"Taiwan’s US Representative Not 'Satisfied' with Biden’s Support" by John V Walsh

 

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Taiwan’s US Representative Not “Satisfied” with Biden’s Support

Devastation in Ukraine Stokes Fear Among Taiwanese

by John V. Walsh / June 15th, 2023

Bi-khim Hsiao, Taiwan’s Representative in the United States, is a familiar figure in the halls of power but she does not often make public speeches. So a recent talk and press conference by Ms. Hsiao deserve some attention.

The One China Policy, endorsed by the US and UN, does not recognize Taiwan Island as an independent country but as part of China, with the government in Beijing providing the official ambassadors to the US and UN. Hence Hsiao is not an “ambassador” but a “representative,” and her organization is known as the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office (TECRO). Her presence and activities in the US are sensitive points in the US-China relationship, which is why she does not often make public appearances.

We might expect therefore that Hsiao had something of considerable consequence to communicate to an American audience. And so she did, but her message did not center exclusively on Taiwan. Hsiao and the reporters in attendance wished to discuss a country over 8000 km away from Taiwan, almost at the opposite end of Eurasia – Ukraine.

The “Tragedy” of Ukraine in the eyes of Taipei’s Representative

In her opening remarks, Hsiao stated: “The Ukraine war has actually generated a lot more attention and interest in … Taiwan’s defense needs. And so there has been an increase in… initiatives to find ways to support Taiwan so that that tragedy will not be repeated in our scenario.”

“Tragedy” indeed. Hsiao, like everyone else in the world, is well aware of the devastation that has been visited on Ukraine as a result of Biden’s cruel proxy war on Russia using Ukrainians as cannon fodder. The “tragedy” of Ukraine has focused not only Hsiao’s mind but mightily distressed all the people of Taiwan Island. This led to the landslide defeat in the 2022 local elections of Hsiao’s Party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which is the home of secessionist sentiment and hostility to Beijing. The DPP was soundly thrashed by the Kuomintang (KMT), the Party that wishes to maintain the status quo with the mainland, leave in place the “strategic ambiguity” of the One China Policy and take a peaceful approach to Beijing.

The first thing that struck me about the press conference was the unreality of Hsiao’s purpose, bordering on insanity. Here we had Taiwan’s envoy discussing war with Mainland China which has the largest PPP-GDP in the world and 18% of all of humanity. Taiwan’s population is 24 million, and it is the size of Maryland.

The bureau chief of the Christian Science Monitor, and host of the event, expressed a similar incredulity, asking in the opening question: “Russia versus Ukraine is one thing, but China versus Taiwan is a much more extreme example in terms of proportions…. How do you fight back against that?” The unstated assumption is that Taiwan can succeed with the support of the US. But just how true is that? How sound is Biden’s support for Ukraine?

Asked whether she was “satisfied” with Biden’s commitment to Taiwan, Hsiao demurred

Was she “satisfied” with Joe Biden’s commitment to defend Taiwan, queried another reporter. Hsiao demurred, did not answer “yes,” but instead opined that “in the long run, nothing is ever completely satisfactory.” Here Hsiao seemed to be channeling Volodymyr Zelensky, always demanding more, ever disappointed. Such is the unenviable position of a proxy whose function in the end is to be used, not championed.

Hsiao sounded very much like someone who had doubts about US support – doubts perhaps aroused after the resounding and very bloody defeat of the US proxy, Ukraine, in Bakhmut. We can be sure that the same doubts are cropping up in the minds of the Taiwan electorate. And such doubts are likely to play a decisive role in the upcoming elections in 2024 for President and Legislative Yuan, the unicameral legislature for the entire island. Will the more pacific policies supported by the electorate in the 2022 local elections prevail again in choosing island wide officials in 2024?

US arms to Taiwan Island, a provocation to war, must end

Several reporters raised the question whether the US arming of Taiwan Island could be seen as a provocation. In itself this is a step forward for the US press which might be awakening to the fact that US tactics did indeed provoke the war as in Ukraine. Hsiao dodged that question by ignoring the US dimension and speaking instead of Taiwan’s efforts at increased militarization. Of course, little Taiwan acting on its own can scarcely be seen as a threat or serious provocation to China. But it is quite a different story when the weapons and personnel come from the US. After all the US has an enormous military presence in the region and has declared as a matter of policy that its aim is to bring down China. In this circumstance US weapons, military personnel and actions in Taiwan can be a serious provocation indeed.

