If you play with fire you should at the very least try to rule out fatal mistakes. But China’s wide-ranging military maneuvers around Taiwan leave ample room for misunderstandings, as demonstrated by five Chinese missiles that struck Japan’s exclusive economic zone on Thursday. The legal significance of these rather large zones is debatable. However, it is not at all good manners to fire missiles in the direction of a neighbor and then still brazenly question its territory instead of apologizing – especially since Japan wasn’t even involved in the current scuffle over Nancy Pelosi. Now Tokyo is also on the barricades.
David Demes reports for us from Taiwan on how the maneuvers are arriving at the center of the storm and what the government is doing to protect the island’s security despite China’s show of force. Taiwan’s armed forces face a test that requires strong nerves. If necessary, they must show limits to the advance of the People’s Liberation Army as part of their maneuvers. But they must not react with aggression, because then disaster threatens.
We also took a look at what the large maneuvers mean for the supply chains. Taiwan is, after all, the world’s biggest supplier of microchips. As of Thursday evening, however, experts are giving the all-clear. Cargo ships have looked for new routes or are simply delaying their passage until everything is over, as Nico Beckert reports. However, that could quickly change if China expands the maneuvers even further.
In the aftermath of Pelosi’s now historic Taiwan visit, we look at why she met Wu’er Kaixi, a 1989 dissident who lives in exile on the island.
Shaking her head, Abigail Chou watched at midday on Thursday as tourists equipped with binoculars and telephoto lenses tried to catch a glimpse of Chinese military maneuvers off Taiwan’s coast. “Very strange,” the 32-year-old thinks. “People should know that they can’t see anything from here.” Nowhere can you get closer to Chinese maneuvers than here at the southwestern tip of the small island of Hsiao-Liu-Chiu (小琉球), a popular destination off the coast of the port city of Kaohsiung. From here, it is only 9.5 kilometers to the Chinese-designated restricted military zone.
The retaliation for the Taiwan visit by top US politician Nancy Pelosi (China.Table reported) came as announced with a lot of military thunder:
The missiles in particular drew attention. China called the missile tests a complete success and declared this part of the maneuvers over in the afternoon. Further military maneuvers are to take place until Sunday noon local time. In Taiwan, however, there was no great panic over the missile tests. Yet the missile tests went beyond the scale of military operations during the 1996 Taiwan Strait crisis, according to a Japanese Defense Ministry report released in the evening.
According to Japan’s military, four missiles are believed to have been fired from positions in Fujian province and to have flown over the main island of Taiwan. The attached graphic shows what China’s intentions must have been with this test: The missiles are said to have flown directly over the capital Taipei. A massive escalation compared to the year 1996.
Neither the Chinese nor the Taiwanese side had confirmed whether or not the Chinese missiles flew over Taiwanese airspace. Because of their altitude, Taiwan was probably unable to intercept the missiles. The government’s air strike warning system also remained silent. Perhaps in order to not unsettle the population. At what altitude a country’s “air sovereignty” ends is disputed worldwide. Nevertheless, the overflight of a Chinese missile over Taiwanese territory is a novelty.
On Beigan Island (北竿) in northwestern Taiwan, some islanders were able to observe Chinese missiles being fired from the Chinese mainland a few kilometers away in the afternoon. But not everywhere in Taiwan were the maneuvers observed this closely. “I was at the office all day today and only found out about it later,” 33-year-old Chen Kao-liang (name changed by editor) told China.Table in the evening. Because China has not massed troops or declared a state of emergency on the coast, they are not taking the threat seriously.
Abigail Chou is not too worried either, even though the Chinese maneuvers are so close to her adopted home of Hsiao-Liu-Chiu. The 32-year-old runs a small bed-and-breakfast on the tiny island off Taiwan’s southern coast. “We grew up with this threat from China, after all,” the Taipei native said. “China just wants to show its strength, it’s not really about us at all.”
