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US Senator John Cornyn is again trying to pressure US President Barack Obama to sell F-16C/D aircraft to Taiwan. This time, he has issued a thinly veiled threat to hold up the nomination of Mark Lippert, a former Obama aide, to be US assistant secretary of defense for Asian and Pacific security affairs. In order to approve the Lippert nomination, Cornyn is demanding that the White House produce a clear plan for addressing Taiwans aging and inadequate fleet of fighter jets. Using an almost identical tactic two months ago, Cornyn forced the Obama administration to publicly announce its decision on pending arms sales to Taiwan. On that occasion, the president refused to sell the F-16C/Ds, but agreed instead to update the nations aging fleet of F-16A/Bs.
Just one day after the US House Committee on Foreign Affairs unanimously supported a bill that would force Obama to sell the F-16C/D aircraft to Taiwan and a day after the first hearing on Lipperts nomination, Cornyn rushed his letter up Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House. Cornyn said in the letter that the failure to sell F-16C/Ds to Taiwan sends a message that the US is willing to abandon our friends in the face of Communist Chinas intimidation tactics. This is a dangerous state of affairs for both Taiwan and the US. Understandably, your decision to withhold from Taiwan the military assistance it needs most has been interpreted by many as a sign of Chinas growing international clout and Americas relative strategic decline, he added.
According to Cornyn, a total of 47 Democrats and Republicans in the Senate and 181 Democrats and Republicans in the House have publicly declared their support for the sale of the F-16C/Ds to Taiwan. Americas credibility in the Asia-Pacific region is at risk, and our policy towards Taiwan is symbolic of our overall position and influence there, Cornyn said in the letter. The US should neither give in to intimidation and threats from China, nor should we cede regional leadership. We must not abandon the free people of Taiwan and our longstanding strategic interest in the stability of East Asia. In closing the letter, Cornyn again raised the Lippert nomination.
He said he hopes to support the confirmation of Lippert, but he first wants Obama to decide on a near-term course of action to address Taiwans looming fighter shortfall, and provide me with the specific actions you intend to take. Holding the Lippert nomination to ransom will almost certainly trigger a quick reply and at the very least keep the F-16 issue on the presidents desk. The letter comes amid continuing concern among Taiwan supporters in the US over the growing number of academics and analysts who appear to favor sacrificing Taiwan to improve relations with China.
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The irony of it all is that the scoundrel is not really a crook, but the idiot has indeed proven to be the fool we thought he was all along. Pan-blue voters are clear about his stupidity, and loathe his I love Taiwan propaganda, but they still voted for him even as they were crying about it. The nightmare of this incompetent fool running the nation has become our reality, and even People First Party (PFP) Chairman James Soong, who had already ostensibly retired from electioneering, has risen again, commencing the battle between the two candidates who claim Chinas Hunan Province as their ancestral home.
Former premier Hau Pei-tsun has called Soongs comeback monkey business, thus giving pan-blue supporters their fool fighting their own monkey. However, the deep-blue camp has raised the stakes, saying supporters should continue to support this idiot even if they detest him. The orthodox deep-blue supporters have forgotten where they come from. They must have never read The Four Books and Five Classics, a collection of Confucian writings dating back to 300 BC, and neither do they understand the importance of selecting a wise and capable candidate according to what the Chinese philosophers Confucius and Mencius wrote about choosing ones leaders.
It is no wonder Soong has called them gangsters. He started out in the KMT, so of course he is well aware of the partys dark underbelly and really hit the nail on the head with this one the KMT is a party of gangsters. While the gangster boss is now calling Soong a troublemaker, he is also suspected of betraying Taiwan with his peace accord proposal, and has uttered some balderdash about the cardinal sin of being a Mainlander in an attempt to manipulate those of his supporters who are not satisfied with his performance.
This gangster mentality and the constant attempts to bully Taiwanese into identifying with China instead of Taiwan has always been the KMTs greatest sin. However, our foolish presidents cardinal sin is his inability to realize how difficult life is for the average person, and wasting taxpayers hard-earned money with this corrupt and inept system. While these gangsters and their sins are remnants of the past, democracy provides us with choices concerning our future.
More Voters must rid Taiwan of gangster president - Taipei Times
This year could be a pivotal one for the direction Taiwan takes. One path is further integration into the Peoples Republic of China (PRC), a process already rapidly advanced under the administration of President Ma Ying-jeou of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). A second path is maintaining the status quo of a de facto independent nation, a policy favored by an overwhelming majority of Taiwanese in recent polls. A third path could see a gradual drift toward declaring political independence from either China (the PRC or the Republic of China), a decision that the PRC threatens to oppose with military action.
The choice Taiwan makes will depend on the outcome of todays presidential election, between Ma, seeking a second term, and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen. What happens in the months following todays election could have momentous implications for all. Although geographically small, Taiwan is anything but insignificant in the global economy. Indeed, the nations economic importance is far out of proportion to both its geographic size (smaller than the Netherlands) and its population of about 23 million. Much of Taiwans growth and prosperity in recent decades has come from the electronics industry. The nation is a global pivotal player in the design and production of much of the hardware and peripherals that come from that industry.
