Saturday, March 21, 2015

The Coming Pressure on the DPP

Nantou 54.

Some links for today...

Alan Romberg over at the Hoover Institution on the current political situation in Taiwan in the context of cross-strait relations. Some of the footnotes are quite interesting; the main text is a richly-sourced attack on the DPP for daring to resist China and emphasizing DPP disunity and failure to serve Beijing while downplaying or hiding KMT disunity. Note that Romberg manages to write a long piece without ever using the term faction, thus making a whole slew of KMT problems disappear (for example). If you want to understand what's going on with the KMT, you're better off following my KMTitanic series.

Favorite quote from the Romberg piece: Eric Chu saying "we cannot let one-party dominance undermine democracy in Taiwan.” Irony is not only dead, its corpse has been exhumed and mutilated.

It's easy to see, with "analysis" like Alan Romberg's above, why you have ex-AIT official Barbara Schrage today saying that the DPP should "clarify" its China policy -- what a hoot! -- and that it should work to find ways to narrow its "differences of opinion" with Beijing. Wouldn't it be awesome if Schrage advised Taiwan to narrow the missile gap instead, and advised Beijing to back off? With what's coming, can't AIT struggle to get us some weapons and allies instead? Imagine, it's 1930s. There's Schrage advising the Indian nationalist movement to find a way to narrow its differences of opinion with the Raj...

More seriously, what Schrage's ill-advised remarks straight out of 2004 signal is the new/old mantra from the anti-Taiwan crowd in the US government: the DPP's China policy is "unclear." Use of this line, and pressure is only going to grow. It's worth quoting myself on the strange position of Taiwan:
The claim that Taiwan “causes tension” has a striking uniqueness: In all other instances of tension along the Chinese frontier, U.S. officials and commentators routinely and assumptively treat China as the source of tension. It is only Taiwan that is different. For example, in the late 1960s Beijing suddenly manufactured a historically absurd and legally indefensible claim to the Senkaku Islands of Japan. The U.S. has asserted that it will defend the islands under the U.S.-Japan mutual defense treaty and criticized China’s illegal air-defense identification zone and other aggressive acts. Nor has the U.S. been shy in criticizing China’s claim to most of the South China Sea, recently offering a highly publicized legal document refuting the Chinese claims. The U.S. also conducts diplomacy with regional powers obviously aimed at countering China. Washington and the U.S. media seldom publicly criticize Japanese, Vietnamese, Malaysian, or Indonesian leaders for resisting Chinese expansion (“causing tension”). Only Taiwan receives that treatment.
"Clarify your policy!" is of course Diplo-code for "submit." I have this dream that US officials will stop fantasizing that if only they sit on the DPP hard enough, problems in the Strait will go away. The reality is simple: if Washington pleases Beijing by stepping on the DPP, Beijing will respond by threatening to increase tensions to push Washington to step on the DPP even harder. D'oh. Feeding the monster only makes it bigger. Because Beijing seeks to transfer tension from the Washington-Beijing relationship to the Washington-Taiwan relationship, each time an (ex-) US official like Schrage criticizes the DPP, it's a strategic victory for Beijing. Please guys, Beijing already has its own diplomatic corps to suppress Taiwan, they don't need ours.

And changing demographics in Taiwan have rendered this policy not only obsolete, but counterproductive...

Anyway, as we wait for war to break out somewhere in Asia, enjoy some links...
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9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Looks like US has no strategy regarding Taiwan. They use Ex-official to play the bad-cop. When things go wrong, they have deniability. Can you imagine any US official to go on record in Congress and said they will sell a democracy down the river so they can have peace in Asia? KMT has no interest in defending the democracy in Taiwan. They love the system in China so people in Taiwan needs to wake up and kick them out. Once people of Taiwan send KMT packing, these US official will have no leverage to pressure the DPP. China is in no position to go to war, their system is fragile and full of problem. The smart thing for DPP to do is be strong and firm on defending Taiwan democracy and wait for China to fall on their face when their system crash and burned

Whirled Peas said...

The Allies required that JPN renounce Taiwan after WWII, but did not specify to which party or polity Taiwan should be renounced. This left a vacuum for yet another colonization to take hold, this time by a million KMT forces who suddenly migrated from China to Formosa in 1949.

IMO it is a given that nature and politics abhor a vacuum, and knowing this, the western Allies should not have allowed Taiwan to be left in an ambiguous state. Right after Japan renounced world leaders could have immediately arranged for independence for Taiwan or at least provisional independence until a democratic Taiwan leadership could be groomed and nurtured. This would have made a lot of sense, and would have been in synch with the part of the Cairo Declaration that said the Allies (which included nationalist China) were not seeking personal gain; and furthermore, independence for Taiwan would have been in synch with what both Mao and Chiang had "claimed" to support in the recent past. Mao back in the late 1930's (and even before) had advocated Taiwan independence (that was of course when the Japanese were in charge of Taiwan). And he support the Taiwan CP in their effort to form a Republic of Taiwan. He even called the people of Taiwan a Taiwan race. Chiang also supported Taiwan independence (from the Japanese). The stances of both PRC and KMT changed once Japan lost the war. Mao and Chiang discovered they could gain by building a narrative to claim Taiwan for their own.

I think a lot of this smoke and mirrors and confusion around Taiwan, which keeps coming back to haunt everyone could have been avoided early on by more resolute and learned decision-making by world leaders immediately after 1945. I know, 20-20 hindsight.

Anonymous said...

God, that Eric Chu quote is so freaking bizarre. What a lame brain.

Btw, here is a follow-up to that China/Shambaugh article. Note the 50center posting the first comment.

http://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/03/19/chinas-uncertain-future/

Anonymous said...

Michael, according to the story you linked, that "town in North Taiwan" is in Kaohsiung!

Anonymous said...

Romberg, just another arrogant piece of work.

Anonymous said...

Romberg, just another arrogant piece of work.

an angry taiwanese said...

@anon
Right on! Net villagers (鄉民) ko State dept. knowledge is power and it is distributed over those 'anonymous'

Anonymous said...

I've always found Romberg very biased, but this article was rather blatant. His attempt to paint the Tainan speaker election scandal as solely something that damaged the DPP, when if anything it hit the KMT hardest due to Chu's backing of Lee to the very end, was ridiculous and completely at odds with how events played out.

Michael Turton said...

Yeah, I wanted to do an all points fisking, but it is basically a waste of time. I'll use it more constructively.

Michael