Although Hsiao spoke in terms of defense not provocation, she herself undermined that way of regarding the US on Taiwan Island. Asked by another reporter whether there was any evidence for Chinese preparation of an invasion of Taiwan Island, Hsiao said there was none. This is hardly surprising since China’s policy is to re-unite peacefully with the Island, a long-term goal.

One clear and simple lesson of the Hsiao press conference is that Mainland China quite reasonably perceives the US arming of Taiwan as a threat and provocation. Thus, the way to peace is to end the US arming of Taiwan. This should be a top priority in the US peace movement, but unfortunately, it does not often receive so much as a mention.

John V. Walsh, @JohnWal97469920, until recently a Professor of Physiology and Neuroscience at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, has written on issues of peace and health care for several independent media. Read other articles by John V..

"Former US natsec advisor: destroy Taiwan semiconductor factories if China invades" by Alexander Rubinstein

Click here for Exit the Cuckoo's Nest's posting standards and aims.  Click here to sign the People's Proclamation and send it to everyone you know. Source: The Grayzone Former US natsec advisor: destroy Taiwan semiconductor factories if China invades ALEXANDER RUBINSTEIN·MARCH 13, 2023 A growing body of evidence suggests that the US would blow up the global economy to prevent China from laying claim to Taiwan’s semiconductor factories. Former White House National Security Advisor Robert C. O’Brien has hinted at a sinister US contingency plan in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Rather than see Taiwan’s semiconductor factories fall into the hands of the Communist Party of China, the US and its allies would simply pull a Nordstream. “The United States and its allies are never going to let those factories fall into Chinese hands,” O’Brien told Semafor, a news outlet that has been funded by jailed Democratic financier Sam Bankman-Fried and his brother. O’Brien went on to compare the destruction of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company’s (TSMC) to Winston Churchill’s bombing of a French naval fleet after the country’s surrender to Nazi Germany. Semiconductors made in Taiwan are necessary for the functioning of everything from smartphones to cars. Taiwan manufactures around 65 percent of the world’s semiconductors and close to 90 percent of advanced chips. Annually, a third of all new computing power generated globally is fabricated in Taiwan. The US National Security Council estimates that the loss of TSMC “could disrupt the world economy to the tune of more than $1 trillion.”  As tensions rise over the Taiwan Strait, the US Treasury Department has published at least two studies on “the overall market impact of an invasion,” while the National Security Council is conducting a study on “semiconductors and US dependencies on TSMC.” TSMC’s advanced chips are used in “all major US defense systems and platforms,” making them an essential building block of American empire. Given these facts, it is highly likely that the destruction of Taiwan’s chip manufacturing plants would be the most damaging act of economic sabotage in history. Having served in senior positions in the three administrations that preceded Biden’s, few private American citizens are better positioned to receive and transmit the views of national security elites than O’Brien. As Donald Trump’s National Security Advisor, he traveled to Arizona in 2020 to congratulate the state’s governor on the opening of a $12 billion TSMC factory in the state, using the appearance as a platform to rail against Chinese communism. “Let us be clear, the Chinese Communist Party is a Marxist-Leninist organization. The Party General Secretary Xi Jinping sees himself as Josef Stalin’s successor,” O’Brien declared. Ironically, it was the global capitalist system that led developing nations to place such strategic assets in non-strategic places like Taiwan. According to William Alan Reinsch, a Senior Advisor at Washington’s leading anti-China think tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), chip manufacturers in the West preferred to place their plants in a “low-wage, nonunion country that probably doesn’t have environmental requirements” to maximize profits at the top. Now, with such a vital industry located just 100 miles from mainland China, O’Brien is joining a chorus of foreign policy hardliners calling for a dog in the manger doctrine. As Bloomberg reported in October 2022, former officials with ties to the Pentagon have urged the Biden administration to destroy Taiwan’s semiconductor industry in the event of a Chinese military assault. The outlet cited Elbridge Colby, a rabidly anti-China former Pentagon official, proclaiming, “We can’t allow such a valuable equity to fall into Chinese hands, I think it would be nuts.” Last year, the US Army War College’s most-downloaded paper called for a similarly ruthless strategy. “To start, the United States and Taiwan should lay plans for a targeted scorched-earth strategy that would render Taiwan not just unattractive if ever seized by force, but positively costly to maintain,” the paper proposed. “This could be done most effectively by threatening to destroy facilities belonging to the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the most important chipmaker in the world and China’s most important supplier.” “An automatic mechanism might be designed, which would be triggered once an invasion was confirmed,” the paper suggested, adding that the US and its allies could “give refuge” to Taiwanese workers in the sector, while Taipei could make “and publicize plans to target the mainland’s chip-fabrication lines using cruise and ballistic missiles, including the Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation facility in Shanghai.” The paper also proposed a “preplanned sanctions campaign against any chip exports to China.” The CSIS think tank ran a recent series of 24 war games pitting the US military against China following a hypothetical invasion of Taiwan in 2026. In the simulations, the US “lost dozens of ships, hundreds of aircraft, and tens of thousands of service members,” while “Taiwan saw its economy devastated.”