However, behind its economic achievements, Taiwan was facing severe challenges as early as the 1990s, with rising wages, costly environmental regulations, high land prices and growing international competition. Taiwanese companies had no choice but to seek cheaper production sites and chose to offshore, primarily in China. Critics saw the move as Taiwan getting caught in the spiders web. Therefore, during the next two decades, Taiwans foreign trade and foreign direct investment (FDI) gradually shifted away from its reliance on the US and Japan, which had largely fueled the nations early growth, to growing dependence on China, irony of ironies. Today, China accounts for the largest share (85 percent) of Taiwans outward FDI and it is the nations major trading partner. About 2 million Taiwanese businesspeople and their dependents live in China. Taiwan and China now have direct transport and postal links.
Economic integration has gone far.
Another of Taiwans great ironies is that in the 2008 presidential election, Taiwanese voters brought back to power the very group (the KMT) that had so ruthlessly ruled the nation for about 40 years under martial law and fought to prevent real democratic reform. Unfortunately, the DPP, which won the presidency in 2000, failed to live up to peoples expectations in its eight years in power. Since 2008, Ma and his government have tried to reinvigorate the economy by tying Taiwan even closer to China.
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US academics yesterday emphasized the importance of Taiwan economically and strategically to the US in its rebalancing strategy to return to Asia and said more needed to be done to strengthen bilateral ties. Wallace Gregson, who served as US assistant secretary of defense for Asian and Pacific security affairs from May 2009 until April last year, told a forum in Taipei that US leadership was essential in an increasingly complex world to promote global peace and prosperity. The presence of the US in the Asia-Pacific region and the efforts it has made in the region are important, as they help shape the geopolitical climate and make the US immediately available to respond to its needs, he said. The US and the world need China to be a successful contributor to the international system, but at the same time, the US needs to work with our allies and friends and be there to support their interests, Gregson said.
Answering a question from the audience, Gregson dismissed the idea of the US abandoning Taiwan to foster a better relationship with China. Abandon Taiwan? Absolutely not, he said, adding that the US had vital interests in the region. Gregson was speaking at a forum on US Strategy in Asia and Taiwans Future hosted by the US-based think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and Tamkang Universitys Graduate Institute of International Affairs and Strategic Studies. At a roundtable discussion, US economic adviser Kevin Nealer said the US would like to see Taiwan join the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) in its formative stage to help shape the regional economy. We think its in our interests. We think its in yours, he said.
Abe Denmark, a senior project director for political and security affairs at the National Bureau of Asian Research, presented his views on the US new strategic guidance released by the US Department of Defense earlier this year. Denmark said the US rebalancing strategy in Asia has three implications for Taiwan although Taiwan is not specifically mentioned in the guidance. The US is not leaving Asia, the US is a reliable partner, and I think its safe to say that the US will continue to provide defense articles to Taiwan, he said. Asked how the US would respond if the presence of Chinese warships increased, Denmark said the problem lies more in how China would use its warships than in the number of warships. The US will be encouraging if China chooses to use its military power in a way that is conducive to a healthy and strong international system, while the US will respond to it very negatively if China uses its military in a more aggressive way, Denmark said.
Bonnie Glaser, a senior fellow with the CSIS Freeman Chair in China Studies, said she preferred referring to the US-China relationship as the most consequential relationship in the world, rather than the most important relationship as many people do, because if it becomes an intense global strategic competition, it will undoubtedly have a very negative impact on the rest of the world. The US-China relationship is characterized by competition some healthy, some unhealthy certainly by mistrust, which I believe is growing, and also by interdependence, which is also growing, and in some way it is a stabilizing factor, Glaser said. She said that there is limited cooperation between the US and China as they have converging and overlapping interests on issues like counterpiracy, counterterrorism, counterproliferation, rebalancing the global economy and so on, despite different approaches.
More US experts say Taiwan a vital interest - Taipei Times
Protesters shouted for President Ma to leave office as they marched through central Taipei. Some people beat drums and flashed ceremonial knives to vent their anger. One group pushed empty baby strollers to protest the high cost of raising children. They also asked President Ma to reconsider utility price hikes and scrap part of a retirement system for government employees. Opposition Democratic Progressive Party Deputy Secretary-General Lin You-chang says a six-month backlog of unmet demands led to the event Sunday. He says these sources of public anger have been accumulating, making now the right time to call for action. President Ma has been in office since 2008 and was re-elected in 2012 for a second and, by law, final term. His Nationalist Party also controls parliament.
Organizers placed the protest head count at 150,000, though outside estimates put the figure closer to 50,000. Younger Taiwanese say housing prices are too high for first-time buyers in two of the islands biggest cities. Those worries followed reports in 2011 of a widening wealth gap, one reason that lower middle-class couples give for not having babies. State-controlled electricity and gasoline prices both went up last year, as well. The opposition also says that 80 percent of Taiwanese want the government to cut back an old scheme for annual bonuses for retired military and civil servants.
A recent poll by local television network TVBS found the presidents approval rating just 13 percent, the lowest since he took office. Chen Yu-liu, a 49-year-old housewife who is out of work, says labor issues have stirred public anger. She says retirement schemes are flawed. Common laborers do not get anything, and people have to put off retirement. College graduates can not find work and salaries have fallen for 14 years, Chen adds, citing a long list of problems.
The government expects 2012 economic growth to come in at less than 2 percent, slower than original forecasts. Officials point to a weak global economy, which in turn cools demand for Taiwanese exports such as machinery and consumer electronics. President Ma has looked largely to Taiwans old political rival China for trade, transit and investment deals that could propel the island economy. The two sides have signed 18 accords, boosting two-way trade to $100 billion in the first 10 months of last year. The presidents spokesman said Sunday that Ma had no comment on the rally.
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