Taiwan’s military was on special alert but did not respond proactively to the provocations from China. It was prepared and did not shy away from military conflict; however, it would not contribute to escalation or provoke conflict, according to the Ministry of Defense in Taipei. In a video address released late in the evening, President Tsai Ing-wen reaffirmed that course, saying, “We will firmly defend our sovereignty and national security and continue to hold the line of defense for democracy and freedom.”
Both the Ministry of Defense and the president specifically pointed to the danger of disinformation campaigns and psychological warfare to morale and cohesion among the population. Already on Wednesday, screens at train stations and grocery stores had been taken over by Chinese hackers, spreading messages hostile to Pelosi. The population should not fall for fake news and should stick to the pronouncements of official government agencies for correct information.
The military’s passive attitude was criticized by well-known retired Army Major General Yu Pei-chen, among others. He warned that next time China could move even closer to Taiwan if the People’s Liberation Army was not firmly confronted now. Lin Ying-yu pointed out the need to continue to closely monitor the upcoming air force and navy maneuvers. The night exercises, in particular, carry the danger of a surprise attack.
People in Taiwan are aware of the risk of escalation but are not panicking. On Thursday, a police department application was the most downloaded app in the Apple app store. One of its key features: A map of bomb shelters.
The logistics, trade, import, and export sectors have become thin-skinned in recent years. Too often, global politics and pandemics have thrown their supply schedules out of sync. So news of extended naval operations around Taiwan has caused a scare.
Will chips from Taiwan now become scarce? Will Taiwanese goods be delayed from reaching Europe? Is there a risk of container congestion at important global ports such as Kaohsiung, Anping, Keelung, or Taipei? After all, the Taiwan Strait is one of the busiest shipping routes in the region.
But experts sound the all-clear for now. “If the military maneuvers only last a short time and are not too extensive, then the disruptions will be mostly limited,” economist Wan-Hsin Liu of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel) told China.Table. There would be alternative routes. The planned duration of the exercises of three days is also within the range that freight companies can still easily accept as a delay.
At any rate, the military exercises have not yet caused any major delays or supply chain problems on the first day. Some shipping companies immediately rerouted their ships to alternative routes after the announcement. Taiwan’s shipping authorities already provided them with options to avoid the danger zones by a wide margin.
Some freighters have also changed their destination and are now calling at ports on the mainland. Others have reduced their speed to reach the critical zones by the weekend after the exercises have ended. However, most freighters simply bypass areas where military exercises are being held.
Ships without a direct destination on Taiwan are also affected. Almost half of the world’s container ships passed through the Taiwan Strait last year, Bloomberg reports. Thus, the restricted zones not only hinder Taiwan traffic, but also ships from Japan, South Korea, and China with destinations in Europe or the United States.
But even if the ships cannot pass through the Taiwan Strait and instead pass by the eastern flank of the island, the delays are only about three days. Such delays are not uncommon in global shipping. Extreme weather, such as typhoons, regularly cause similar deviations.
However, some uncertainty remains. Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the US House of Representatives, only spent a few hours in Taiwan. Her visit, however, has left the region in turmoil. The military exercises around Taiwan have already reached a new dimension. Whether the People’s Republic will be content with that remains to be seen. The designation of the maneuver zones already looks like a preparatory exercise for a naval blockade of Taiwan. According to Taiwanese media, this is exactly how Chinese General Meng Xiangjun portrays the situation.
If China were to extend the exercises, problems might emerge after all. Companies and logisticians would have to be prepared for “considerable disruptions in global supply chains and thus also in the global economy,” according to globalization expert Liu from the IfW. However, experts believe it is too early to be too alarmed. “We might be concerned if the drills become longer and more intense to impact supply chains, but there is no sign of that happening now,” says Huang Huiming, a fund manager at Nanjing Jing Heng Investment Management.
However, even dealing with the scenario is quite relevant in light of the experience of the past few years. Taiwan possesses the world’s largest production base for microchips. The market leader Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSMC) alone holds a share of 53 percent.