ALEXANDER RUBINSTEIN

Alex Rubinstein is an independent reporter on Substack. You can subscribe to get free articles from him delivered to your inbox here. If you want to support his journalism, which is never put behind a paywall, you can give a one-time donation to him through PayPal here or sustain his reporting through Patreon here.

"War with Taiwan? It Would be Our Craziest War Ever." by Ted Rall

  

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Source: The Unz Review

War with Taiwan? It Would be Our Craziest War Ever.

TED RALL • MARCH 17, 2023

 • 1,100 WORDS 

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America and the West have begun promoting the idea of a war against China over Taiwan. If China invades Taiwan, President Joe Biden has said, the U.S. would go further than it has in Ukraine, sending American ground troops as well as weapons. Thirty-seven percent of American voters agree with Biden. But how do you go to war to defend a country from invading itself?

According to the U.S., the United Nations and most of the world — including Taiwan itself — Taiwan is part of China.

Can the U.S. invade Ohio?

Like many other places, Taiwan is in a tough spot caused by decisions made by U.S. policymakers many years ago.

Until 1945, Taiwan was a Japanese colony. The birth certificate of my former father-in-law, an ethnic Taiwanese, read “Taipei, Japan.” The end of World War II brought a breather. Occupation forces withdrew. The Taiwanese expected independence as part of postwar decolonization. But America had other plans.

Across the Taiwan Strait, the Chinese civil war was drawing to a close. Mao Tse-tung’s Communists were beating the far-right Nationalists (KMT) led by Chiang Kai-shek. The Nationalists, looting everything they could carry including China’s gold reserves, jumped aboard U.S. ships helpfully provided by President Harry Truman and fled to Taiwan. The exiled KMT took over, purged and murdered Taiwanese intellectuals and independence advocates and established a vicious authoritarian dictatorship of the type propped up by the U.S. around the globe during the Cold War. There was a remarkably calm transition to democracy following Chiang’s death.

“When,” my father-in-law would ask me during one of our long political discussions, “will the United States give independence to Taiwan?”

“Whether it’s the U.S. splitting from Britain, or East Timor,” I replied, “independence is taken, not given. You declare independence.” About 1,400 Timorese died after declaring independence from Indonesia.

“We can’t do that,” he’d say. “China will invade. Many people will be killed.”

“Maybe they’d invade,” I’d replied. “Maybe not. But there’s no other way.”

The Taiwanese people are unwilling to die, so Taiwan has never declared independence. Since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, the island of Taiwan — whose legal name is the Republic of China — and mainland China have agreed on the legal fiction that Taiwan and China are part of the same country. Beijing calls Taiwan “a renegade province” it wants back in its fold; Taipei’s government, heir to the defeated Nationalist troops who fled to exile across the Taiwan Strait when the Communists seized power in 1949, officially maintains the ridiculous position that someday it will reconquer the mainland.

Mouse eats cat.

Like Kurdistan, Palestine and Pakistani Kashmir, Taiwan lingers in diplomatic purgatory, its people semi-stateless. It enjoys robust economic growth and de facto independence. But it’s not really a country. It has no seat at the U.N. Only 13 nations, most of them tiny — Belize, Haiti, Vatican City, Honduras, the Marshall Islands, Nauru, Palau, Paraguay, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Tuvalu and Guatemala — recognize Taiwan as a country. Even its primary benefactor, the U.S., does not recognize it.

Yet Taiwan is different. Always on the periphery, the Chinese empire’s control of the island waxed and waned in proportion to its political stability and military strength, allowing the Taiwanese as well as the ethnic Han Chinese who migrated there from the mainland, to develop their own arts, food, and political and economic cultures. Seventy years of diplomatic limbo and de facto independence — their own coins, stamps, military — have accelerated those trends and made them feel permanent. They don’t want to be absorbed into the Borg, like Hong Kong.

