Taiwan?
That’s why it’s, in my view, best to come up with the lowest denominator, one or two sides to agree. That has to do with just a need for legitimacy.
But both colors try to paint the other in the darkest hue possible.
Wow. I wish I did that.
You formed your first company in junior high?
Eric Chu made this point pretty clear.
Just with the KMT choosing to align themselves a lot more, identifying more with communist party perspectives and growing to some extent anti-Americanism, to some extent, almost loss of hope at the United States. To me it’s just somewhat concerning.
Of course, this is viewing as a binary sense, some kind old cold warrior, the side of a liberal democracy, representative democracy versus authoritarian autocratic systems. If you view these things in this way, then it’s important that Taiwan is at a critical ally, probably the most important ally that ...
What’s that?
My concern is that we’ve alienated a lot of the KMT types.
From the US side, though, I’m really not that worried about the Taiwan side, with one exception. That exception is, from the US side, there’s more things we can do to help promote a united front within Taiwan or a more common vision between…the extremes are going to be hard, ...
Other mantras, “The status quo in the Taiwan Strait is the existence of two legitimate governments,” and keep hitting this to be able to go directly after the core of what Beijing…
The best way to do it is, I’m not saying this is propaganda, you hit mantras. You repeat the same thing over and over again. “Taiwan, under its current ROC Constitution is an independent sovereign state.” There’s a difference between recognition of that.
…is play in a different playing field. You have to figure out what their strategy is, in my view, because they feel threatened. They’re very insecure.
One of the concerns, in my view, coming back to the theme of our visit here, is political warfare. In my view, the best way to counter Communist Party political warfare…
It’s a move in the right direction. In an ideal world, yes, it’s symbolic. Of course, symbolism has a substance.
…live feed in the conferences. I think GTI did one.
Tsai Ing-wen, I believe, and Joseph Wu gave video statements…
How do you do that?
How do you do this?
What effect does this have on social psychology? If you’re in junior high or something and you have one kid who’s just not accepted, it’s like, “You don’t exist.” It just seems like that would have a big effect on a social psychology. I just wondered has there ever been ...
That’s innovative.
You have ROC passport.
On the social aspect though, social psychology, because we look at public perceptions of different things in psychology in general, I just wonder what the effect has been about the lack of…I just wonder how Taiwan people when you can’t even get entrance into the United Nations…
This is going off-topic a little bit. One of the long-term goals has been look at Taiwan and, in the international community, what makes Taiwan unique. How is it different from other places? There’s a lot that one can come up in terms of mountain ranges, susceptibility to natural disasters, ...
People generally aren’t objective. You’re always going to have some subjective assessments of how you perceive things. That reflects that way in reporting. I would assume that that’s also part of a media literacy. If you’re really interested in an issue and you want to get to objective reality, you’ve ...
Media literacy I assume also includes naturally like in Taiwan the “China Times” naturally they’re going to have a perception bias. Same for “Liberty Times”. Same in the US. I switch back and forth between CNN and Fox News. I get a kick out of that. It’s obvious the spins ...
More literate. Yeah, I should be more literate. There’s a basic philosophy in the old days. If a report out of Hong Kong, for example, talking about China, PLA, if that report was 70 percent correct, that’s a good report. In other words, you can have a report that 70 ...
When it comes to media literacy, I should be more educated on this than I am.
The Philippines in interesting because there’s been I would say credible information that it has been a long target of again PLA in terms of infiltration targeting the military. I’m just flabbergasted because a lot goes on with Japan trilateral. I just haven’t seen anything that’s been initiated in terms ...
Our institute has a program. It’s actually State Department Democracy, DRL funded. I get some funding from them and NED. The DRL one is of course rehabilitation of political prisoners. It’s support for LGTBQ rights. Burma’s one of the members. As well, NED side is looking at Chinese political warfare ...
More on the security front but try out a little dialogue to try to get that going with the Philippines. I just wasn’t sure what else was going on already between Taiwan and the Philippines.
On the Philippines issue, just reason why that’s of interest, I’m going there tomorrow, Manila.
Yes.
When you say digital dialogue, there was a conference here maybe a month ago on some digital issue. I forgot what it is. There were representatives from Burma that came. Does this sound familiar? It was an international conference on digital…
What is it called?
[laughs]
Government, maybe 1911. It fundamentally changed with the first direct presidential election. Instinctively, this is a US policy issue. How to articulate that to people is really the challenge.
Ideal vision obviously. It’s a normal relationship. It’s not to support Taiwan independence. You can separate that. US should not support or oppose. It’s to normalize the relationship.
Russell was still there. Did a proposal to MOFA in prospect on actually doing this joint work plan to be able to…
Then you have seven focus areas, and it helps move toward that vision. Then each focus area, of course, has a vision statement, achievable five to seven years, and under each focus area, goals, objectives, and actions.
One of the best ones, I think, was what we called the Joint Work Plan for the Future of US-Taiwan Defense Relations. It used something called strategy to task analysis, which ran, which you have a vision statement, 10, 15 years from now, and the whole process takes a year. ...
Exactly. There’s a precedent for this. It goes back into the history, but I was in DoD for seven years, in charge of US-Taiwan defense relations. Yeah, back in those days, it was a blossoming, because always sitting around doing ideas, crazy ideas that actually never went anywhere – some ...
The bilateral issue.
What happens is without this, you don’t have a means to communicate to populations. American people…It’s a process of negotiation and it’s a process, then, of coming up with a joint statement and issuing it to populations on both sides that you can work together toward a common vision.
I would challenge one to name any other country in which there’s not been a joint statement that’s bilateral. With Taiwan, since 1979, there’s never been a joint statement. It’s always unilateral. The TRA is a unilateral statement. Congressional law is a unilateral statement.
When you look at the manifestations of a normal relationship, obviously an embassy, senior-level business – there are exchanges – one of the most visible manifestations of a normal relationship is the way that two governments communicate. Every single government, you have a joint statement. You’ll have a minister of ...
Let’s say normal. What is a normal relationship? A normal relationship is where we treat Taiwan in the same way that we would Philippines. You have to ratchet it back a bit.
Let’s say for example, picking the year 2030, and you establish a vision statement. Put it in the present tense. Let’s say it is 2030. The United States and Taiwan enjoy normal, stable, and constructive relations. Then you have to define each one.
For those types, there is some vision. They know what they want to be in the future. Beyond that, one of the issues in Taiwan and the US is that there’s very few people that said, “I have a vision for the future.”