According to Liu, semiconductors accounted for a good 51 percent of Taiwanese exports in the first half of the year. If these components are missing, the assembly lines in Germany will also come to a standstill. As a result, the German economy sees a strong dependence on Taiwan. Above all, it is aware of the possibility of indirect effects caused by outages in the People’s Republic (China.Table reported) and was already an issue before the current crisis.
China also still has the option of extending the sanctions to other Taiwanese commodity groups imposed after Pelosi’s visit. This scenario would involve a customs tricks instead of a naval blockade. China is already rejecting goods on various questionable grounds (China.Table reported).
So far, the food and construction industries have been most affected. But product groups relevant to manufacturing could also become the target of revenge for Pelosi’s provocation. This would hit Taiwan hard. The People’s Republic is the island’s largest trading partner. Last year, it shipped goods worth just under $190 billion to China. Germany accounted for a good $245 billion.
However, far-reaching sanctions are currently considered unlikely. China would also hurt itself by isolating Taiwan economically. The People’s Republic is also dependent on semiconductors from Taiwan (China.Table reported).
Over the past 70 years, average temperatures in China have risen nearly twice as fast as in the rest of the world, according to the National Meteorological Service. Since 1951, temperatures in the People’s Republic have risen 0.26 degrees per decade, compared with a global increase of 0.15 degrees, according to the annual report released Thursday. “In the future, the increase in regional average temperatures in China will be significantly higher than the world,” said Yuan Jiashuang, Vice Director of China’s National Climate Center (NCC). China is a “sensitive region” regarding global climate change, he explains. That could have an impact on water reserves, the ecosystem, and harvests.
Parts of the People’s Republic have already struggled with extreme temperatures of over 44 degrees for weeks. These include the provinces of Yunnan in the southwest and Hebei in the country’s north. A total of 131 weather stations in China report temperatures on par with or exceeding previous records. Last year, 62 weather stations reported. Coastal water levels reached their highest level since 1980, according to the climate report, and the melting of glaciers and sea ice has also accelerated.
Strong economic growth in recent decades has made the People’s Republic the largest contributor to carbon emissions. China is now responsible for a good 30 percent of global emissions. Climate change poses immense challenges for the country. If insufficient countermeasures are taken, there is a threat of economic costs in the trillions (China.Table reported). nib/rtr
Before Nancy Pelosi flew from Taiwan to South Korea on Wednesday afternoon, she met with three high-profile human rights and democracy activists behind closed doors in Taipei: Lam Wing-kee, a Hong Kong bookseller who was forced to flee to the island in 2019 due to his political publications; Lee Ming-che, a Taiwanese NGO worker who served five years in a prison in China and was released only this year (China. Table reported); and Wu’er Kaixi, a former Chinese student leader who has lived in Taiwan since 1996 and is still rebelling against Beijing.
The meeting with the three activists intends to highlight the “deep friendship rooted in shared interests and values” that Pelosi had already touched on in her travel statement yesterday: self-determination and self-governance, democracy and freedom, human dignity and human rights. “We came to listen and learn; we left inspired by their courage,” Pelosi wrote on Twitter after the meeting at the Human Rights Memorial and Cultural Park.
Pelosi meeting Wu’er Kaixi is a clear signal to the communist leadership in Beijing, which still considers the activist an enemy of the state. But it is also a high-profile gesture to the West, where Wu’er Kaixi is remembered as one of China’s best-known dissidents.
Born in 1968 in Beijing, with Uyghur roots, Kaixi was one of the brains behind the student movement in Tiananmen Square in 1989. As a leader of the newly formed independent Students’ Autonomous Federation, which called for the resignation of CP General Secretary Zhao Ziyang and freedom of the press and speech, Kaixi demonstrated his talent as an orator with plenty of charisma. However, he became the face of the student movement only after he and other student representatives met former Premier Li Peng on state television for a roundtable discussion. Wu’er Kaixi came directly from the hunger strikers’ tent. Sitting across the political hardliner while wearing pajamas, the then 21-year-old didn’t hesitate to interrupt: “I know it’s rude, Mr. Premier, but there are people sitting out there in the square, being hungry, as we sit here and exchange pleasantries.” Two weeks after the appearance, China’s leadership had the democracy movement put down by force.
