Replying to Jerome Cohen

A few days ago I blogged on the Op-Ed of Cohen and Chen in the Asian Wall Street Journal (CFR version) on the KMT, DPP, and China policy here. I did not reveal my full range of thoughts because AWSJ had already taken a letter from me in response. Here is the final version (title is not mine):

Taiwan's KMT Shouldn't Run Foreign Policy
29 July 2009
The Wall Street Journal Asia

Jerome Cohen and Yu-Jie Chen's op-ed ("Chairman Ma's Challenge," July 28) on the accession of President Ma Ying-jeou to the chairmanship of the Kuomintang (KMT) in Taiwan serves as a timely reminder of how commentators suffer from grievous misunderstandings of President Ma, the KMT, the opposition Democratic People's Party and the cross-Strait forums.

There are a number of conflicts and omissions in the op-ed, starting with the fact that Mr. Cohen was Mr. Ma's teacher when the president was in law school in the United States. Mr. Cohen should have told readers of this personal connection.

The major problem with the op-ed lies in the authors' approval of unofficial, party-to-party talks between the Chinese Communist Party and Mr. Ma's KMT. Mr. Cohen and Ms. Chen signal strong support for this undemocratic process, which has been hidden from the public eye and carried out by private political organizations and politicians. Mr. Ma claims economic agreements between the KMT and the CCP need not be submitted to democratic oversight in the form of public referenda. The op-ed omits any discussion of this controversy.

The importance of this omission cannot be overstated. By withholding this information from the reader, the authors can then claim that the opposition DPP is adopting a "head in the sand" posture. This erroneous claim is nothing more than a KMT talking point. The DPP will not participate in the Cross-Strait Forum because it is protesting the fact that the talks between "Taiwan" and "China" are actually talks between two political parties completely out of the public view. The DPP position is that talks between Taiwan and China should be handled by official diplomatic personnel trained in international negotiations under the aegis of the government, not a private political party, and overseen by the democratically elected representatives of the people, the legislature and the president.

Without that framework, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the talks are merely dickering between two political parties over how best to divvy up the spoils of annexing Taiwan to China, in which any DPP participants would merely be used for their propaganda value.

If Mr. Cohen and Ms. Chen truly believe that Mr. Ma wants to be president of all the people, then they should pressure Mr. Ma and his party to submit the talks to democratic oversight within the government framework, rather than apologize for one-party politics and criticizing the DPP for defending democratic principles.

The AWSJ team did a bang-up job of editing it and turned it into a better piece than my wordy original. I removed a paragraph taking issue with Cohen/Chen's problematic characterization of Ma as "squeaky clean" -- he did essentially the same thing President Chen is accused of, only there is no dispute that he downloaded government money into his private accounts. They also characterized him as "able" though as anyone following the news here, Ma's two signature projects, the Neihu subway line and the Makong Trolley system, are both a mess. Nor can anyone reasonably claim he did much as Taipei mayor.

I removed that paragraph because I thought it was more important to preserve the idea that the KMT-CCP talks are, without the democratic framework to contain and shape them, merely two allied political parties dickering over the spoils of Taiwan.

Because of space, I could not focus on the incredibly bad logic of their argument, encapsulated in the last paragraph:

The most recent poll of Taiwanese political opinions by Taipei-based Global Views magazine shows some slippage in the standing of the Ma administration, but by far its most impressive finding revealed that 63.8% of those asked said that, if the DPP wanted to uphold Taiwan's interests, it had to engage in direct communication with the Chinese Communist Party. .... By taking an active part in Taiwan's unofficial discussions with the Mainland, the DPP will do more to protect the island's interests than by carping from the sidelines.

Here's the poll he refers to. His figures are correct -- but note the illogic. Even if 68% want the DPP to engage China, it does not follow that they want the DPP to do so in KMT-controlled talks. Everyone I know wants the DPP to talk to China (the issue was always Beijing's unwillingness to talk to the democracy side in Taiwan's politics, not the DPP). There is no basis from that poll for Cohen/Chen to argue for DPP participation in the Party to Party talks in China.

I note, in passing, that Cohen/Chen write "the Mainland" (capitalized, no less!) and not "China." It is interesting how that bit of pro-China propaganda has become a staple of everyday speech. I hope in the future that US-based writers will refer to China and not the Mainland. Unless you are standing on Hainan Island, China is not the mainland.
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International Criticism on its Way?

Lots of communication from friends and acquaintances asking how we can get more international pressure on the local political situation. It's coming folks, slowly, as awareness dawns. Please write to your local newspaper, your local Congressman, your local Amnesty International Chapter, and tell them your concerns. Nothing will be done until people know there is a problem.