It isn’t hard to see why Taiwan’s people embrace the strategic ambiguity of diplomatic limbo. Life is good and getting better, money is rolling in, and — bluster aside — China seems unwilling to risk the chaos and economic cost of reclaiming an island it hasn’t had under direct control since the 19th century. Why fix the unbroken?

Except it is a broken situation. You can’t have national pride until you’re a nation. You can’t demand respect unless your people demonstrate courage. Most of all, there’s the question of what the future holds: President Xi Jinping seems smart enough not to try to put the band back together again, at least not via hard (military) power. What about his successor or his successor’s successor?

Every now and then some Taiwanese political theorist gins up a farfetched workaround that promises to deliver independence without the risk of Chinese tanks rolling through Taipei. The 51 Club, founded in 1994 with 51 members, is a Taiwanese organization dedicated to the goal of turning the island into the 51st state of the United States. Presto! War with Taiwan is war against the United States — something the Chinese would never want.

The idea hasn’t exactly caught fire. “All the PLA (People’s Liberation Army) has to do is lob a few missiles over, and people will be swarming to us,” founder David Choi predicted in 1994. No missiles yet.

Annette Lu, former vice president of Taiwan under the KMT, promotes One Zhonghua, a scheme under which Taiwan and China would form an economic commonwealth like the European Union, with economic integration and political independence. Neither the Chinese nor the Taiwanese are on board.

There’s also a theory that the U.S. is, under international law, has been — and still is — the administrator of Taiwan since World War II. In 1945, the U.S. appointed Chiang’s Republic of China (KMT) to administer Taiwan — think of it like a sublet. The San Francisco Peace Treaty didn’t go into effect until seven years later, in 1952. “The treaty never mentioned who would receive Taiwan. Japan surrendered its former colony, but it never said to whom,” writes The Taipei Times. So who gets it? “Regarding Taiwan, the official U.S. position was, is and continues to be that it is ‘undecided.'” Biden may be hanging his hat on this bit of unfinished business.

From a domestic U.S. political perspective, however, whatever enthusiasm Americans have for defending Taiwan would vanish as soon as they learn that we would be risking World War III over a “country” that isn’t even a country — and doesn’t claim to be. The United States has gotten itself into a lot of stupid wars, but this would be the craziest one ever.

Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis.

"If Zelensky Called Taiwan’s Prez Tsai after Her Electoral Rout …" by John V Walsh

 

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If Zelensky Called Taiwan’s Prez Tsai after Her Electoral Rout …

Fallout from Tsai Ing-wen’s massive defeat in the Nov 26 Taiwan Local Elections

by John V. Walsh / December 5th, 2022

In recent local elections in Taiwan, the Party of President Tsai Ing-wen, the US-allied, pro-secessionist candidate lost badly. We have obtained a recording of a phone conversation that she received from Ukraine’s Volodymor Zelensky in the wake of that defeat.

Volodymor Zelensky: Tsai, how are you doing? We have not spoken in months. Sorry for the delay in answering your call earlier. We were in another photoshoot for Vogue.

Tsai Ing-wen: (Sobs into the phone). Hello, Voldodya.

Zelensky: Get hold of yourself, Tsai. Why are you crying? Last time we spoke, I was the one crying over NATO’s refusal to admit us, a refusal that stands and leaves us holding the bag.

Tsai (Sobs more): On November 26, we had island-wide local elections for mayors and county officials. My Party, the Democratic Peoples Party, DPP, the heart of the US-backed secessionist movement lost in a landslide. The Mainland friendly KMT (Kuomintang) won overwhelmingly. It was a catastrophe – both for me and the DPP.

Zelensky: Tsai, don’t be so upset. How bad was it?

Tsai: Volodya, It was a blood bath. There are 6 key municipalities; we lost 4, including two key ones, Taipei, the capital, and Taoyuan, both in the populous north.

Of the total of 21 county and municipal jurisdictions, we won only 5!

Zelensky: I’m astonished to hear that. I knew nothing about it. I keep up with the American press, even slog through the tedious NYT every day.

Tsai: (Cheers up a bit, with a smile in her voice). Well the Western media coverage, or should I say non-coverage, is a bright spot. You know: If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears, etc. I don’t know how the Western governments control the info so well.