When Pelosi visited Tiananmen Square in 1991, unfurling a banner for those who died in the massacre, Wu’er Kaixi was already a political refugee. Traveling from Hong Kong via France, he arrived in the United States, where he studied at Harvard. In 1996, he moved to Taiwan. Since then, he has worked as a political commentator, investment banker, filmmaker, and lecturer in Taipei. In 2015, he ran for Taiwan’s parliament as an independent. Although nothing came of his career as a parliamentarian – on the one hand, he did not have one of the major parties behind him, and on the other, many voters still saw him as a foreigner – Wu’er Kaixi is still a well-known commentator and human rights activist on the island. As Secretary-General of the Taiwan Parliamentary Human Rights Commission, the human rights committee in Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan, he has recently become increasingly active on behalf of the Uyghurs. Today, more than 160,000 people follow him on Twitter alone.
There, he explicitly welcomed Pelosi’s visit, saying it was the best measure the US could take to ensure that “if there are disputes, they are on their own terms and not China’s.” In a post on the online platform Chinadiction, the now 54-year-old writes that the US policy of “strategic ambiguity” toward Taiwan, coined by Henry Kissinger, must end.
“It is wrong for the US – for any other country, for that matter – to imagine that clear red lines are a provocation,” the activist writes in his post. The opposite is true, he said, adding that ambiguity will encourage rather than deter China. “A clear commitment to defend Taiwan will, in short, make the world a safer place. China will fume and scream, but it will not risk everything and go to war.”
View of the maneuver: This Taiwanese man watches China’s fleet at work. From the coast near Taipei, the warships are barely visible on the horizon. What the dogs think about the political excitement surrounding Pelosi is not known.
If you play with fire you should at the very least try to rule out fatal mistakes. But China’s wide-ranging military maneuvers around Taiwan leave ample room for misunderstandings, as demonstrated by five Chinese missiles that struck Japan’s exclusive economic zone on Thursday. The legal significance of these rather large zones is debatable. However, it is not at all good manners to fire missiles in the direction of a neighbor and then still brazenly question its territory instead of apologizing – especially since Japan wasn’t even involved in the current scuffle over Nancy Pelosi. Now Tokyo is also on the barricades.
David Demes reports for us from Taiwan on how the maneuvers are arriving at the center of the storm and what the government is doing to protect the island’s security despite China’s show of force. Taiwan’s armed forces face a test that requires strong nerves. If necessary, they must show limits to the advance of the People’s Liberation Army as part of their maneuvers. But they must not react with aggression, because then disaster threatens.
We also took a look at what the large maneuvers mean for the supply chains. Taiwan is, after all, the world’s biggest supplier of microchips. As of Thursday evening, however, experts are giving the all-clear. Cargo ships have looked for new routes or are simply delaying their passage until everything is over, as Nico Beckert reports. However, that could quickly change if China expands the maneuvers even further.
In the aftermath of Pelosi’s now historic Taiwan visit, we look at why she met Wu’er Kaixi, a 1989 dissident who lives in exile on the island.
Shaking her head, Abigail Chou watched at midday on Thursday as tourists equipped with binoculars and telephoto lenses tried to catch a glimpse of Chinese military maneuvers off Taiwan’s coast. “Very strange,” the 32-year-old thinks. “People should know that they can’t see anything from here.” Nowhere can you get closer to Chinese maneuvers than here at the southwestern tip of the small island of Hsiao-Liu-Chiu (小琉球), a popular destination off the coast of the port city of Kaohsiung. From here, it is only 9.5 kilometers to the Chinese-designated restricted military zone.