UPDATE 2: According to the Taipei Times, AIT Director Steve Young commented on the Chen Shui-bian case, asking for a "transparent, fair, and impartial" resolution to it. He said he also expected that the Ma Administration would have further dialogue with the DPP. More, please, Mr. Young. Dutch politicians have also expressed their concerns.

Meanwhile some commentary in the media is appearing. Today in the South China Post Jerome Cohen of the US Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the Establishment elite think tank, has an article in the South China Morning Post (SCMP) out of Hong Kong. Cohen was current Taiwan president Ma Ying-jeou's mentor in law school. Here is the article:

Ties that blind
Improved cross-strait relations appear to have come at a cost to some civil liberties in Taiwan
Jerome Cohen
Nov 13, 2008

......[snipped]....

After police in Tainan failed to prevent an assault on Mr Chen's deputy, president Ma Ying-jeou's government was obligated to do better during Mr Chen's visit. Although police could not prevent Mr Chen from being trapped in a hotel for eight hours by a huge mob of protesters, they did defend him against bodily harm throughout a stressful week.

In doing so, they went beyond the limits of a free society, forbidding peaceful protesters from displaying Taiwanese and Tibetan flags, confiscating flags from demonstrators, closing a store that played Taiwanese songs and seeking to minimise the visitors' awareness of the protests. There were also incidents of police brutality, albeit sometimes in response to violent provocations by demonstrators.

The police misconduct even outraged many local supporters of Mr Chen's visit. Mr Ma, in addition to implementing his campaign pledge to sponsor revision of the Assembly and Parade Law to eliminate protesters' need for advance official permission, should recommend amendments prohibiting the kind of undemocratic police practices that recently occurred and order training designed to enhance police compliance with the law. It is encouraging to note that Democratic Progressive Party chairwoman Tsai Ing-wen, who led the massive opposition demonstration, has subsequently called not only for a government review of police misconduct but also for a re-examination by her own party of its failures to maintain order among its demonstrators. The DPP, if it is to fulfil its essential role as democratic opposition, must not degenerate into an army of street fighters.

Some Taiwanese and foreign critics took the occasion of Mr Chen's visit to call attention to another crucial feature of democratic government - the fair prosecution of current and former officials suspected of corruption. The critics voiced three serious complaints about recent arrests and incommunicado detentions of prominent DPP figures who have served as government officials. They imply that the DPP is being singled out for prosecutions while corruption among Kuomintang leaders is being ignored. They also claim that: most DPP suspects have been held incommunicado without a court examination of the justification for their detentions; and that prosecutors' offices have been leaking detrimental information about the suspects to the media while denying them knowledge of the leaks and a chance to refute the "trial by press".

These practices, it is said, bring into question the political neutrality of the judiciary, and the presumption of innocence and other elements of due process required for the fair and open trials essential to democracy, raising the spectre of the unjust procedures of "the dark days of martial law" (1947-1987). It is not clear whether critics' claims of "selective prosecution" are well founded. Recent arrests may simply reflect massive corruption by the DPP, which dominated executive government for the past eight years - corruption that allegedly reached as high as former president Chen Shui-bian and his family.

Oddly, although during the Chen administration some prosecutions were brought against both DPP and KMT figures, some obvious KMT targets were overlooked despite reportedly thick dossiers compiled by Control Yuan investigators. Mr Ma should appoint a commission of impartial experts to review such prosecutions.

It does not appear that any of the recently detained DPP figures were denied a court hearing or their right to counsel. Moreover, there is a legislative basis for the courts' decisions to detain them incommunicado for up to four months of investigation if there is a reasonable basis for believing that the suspects might otherwise falsify evidence. Yet, in view of the harshness of this pre-indictment sanction and the obstacles it creates to mounting an adequate defence, it ought to be invoked rarely.

Certainly, the Legislative Yuan, or the commission suggested here, should re-examine legislation to strike a new balance between the threat of corruption to a democratic government and the threat of incommunicado detention to civil liberty.

The charge of biased prosecution leaks to the press seems to be the most straightforward of the critics' complaints. Such leaks, which occur in many countries, do appear to have taken place and cannot be allowed in a democratic system.

Jerome A. Cohen is co-director of NYU's US-Asia Law Institute and adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations

I have to wonder what Cohen and his fellows among the US Establishment imagined they were doing when they supported Ma Ying-jeou for President. There's a simple formula: the closer Taiwan gets to China, the more civil liberties here will have to be suppressed. When Taiwan is China, as during the martial law era, civil liberties are completely suppressed. Still, criticism of any kind, however lukewarm, is welcome, and definitely preferable to silence.

