China decisions that cost the KMT in 2014 and 2016. The project would also have been governed by the free trade zone rules proposed by the KMT, which would turn the zone administrators into dictators administering miniature Uzbekistans. Indeed, there was some speculation that casino gambling would be permitted within the Aerotropolis as a free trade zone unrestricted by the rules applied to the rest of Taiwan.

The DPP has apparently learned little, for the new government has chosen the Aerotropolis as the site for its Asian Silicon Valley…

Premier Lin Chuan (林全) yesterday vowed to reduce land expropriation and enhance communication with the public as the government pushes forward with the Taoyuan Aerotropolis project, which is to be a key component of a larger “Asian Silicon Valley” project that President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) proposed during her campaign [MT: 2015 article].
…
“Politically speaking, [the government] should reduce unnecessary land expropriation to avoid delays in the project’s progress due to protests by local residents,” Lin said in response to media queries for comments on the stalled project.

“The government should also do its best to communicate with the public. I believe that [Taoyuan Mayor] Cheng Wen-tsang (鄭文燦) would help negotiate and he should not only follow the rules and regulations, but also pay attention to things that have been overlooked.”
….
“Taipei and Hsinchu are the right and left hands of Taoyuan, with Taipei being an international metropolis and Hsinchu being an important research and development hub for the IT industry,” Lin said. “We have chosen Taoyuan as the base for the Asian Silicon Valley project to revive the economy in northern Taiwan.”

The Asian Silicon Valley is the island’s industrial site for its internet-of-things operations, which everyone expects will be the Next Big Thing. China Post compares it to Ma’s China-centric economic plans here, but in many ways it is just another in a long long long line of projects that are supposed to internationalize Taiwan’s economy by linking airports and high-tech manufacturing and getting outsider firms to relocate here. Remember the chimerical APROC plan?

“To revive the economy in northern Taiwan”. ROFL. The economy in northern Taiwan is just fine, thanks. It’s the center and south that desperately need investment; occupancy rates in the southern science parks are below average. The real purpose of such announcements is to get local construction-industrial state patronage networks to re-orient on the DPP because it is now doling out construction dollars, expropriating land and handing it to developers, and keeping housing prices in Taoyuan up. Whatever happened to the DPP’s commitment to spreading development from the north to other regions?

Note the presence of the strange phrase “unnecessary land expropriation”. How can such a thing exist? Was land not in the project being expropriated? Isn’t all expropriation “necessary expropriation”? Or what? “Unnecessary land expropriation” = {null}. Couple that with the “better communication” promise and you have full-blown Ma Ying-jeou Administration jive talkin’ at its finest. This is the technocratic administration “communicating” and everyone should shut up and listen. Because the government’s plans are never wrong, the problem can only be insufficient communication.

Now, recall that the land expropriations triggered protests before (student roughed up).

Recall that the student movement has promised to hold the DPP to account.

This seems, at some point, tailor-made for a collision between the students/Sunflowers and the DPP administration.
_____________
Daily Links:

• Good piece by Shannon Tiezzi in The Diplomat on the legislature which cites Ketagalan Media and two of the sharpest observers of Taiwan I know, Aaron Wytze and Gwen Wang. Kudos to all.
• Poll: Over half of people support independence, 80% identify as Taiwanese. It’s a pan-Green poll, and its numbers for independence are much too low.
• Students condemn Tsai over support of health minister for using “Chinese Taipei” at WHA. Please students — pick your battles.
• Record high temps this year today
• Knife-wielding man breaks into Presidential office
• The plan Taiwan needs to defend itself against China
• Watch out China: Taiwan and Japan are teaming up
• Taiwan smartphone assembly share falls in Q1
• Births are up in Taiwan! I interpret this as meaning that the economy is so bad people are having extra children to make sure they are supported in their old age.

The post Asian Silicon Valley = Taiwan’s DPP Collision with Student Movement appeared first on The Nanfang.