The retaliation for the Taiwan visit by top US politician Nancy Pelosi (China.Table reported) came as announced with a lot of military thunder:
The missiles in particular drew attention. China called the missile tests a complete success and declared this part of the maneuvers over in the afternoon. Further military maneuvers are to take place until Sunday noon local time. In Taiwan, however, there was no great panic over the missile tests. Yet the missile tests went beyond the scale of military operations during the 1996 Taiwan Strait crisis, according to a Japanese Defense Ministry report released in the evening.
According to Japan’s military, four missiles are believed to have been fired from positions in Fujian province and to have flown over the main island of Taiwan. The attached graphic shows what China’s intentions must have been with this test: The missiles are said to have flown directly over the capital Taipei. A massive escalation compared to the year 1996.
Neither the Chinese nor the Taiwanese side had confirmed whether or not the Chinese missiles flew over Taiwanese airspace. Because of their altitude, Taiwan was probably unable to intercept the missiles. The government’s air strike warning system also remained silent. Perhaps in order to not unsettle the population. At what altitude a country’s “air sovereignty” ends is disputed worldwide. Nevertheless, the overflight of a Chinese missile over Taiwanese territory is a novelty.
On Beigan Island (北竿) in northwestern Taiwan, some islanders were able to observe Chinese missiles being fired from the Chinese mainland a few kilometers away in the afternoon. But not everywhere in Taiwan were the maneuvers observed this closely. “I was at the office all day today and only found out about it later,” 33-year-old Chen Kao-liang (name changed by editor) told China.Table in the evening. Because China has not massed troops or declared a state of emergency on the coast, they are not taking the threat seriously.
Abigail Chou is not too worried either, even though the Chinese maneuvers are so close to her adopted home of Hsiao-Liu-Chiu. The 32-year-old runs a small bed-and-breakfast on the tiny island off Taiwan’s southern coast. “We grew up with this threat from China, after all,” the Taipei native said. “China just wants to show its strength, it’s not really about us at all.”
Taiwan’s military was on special alert but did not respond proactively to the provocations from China. It was prepared and did not shy away from military conflict; however, it would not contribute to escalation or provoke conflict, according to the Ministry of Defense in Taipei. In a video address released late in the evening, President Tsai Ing-wen reaffirmed that course, saying, “We will firmly defend our sovereignty and national security and continue to hold the line of defense for democracy and freedom.”
Both the Ministry of Defense and the president specifically pointed to the danger of disinformation campaigns and psychological warfare to morale and cohesion among the population. Already on Wednesday, screens at train stations and grocery stores had been taken over by Chinese hackers, spreading messages hostile to Pelosi. The population should not fall for fake news and should stick to the pronouncements of official government agencies for correct information.
The military’s passive attitude was criticized by well-known retired Army Major General Yu Pei-chen, among others. He warned that next time China could move even closer to Taiwan if the People’s Liberation Army was not firmly confronted now. Lin Ying-yu pointed out the need to continue to closely monitor the upcoming air force and navy maneuvers. The night exercises, in particular, carry the danger of a surprise attack.
People in Taiwan are aware of the risk of escalation but are not panicking. On Thursday, a police department application was the most downloaded app in the Apple app store. One of its key features: A map of bomb shelters.
The logistics, trade, import, and export sectors have become thin-skinned in recent years. Too often, global politics and pandemics have thrown their supply schedules out of sync. So news of extended naval operations around Taiwan has caused a scare.
Will chips from Taiwan now become scarce? Will Taiwanese goods be delayed from reaching Europe? Is there a risk of container congestion at important global ports such as Kaohsiung, Anping, Keelung, or Taipei? After all, the Taiwan Strait is one of the busiest shipping routes in the region.
But experts sound the all-clear for now. “If the military maneuvers only last a short time and are not too extensive, then the disruptions will be mostly limited,” economist Wan-Hsin Liu of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel) told China.Table. There would be alternative routes. The planned duration of the exercises of three days is also within the range that freight companies can still easily accept as a delay.
