In yesterday’s riot against the pension reformation, some fifty veterans were arrested. Among them were a few from Taiwan’s ‘Seal’ and ‘Green Beret’ units. It’s not an open secret that US special forces helped a lot with the establishment and training of Taiwan speicial forces.
It’s also not a secret that Taiwan special forces, as every intelligence agency, are controlled by elite mainlanders. They had been used in the suppression of democracy before. Now the ruling party DPP, which they have had great hatred toward, wants to cut their pension. Will their violent yester escalate to a guerrela war in the near future? Similar sentiment and development has happened in post-Sadam Iraq.
What role has China played in yesterday’s veteran protest? What preparation has the AIT had? Will the new AIT Neihu HQ need to station more marines?
That’s a pretty thrown-together mishmash so I’ll try and tackle the last two questions.
AIT doesn’t get involved between Taiwan and their government. The USA supports a Democratic Taiwan including pensioners complaining about losing their benefits. If anything, the USA would say go for it democratic people do whatever you want including protesting.
AIT a small finger tip of America anyway.
Marines at US embassies are not there to protect the Americans in the country. They are there as a small contingency to protect the embassy or AIT in this case. There could never be enough Marine stationed at AIT to do anything.
You mean, will there be a violent insurgence in which hundreds of thousands are killed in endless waves of shocking carnage and human misery? Because, of course not.
Sorry, I don’t suffer this kind of hyperbolic sensationalism well. The premise is ridiculous and borderline offensive. If you had a salient point to make, it’d be better to not start by predicting Taiwan will become as broken as one of the most failed countries in the world.
Great topic. The key word is “de-baathification”. The ideology of a Chinese caliphate resembles or mirrors very much Political-Islam in terms of their end goal. Basically a revisionist anti-West world order
How did we arrive at this point? That’s because US in the early mid-90s could not “set the record straight” by recognizing (in whatever way) Lee Teng-Hui’s Taiwan. And without recognizing Lee’s Taiwan US also permanently caused China to NOT democratize. Rather China became the pillar and star of an Anti-US coalition.
Sorry sofun and VOT, your Mad Max Iraqi Taiwan scenarios are vague and confusing.
There are so many differences between Taiwan and Iraq – Taiwan would be more like Kuwait, which Saddam claimed as Iraqi territory, but unlike Taiwan, Kuwait was generally accepted as a real country. And so on.
If you want a serious discussion, you need to explain how your vision of the future works – who participates in the war, who wins, who starts the 'insurgency" and so on.
As you know China’s territorial ambition and claims know no fixed boundaries because it is based on an ideology of “historical grievances”. SinceUS foreign policy makers shunned LTH and adopted a wholesale appeasement policy, China’s grievances have now grown far beyond Taiwan to include the entire South China Sea and East China Sea. Just like Political-Islam or ISIL, it is useless to talk about at what point would China be satisfied with its territory since from their perspective the end game is about a world order that restores the Chinese glory (which entails a US concession to US’ own decline).
Therefore it’s false to treat Taiwan as an isolated case like Kuwait, and foolish to see Taiwan only in terms of an area demarcated by the Taiwanese borders or Taiwanese ADIZ.
That still doesn’t make sense in the context of VOT’s Iraq analogy. The IS was created in a (kind of) power vacuum after an invasion etc. You’re talking about China itself, not a Confucian State that would arise in post-war Taiwan. If Beijing wins the war, why would a pro-Beijing rogue regime bother trying to exist in Taiwan?
the aftermath of a de-baathification turning into ISIS could have been predicted just by looking at how the KMT rebelled against LTH’s (and CSB’s) democratic Taiwan in 2000, where the KMT en masse switched their allegiance from at least superficially “democratization” to the People’s Republic of China, and also in that process the bitter KMT indoctrinated the Chinese mainland with the most radical stream of Chinese Nationalism. Within this 15 year timeframe, China went from so-called Internationalist(extreme left) to Chinese Fascism (extreme right), and correspondingly China’s claim went from merely Taiwan to all the lost territories of their past “Qing Empire”. The parallel is quite noteworthy.
Those who formerly enjoyed a privileged position of minority-rule in a totalitarian party-state, upon and after democratization, feel “disenfranchised” and begin to seek a new kind of ideology (actually just an old ideology because they are referencing to their historical holly text) in order to overthrow the world order that causes their perceived grievances.
Yup that Russian comparison works too. Still, basically the same undercurrent of various revisionist ideologies seeking to right the wrong of liberal-democratic world order or the victory of cold war.
I get it: this is like one of those facebook things where you type “dog eats” then auto complete the sentence picking the third suggested word or something.
He went:“will Taiwan” and the rest was just scripted magic.
The key take-away is that just as protesters here have never really internalized the ideal of “peaceful protest,” neither do many military people take their oaths very seriously.