The Western press gave this debacle a brief, one day, back page story – a relief for me. Most outlets said nothing of it. I saw not a word of it in the print edition of the NYT which I also trudge through daily. Quite amazing since we have become the front line of the US effort to bring down China.

Zelensky: Yes, we proxies for the US get great coverage – never the bad, only the good.

I can almost dictate the stories to the Western media on Ukraine.

But look Tsai, those were only local elections with local issues.

Don’t consider it a referendum on your noble efforts at secession. It seems to me that these are entirely different matters.

Tsai: Not exactly, Volodya. I campaigned for the Party’s candidates on the basis of my secessionist policy. I turned the elections into a referendum on my Party’s policy!

Let me read you this assessment quoted by the South China Morning Post:

Wang Kung-yi, head of the Taiwan International Strategic Study Society, a Taipei-based think tank, said the results indicated voters were punishing the Tsai administration. “The election campaign turned into a patriotism race in the latter stages after Tsai defined the polls as a way of standing up to Beijing and safeguarding Taiwan.”

Zelensky: Tsai! Why did you do that? I thought that the overwhelming majority in Taiwan wanted to maintain the status quo, the One China Principle,” Strategic Ambiguity,” as the American pundits call it. That has long been the case.

Tsai: Well, Volodya, my approach is to poke the Panda every chance I get. It keeps the dollars and weapons flowing in.

But you have a point. In fact, as of last June the number favoring the status quo stood at a staggering 82.1%, a sentiment which has been much the same for decades. And you will be interested to know that the number was unchanged from last November before the war in Ukraine. So the coverage of the war in Ukraine has certainly not made Taiwanese eager to be Ukraine 2.0.

In addition, my Party, the DPP, had also been discussing the idea of increasing mandatory military service. Needless to say, that is not a popular idea among young voters on whom my Party is relying. But there is always a push by the neocon Americans in charge to do such things. Of course, I want to push more militarization – as I see it, you can never get enough. I thought, however, this was not the most opportune time for that approach. But it is difficult to disagree with the CIA operatives. You know, the Americans make you an offer you cannot refuse.

Zelensky: I sure do. I got one of those offers after I ran as a peace candidate and was told to change course. And I got another such “offer” from Boris Johnson last April in Istanbul when we nearly came to an agreement with Russia. He was a messenger boy for the US. It was not the course that we were choosing but one that was imposed upon us.

That sabotage of negotiations has cost us dearly – in tens of thousands of soldiers lost. I cannot give you the numbers – breach of secrets. But I can say that European Commission President Von der Leyen put it at 100,000 in a recent speech that was quickly altered on the web to omit that segment. 100,000, Tsai!

That is stirring up discontent; makes it harder to march troops into the artillery barrages. Not good for my career. And if your citizens see that, I suspect that they will have considerably less appetite for a role as US proxy. I am not surprised that the video was scrubbed in the blink of an eye. It is not a good message to be sending out to future proxies.

Tsai: I wish you had not mentioned Boris Johnson. After I led my Party to those huge losses, I had to resign the Party leadership. It was that bad. I was completely humiliated. I remain President but now I am without real power – just like Boris was for weeks before his final ouster. And I can’t run again in 2024; I am term limited out. I am now useless to the US – and that is very scary. I know very well what happened to President Diem of Vietnam when the Americans came to see him as a liability. (Her voice quakes noticeably with fear.)

Zelensky: Well, to paraphrase Kissinger, to be an ally of the US can be dangerous – as the Europeans have learned. To be a proxy can be fatal. But the celebrity status and money are great! Another kind of offer that is hard to refuse. The largesse of the US MIC knows few bounds. I don’t know how they get the taxpayers to swallow it.

And I salute you on your noble efforts at secession. Of course, that does not apply to the secessions of Donetsk and Luhansk. Entirely different matters.

I must go, Tsai. My CIA “advisor” has summoned me. And I have to look at brochures for some properties in Monaco.

Tsai: Good-bye, Volodya. I must visit more people to make apologies for the debacle. And I should really be looking into those cushy sinecures at Harvard and Stanford. That will get me out of here before the false flag op to be pinned on Beijing. Maybe I can also do some photoshoots then.

Note to the cult of the literal minded. The above is satire.

Image credit: Global Times.

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John V. Walsh, @JohnWal97469920, until recently a Professor of Physiology and Neuroscience at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, has written on issues of peace and health care for several independent media. Read other articles by John V..

Source: Dissident Voice