At any rate, the military exercises have not yet caused any major delays or supply chain problems on the first day. Some shipping companies immediately rerouted their ships to alternative routes after the announcement. Taiwan’s shipping authorities already provided them with options to avoid the danger zones by a wide margin.
Some freighters have also changed their destination and are now calling at ports on the mainland. Others have reduced their speed to reach the critical zones by the weekend after the exercises have ended. However, most freighters simply bypass areas where military exercises are being held.
Ships without a direct destination on Taiwan are also affected. Almost half of the world’s container ships passed through the Taiwan Strait last year, Bloomberg reports. Thus, the restricted zones not only hinder Taiwan traffic, but also ships from Japan, South Korea, and China with destinations in Europe or the United States.
But even if the ships cannot pass through the Taiwan Strait and instead pass by the eastern flank of the island, the delays are only about three days. Such delays are not uncommon in global shipping. Extreme weather, such as typhoons, regularly cause similar deviations.
However, some uncertainty remains. Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the US House of Representatives, only spent a few hours in Taiwan. Her visit, however, has left the region in turmoil. The military exercises around Taiwan have already reached a new dimension. Whether the People’s Republic will be content with that remains to be seen. The designation of the maneuver zones already looks like a preparatory exercise for a naval blockade of Taiwan. According to Taiwanese media, this is exactly how Chinese General Meng Xiangjun portrays the situation.
If China were to extend the exercises, problems might emerge after all. Companies and logisticians would have to be prepared for “considerable disruptions in global supply chains and thus also in the global economy,” according to globalization expert Liu from the IfW. However, experts believe it is too early to be too alarmed. “We might be concerned if the drills become longer and more intense to impact supply chains, but there is no sign of that happening now,” says Huang Huiming, a fund manager at Nanjing Jing Heng Investment Management.
However, even dealing with the scenario is quite relevant in light of the experience of the past few years. Taiwan possesses the world’s largest production base for microchips. The market leader Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSMC) alone holds a share of 53 percent.
According to Liu, semiconductors accounted for a good 51 percent of Taiwanese exports in the first half of the year. If these components are missing, the assembly lines in Germany will also come to a standstill. As a result, the German economy sees a strong dependence on Taiwan. Above all, it is aware of the possibility of indirect effects caused by outages in the People’s Republic (China.Table reported) and was already an issue before the current crisis.
China also still has the option of extending the sanctions to other Taiwanese commodity groups imposed after Pelosi’s visit. This scenario would involve a customs tricks instead of a naval blockade. China is already rejecting goods on various questionable grounds (China.Table reported).
So far, the food and construction industries have been most affected. But product groups relevant to manufacturing could also become the target of revenge for Pelosi’s provocation. This would hit Taiwan hard. The People’s Republic is the island’s largest trading partner. Last year, it shipped goods worth just under $190 billion to China. Germany accounted for a good $245 billion.
However, far-reaching sanctions are currently considered unlikely. China would also hurt itself by isolating Taiwan economically. The People’s Republic is also dependent on semiconductors from Taiwan (China.Table reported).
Over the past 70 years, average temperatures in China have risen nearly twice as fast as in the rest of the world, according to the National Meteorological Service. Since 1951, temperatures in the People’s Republic have risen 0.26 degrees per decade, compared with a global increase of 0.15 degrees, according to the annual report released Thursday. “In the future, the increase in regional average temperatures in China will be significantly higher than the world,” said Yuan Jiashuang, Vice Director of China’s National Climate Center (NCC). China is a “sensitive region” regarding global climate change, he explains. That could have an impact on water reserves, the ecosystem, and harvests.
Parts of the People’s Republic have already struggled with extreme temperatures of over 44 degrees for weeks. These include the provinces of Yunnan in the southwest and Hebei in the country’s north. A total of 131 weather stations in China report temperatures on par with or exceeding previous records. Last year, 62 weather stations reported. Coastal water levels reached their highest level since 1980, according to the climate report, and the melting of glaciers and sea ice has also accelerated.