Cohen's piece is highly apologetic and defensive, possibly because Cohen strongly supported Ma and the KMT in the 2008 Presidential election and now bears, in some ghostly way, at least a moral responsibility for what is happening ("It is not clear whether critics' claims of "selective prosecution" are well founded. Recent arrests may simply reflect massive corruption by the DPP, which dominated executive government for the past eight years - corruption that allegedly reached as high as former president Chen Shui-bian and his family.") ROFL. Detainee Su Chih-fen, Yunlin County Commissioner, has no connection to Chen and is an elected official doing her job. It's very clear what's going on -- but at least the international media is starting to wake up to the issue. More articles please!

UPDATE 1: I've decided to keep expanding this post as new commentary rolls in, so it is going to get loooooong. This from the National Review blog...

Things look bad in Taiwan. Former president (2000-2008) Chen Shui-bian has been arrested on corruption charges by the government of his successor (since May this year), Ma Ying-jeou. Chen was pro-autonomy; Ma is much keener on "cross-strait relations." Chen's arrest comes after some ugly scenes last week during a visit to the island by a ChiCom flunky, in aid of further "improving cross-strait relations." There were public protests, dealt with very brutally by the police.

On the corruption charges: I wouldn't be surprised, though the administration has acted very high-handedly in making evidence known, and in its treatment of Chen. He was for example manacled, quite unnecessarily. (See this editorial from today's Taipei Times.) But then, "un-corrupt Taiwan politician" is pretty much an oxymoron, and I doubt Ma's affairs would bear very close scrutiny. His party is the KMT, after all — the party, that is, of the late Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, know in his time to American newspapermen as "General Cash My Check." What's going on here is the criminalization of politics; and if the ChiComs don't have a hand in it somewhere, then their Intelligence and Covert Ops people are not doing what their employers pay them to do.

[Taiwan]

What the Establishment View Is, and How it is Spread

I've been tracking the spread of Robert Scheer's awful bit of writing Taiwan Declares Peace on China, which has spread, Spanish Flu-like, to The Nation (my response at DKOS). One of the things I noted in my reply is that far from using Taiwan as a Cold War stalking horse to advance to some putative WWWIII against China, the Bush Administration and the US Establishment, dazzled by the prospect of money to be made in China, are busy selling out the island to China.

One example of this is the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the Establishment elite think tank whose rosy view of future US-China relations should be read not as a prediction of the coming future, but as a primer on how the things to come will be shaped. Today in the South China Morning Post CFR member Jerome Cohen had a piece on China-Taiwan economic cooperation...you can see where it is going from the first paragraph:

The establishment of direct air and sea links between Taiwan and the mainland and the expansion of mainland tourism to Taiwan have justifiably attracted favourable worldwide attention. Yet these important steps - currently being implemented through cautious but good-faith co-operation on both sides of the Taiwan Strait - represent only the first stage of the greater cross-strait integration made possible by the election of Ma Ying-jeou.

The second stage, which will require implementation of major industrial projects jointly conducted by government-backed organisations on each side, will prove even more challenging. But it has already begun, albeit with little fanfare. Although almost obscured by the exciting progress in transport and tourism, ambitious plans are now under way for co-operation in oil and gas exploration in the Taiwan Strait and elsewhere.

The political implications of Cohen's views should be obvious. What the CFR wants is for Taiwan's political independence to quietly disappear into "economic integration." Most of the piece consists of a review of what has gone on and what is going on, but the last two paragraphs...

Such participation would, of course, enable CNOOC to share the investment risks with CPC. More importantly, because Taipei has long made claims over the Diaoyu Islands and broad areas of the East China Sea that are similar to Beijing's, CPC's entry into the project might increase pressure on Japan to make what Greater China deems a reasonable settlement concerning the disputed resources.

Mr Ma is admirably qualified to lead the Taiwanese side in this effort. He has been closely following this situation since he began to research the international legal problems of East Asia's offshore oil for his doctoral dissertation at Harvard Law School 30 years ago.

I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader what kind of "reasonable settlement" a China made Greater with the annexation of Taiwan might want. One also might reasonably wonder why such a remark is in this article from a CFR member in the first place.

