Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
語言:
English
Photo Credit: Screenshot
A RECENT TRIO of articles in Time Magazine has led to backlash in Taiwan, particularly seeing as the three articles frame current Taiwanese president Lai Ching-te as being dangerously pro-independence. The three articles are by thinktank analyst Lyle Goldstein, retired People’s Liberation Army senior colonel Zhou Bo, and Time editor Charlie Campbell.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, it never occurred to Time that a Taiwanese voice should be included in a discussion about Taiwan’s future, instead confining discussion solely to Westerners and Chinese nationals. This backlash against Taiwan proves ironic–the DPP has long been lambasted by foreign correspondents based in Taiwan for privileging Time Magazine above any other publication when it came to features, interviews, or profiles of heads of state. It is probable that the articles were released ahead of an upcoming meeting between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping in which the two will discuss Taiwan, in an attempt to influence Trump’s decision-making.
Campbell’s article is perhaps the least objectionable, describing Chinese invasion scenarios through the lens of the recent television drama Zero Day Attack. But Goldstein and Zhou’s articles seek to paint Lai Ching-te as a provocateur in cross-strait relations who must be restrained by the Trump administration.
Such views may not surprise when they come from Zhou, after all, a former officer in the PLA. Zhou depicts Lai as, in fact, the aggressor against China. He states that “Lai has prevented cross-strait people-to-people exchanges in the name of ‘opposing China’s united front work.’ He labeled the Chinese mainland as “foreign hostile forces” and outlined 17 strategies to threaten the people in Taiwan who support cross-strait exchanges.”
It is improbable that Zhou would, of course, ever mention the fact that nine Taiwanese vanish or are held each month in China. The same in reverse, of course, cannot be said of Taiwan–at best, several pro-unification influencers who are Chinese nationals married to Taiwanese have had their residency permits canceled. Zhou then goes on to suggest a fundamental weakness in the Taiwanese military, deriding Taiwanese soldiers as “strawberry troops” and argues that Trump should reduce the already-limited diplomatic space that Taiwan has.
It has, unsurprisingly, proved more outraging to those in Taiwan that Goldstein largely echoes Zhou’s talking points. Goldstein begins by suggesting that somehow Lai is aggressive to the US in the manner of, say, imperial Japan by stating that “the U.S. has been burned badly by Asian nationalism more than a few times in the past, and so should act with utmost prudence today”. He then goes on to call Lai “brash” and suggest that Lai has deliberately sought to rock cross-strait tensions in a manner that his predecessor Tsai Ing-wen did not.
To prove Lai’s hawkishness, Goldstein confusingly goes on to cite a Taipei Times article by Courtney Donovan Smith that points to the restrained nature of Lai’s speech, and then the Chinese state-run Global Times. To suggest that Lai has created a partisan and polarized political environment in Taiwan, he further cites an article in The Diplomat by me about allegations of Chinese interference in the recent KMT chair election–failing to note that such allegations came from pro-unification hardliners in the KMT. It is telling that Goldstein only cites sources in English, as well as that any of the Taiwan-based sources he cites, he cites incorrectly–presumably cherry-picking sources that he has not actually read in order to fill out the contours of a pre-existing argument.
Goldstein then, echoing Zhou, goes on to sneer at Taiwan’s military preparedness, suggesting the futility of resistance. That a hypothetical invasion of Taiwan, as described in Campbell’s contribution to the same issue, would be “the most complex military operation in modern history, dwarfing even the D-Day landing of World War II, and must be coordinated by generals who have not waged a major war in over seven decades,” receives scarcely a mention.
Indeed, it proves once again remarkable for Americans as Goldstein–who peer in on Taiwanese politics only occasionally and do so from an extreme distance–to perceive Lai as a pro-independence provocateur in a way that Tsai Ing-wen was not. For one, Lai has studiously stuck to Tsai’s script to avoid rocking cross-strait relations.
But, even then, one notes that such American commentators had previously depicted Tsai herself as being a dangerous provocateur when she actually held power. Tsai was framed as dangerously provocative through actions such as taking a phone call from Donald Trump in an upending of diplomatic precedent in 2016 and allowing for a visit to Taiwan by then-US Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. It is only now that Tsai is safely out of office that she is suddenly seen as a peacemaker in a way that Lai apparently is not.
At the heart of such arguments by Americans, as also seen with a recent New York Times op-ed by Jennifer Kavanaugh, is simply the imperial worldview that sees Taiwan as inconvenient to the machinations of Great Powers to dictate the terms of world peace. Yet, when has it ever been that Great Powers can be counted on to responsibly and rationally come to terms, while dealmaking with the lives of the global majority in order to benefit their own domestic populations? More often than not, even when they arrive at such grand bargains, they simply find other reasons to clash. Here, Taiwan is not a place, simply an inconvenience that must be wished away.