Strong economic growth in recent decades has made the People’s Republic the largest contributor to carbon emissions. China is now responsible for a good 30 percent of global emissions. Climate change poses immense challenges for the country. If insufficient countermeasures are taken, there is a threat of economic costs in the trillions (China.Table reported). nib/rtr
Before Nancy Pelosi flew from Taiwan to South Korea on Wednesday afternoon, she met with three high-profile human rights and democracy activists behind closed doors in Taipei: Lam Wing-kee, a Hong Kong bookseller who was forced to flee to the island in 2019 due to his political publications; Lee Ming-che, a Taiwanese NGO worker who served five years in a prison in China and was released only this year (China. Table reported); and Wu’er Kaixi, a former Chinese student leader who has lived in Taiwan since 1996 and is still rebelling against Beijing.
The meeting with the three activists intends to highlight the “deep friendship rooted in shared interests and values” that Pelosi had already touched on in her travel statement yesterday: self-determination and self-governance, democracy and freedom, human dignity and human rights. “We came to listen and learn; we left inspired by their courage,” Pelosi wrote on Twitter after the meeting at the Human Rights Memorial and Cultural Park.
Pelosi meeting Wu’er Kaixi is a clear signal to the communist leadership in Beijing, which still considers the activist an enemy of the state. But it is also a high-profile gesture to the West, where Wu’er Kaixi is remembered as one of China’s best-known dissidents.
Born in 1968 in Beijing, with Uyghur roots, Kaixi was one of the brains behind the student movement in Tiananmen Square in 1989. As a leader of the newly formed independent Students’ Autonomous Federation, which called for the resignation of CP General Secretary Zhao Ziyang and freedom of the press and speech, Kaixi demonstrated his talent as an orator with plenty of charisma. However, he became the face of the student movement only after he and other student representatives met former Premier Li Peng on state television for a roundtable discussion. Wu’er Kaixi came directly from the hunger strikers’ tent. Sitting across the political hardliner while wearing pajamas, the then 21-year-old didn’t hesitate to interrupt: “I know it’s rude, Mr. Premier, but there are people sitting out there in the square, being hungry, as we sit here and exchange pleasantries.” Two weeks after the appearance, China’s leadership had the democracy movement put down by force.
When Pelosi visited Tiananmen Square in 1991, unfurling a banner for those who died in the massacre, Wu’er Kaixi was already a political refugee. Traveling from Hong Kong via France, he arrived in the United States, where he studied at Harvard. In 1996, he moved to Taiwan. Since then, he has worked as a political commentator, investment banker, filmmaker, and lecturer in Taipei. In 2015, he ran for Taiwan’s parliament as an independent. Although nothing came of his career as a parliamentarian – on the one hand, he did not have one of the major parties behind him, and on the other, many voters still saw him as a foreigner – Wu’er Kaixi is still a well-known commentator and human rights activist on the island. As Secretary-General of the Taiwan Parliamentary Human Rights Commission, the human rights committee in Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan, he has recently become increasingly active on behalf of the Uyghurs. Today, more than 160,000 people follow him on Twitter alone.
There, he explicitly welcomed Pelosi’s visit, saying it was the best measure the US could take to ensure that “if there are disputes, they are on their own terms and not China’s.” In a post on the online platform Chinadiction, the now 54-year-old writes that the US policy of “strategic ambiguity” toward Taiwan, coined by Henry Kissinger, must end.
“It is wrong for the US – for any other country, for that matter – to imagine that clear red lines are a provocation,” the activist writes in his post. The opposite is true, he said, adding that ambiguity will encourage rather than deter China. “A clear commitment to defend Taiwan will, in short, make the world a safer place. China will fume and scream, but it will not risk everything and go to war.”
View of the maneuver: This Taiwanese man watches China’s fleet at work. From the coast near Taipei, the warships are barely visible on the horizon. What the dogs think about the political excitement surrounding Pelosi is not known.