There's a couple of other interesting things about this article I thought I'd point out. The first author is Jerome Cohen of the CFR. The blurb at the bottom says:

Jerome A. Cohen is an NYU law professor and adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Chen Yu-jie is a Taiwan lawyer and the current NYU School of Law Robert L. Bernstein Fellow in International Human Rights

I know you are thinking that Cohen's name is familiar, so I'll relieve your curiosity: Cohen is not just any NYU law professor -- he was Ma Ying-jeou's mentor in college. In other words, pretending to be a dispassionate analysis of events, Cohen is actually invested in them in two very different ways -- as a longtime Ma booster, and as a CFR member who wants to see China annex Taiwan, but ever so quietly so nobody notices, so we all wake up here one morning and find we're Locutus of Borg. When Ma visited the US in 2006, Jerome Cohen was the presider at a Q&A session in which Ma received softball questions. It would have been nice if the article had somewhere indicated the prior relationship between Cohen and Ma.

There's another thing about Jerome Cohen that is interesting. In 1991 Winston Dang (Mandarin Chen) published Taiwangate: Blacklist Policy and Human Rights, a collection of materials relating to the KMT blacklist and its surveillance activities in the United States. In the Preface he wrote:

I can recall one day in 1978, when I attended a seminar at Harvard's Department of East Asian Studies. As the scheduled speaker was from Taiwan, many other Taiwanese students were also present. Dr. Jerome Cohen, a Harvard professor, was seated next to me. While we watched the students fill the room, Professor Cohen leaned towards me and whispered 'There's another KMT spy!" I could not understand why Professor Cohen would reveal his own student as a spy, though, he might have been joking. However, I recognized the Chinese student as someone very active in the publication of the "Boston Newsletter," distributed by the Boston area Chinese Student Association and supported by the authorities in Taiwan. This man had also attended a pro-Taiwanese rally, feigning support for our cause. While at the rally, he and a group of his friends stood apart from the rest of us and remained silent. Some activists recognized his face and chased him away. A few years later, as a man in his early thirties, he went back to Taiwan and accepted a very powerful position in the government.

Winston Dang would go on to become EPA head in the second Chen Administration. The student who "accepted a very powerful position in the government" would go on to....higher things.

[Taiwan]

Waldron, CFR, China

The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the Establishment think tank that conspiracy theorists love to hate, is out with a new report on China that's upbeat on China's rise. Not so fast, says Arthur Waldron, longtime Taiwan friend and China watcher (commentary from this right-wing site):

The report contains much useful factual material and some worthwhile recommendations. Its basic approach, however, tends to discount concerns about China, though not completely by any means, and search for the key to peace in the Pacific in Washington's actions, rather than in changes in Chinese behavior and political system.

Therefore Professor Waldron found himself in disagreement on a series of key points. These included the failure of the report to deal with the fundamental nature of the Chinese regime, a dictatorship having no legal or electoral processes and thus fundamentally wanting in legitimacy; the report's overly optimistic assessment of China's military build up, which he believes is dangerous and clearly targeted on U.S. forces and U.S. allies; an upbeat assessment of the Chinese economy that fails to deal searchingly with the lack of market mechanisms or genuine private entrepreneurship, state allocation of capital through political bank loans leading to bad debt, stock market and property market bubbles, and unwillingness to make the currency convertible. He also noted the report's failure to deal with Taiwan realistically, as a state that will continue to exist as it has, independently now, for more than sixty years, and the need for the world to make a place for it.

Above all, Professor Waldron deplored the reluctance to look forward. Many members of the Task Force believed that China today is stable and on a track of economic and political development that will continue in the future as it has over the past several decades, and that the United States should take an active and affirmative approach to Beijing. While Professor Waldron opposes confrontation and believes that the relationship must be carefully managed in the interests of peace, he is also persuaded that because of the many internal problems China faces, Communist rule there will face a crisis sooner or later, as the Soviet Union did. The West, and Washington not least, were entirely unprepared intellectually and emotionally for the end of the USSR; indeed had not even considered the possibility of Soviet collapse and how we should respond, with the result that it was handled extemporaneously and badly.

Professor Waldron believes that it is essential that the rest of the world be prepared for a likely regime crisis in China. Indeed, thinking about and preparation for this likely eventuality are perhaps the most important and pressing task faced at present by the rest of the world with respect to China.

Waldron's had a couple of really good pieces in the Taipei Times recently, and it is good to see him take a strong stand on the Taiwan issue. When Ma Ying-jeou visited the CFR in '06, they handed him softball questions, whereas conservatives pointed out that his longterm plans were a threat to regional security.

The Council on Foreign Affairs did not publish Waldron's full dissent. It is well-written and informative and worth a read. There are two pages on Taiwan. The scary part is that Waldron's dissent makes it clear that US Establishment thinkers have quietly decided that Taiwan is going to be sold out to China.


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