The View from Taiwan

And he writhed inside at what seemed like the cruelty and unfairness of the demand. He had not yet learned that if you do one good deed your reward usually is to be set to do another and harder and better one.
The reliably excellent Wendell Minnick has a couple of stories out this week. The [...]

FAPA Europe is organizing a letter drive on the WHO issue. Details in email below.
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Dear Friends:
As you know, Taiwan is actively seeking to join the WHO (World Health Organization), and this May 19th to 24th, the annual World Health Assembly meeting will be held in Geneva….If you have friends or relatives who are also fluent [...]

A Canadian teacher here lets everyone know that in Taiwan is paradise in a local Canadian newspaper…..
But it is not all bad here. The people are friendly and gentle, there is hardly any petty or violent crime, and the women love white men. It’s also pretty cheap to live here.
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That’s probably the biggest contradiction about [...]

A friend of mind offers this excellent, thoughtful, long and very detailed blog post about the “protests” by Chinese in New Zealand.

“Kill the pig! Cut his throat! Kill the pig! Bash him in!” - William Golding, Lord of the Flies
Sunday afternoon saw Auckland subjected to a mass display of ugly Chinese nationalism. Thousands of [...]

The Nelson Report has the latest from CSIS’ Bonnie Glaser on Ma Ying-jeou’s victory and what the US should be doing. Glaser is normally a first class commentator on Taiwan affairs, but this one is well-below her usual standards….
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CHINA-TAIWAN…with President-elect Ma’s inauguration getting closer, Beijing is still locked in a debate over what, and when [...]

That sucking sound you heard today was for once not jobs going to China but instead, the collective in-breath of the world media. Big news today was that Lai Shin-yuan (賴幸媛), a politician from the “pro-independence” (”surprise choice“; “counter to the pervasive mood of thawing“; “pro-independence figure“) Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU) was appointed to head [...]

The International Affairs Forum offers two pieces that touch on Taiwan this week. The first is a long address by an Indian scholar on Taiwan. It offers a good example, I think, of how Taiwan is understood elsewhere…..an excerpt:
In like manner,although much smaller in area, Taiwan has a much higher level of technological sophistication than [...]

WaPo has an article on the recent offer by China to negotiate with Tibet, and the usual noises of criticism by China’s colonial officialdom of the Dalai Lama…..look at the opening paragraphs:
Less than 24 hours after China offered to meet with an envoy of the Dalai Lama, state-controlled news media on Saturday kept up their [...]

Many news sources are reporting that Andrew Card, with longstanding ties to the Bush family, will be sent to represent the US at Ma’s swearing-in. The Nelson Report, the Washington Insider Report, with the latest on that and the Administration:
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TAIWAN…a final quick note…Administration sources had hinted for some time that the White House would try [...]

A classic piece on the Torch in Oz. The whole thing must be read, from the Chinese guards in a shoving match with Aussie police, to Beijing’s busing in protesters to drown out the pro-democracy voices:
If I hadn’t seen the circus with my own eyes, I’d think the $2 million we spent running a torch [...]

Last year China offered us L’Affaire Kitty Hawk (my long blogpost). Readers may recall that China had denied the US carrier Kitty Hawk entry into Hong Kong port for a normal Thanksgiving visit, an event followed by truculent explanations, but which in the end appeared to be a communciations eff-up. About the same time it [...]

My bud Joel Haas alerted me to this article in El Pais in Spain on China’s backing of bonds for sports arenas, funding of festivals, and other influence buying activities in Central America. This is exactly the same dollar diplomacy that is happening in the South Pacific…..
Ahora la presencia china chispea como una luz amarilla [...]

I’ve been kvetching recently about the tendency to view the China-Taiwan economic relationship in cargo-cult terms, and here today the Asian edition of the Wall Street Journal carried an article today cautioning investors on exaggerating the effects of direct flights (link is behind a pay wall):
[Analysts] believe that even if direct China-Taiwan air links materialize [...]

First, the good stuff. The island’s own Jon Adams has a strong post in a FEER blog about the missiles that those statesmen in China point at the radical corporate lawyer Presidents in Taiwan. He writes:
Fortunately, such scenarios are extremely unlikely. In the next few years, it’s the missiles’ role as a bargaining chip that [...]

In the run-up to the 2000 Taiwan election, the Washington Post featured a short piece by a reporter named John Pomfret, an interview with then-presidential candidate James Soong. Pomfret presented Soong, at that time a lifelong opponent of democracy, as a democratic reformer. I responded with a short letter protesting this mischaracterization of Soong’s political [...]