Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

A wolf stalks democratic Taiwan

Bill Sharp

History shows that the failure of democratic states typically results from a conjunction of powerful external enemies and deep domestic division. Such division in Taiwan is vulnerable to Chinese influence. Taiwan needs to keep reforming its democracy to consolidate internally and to win the support of other countries to play a significant role in the US’ Indo-Pacific strategy.

Taiwan is the gleaming beam of democracy in Asia, but take a closer look: The nation is polarized — mildly, but polarized — and its democracy is fragile.

Virus Outbreak: No new cases for third time in week

Taipei Times

People take pictures of the Grand Hotel in Taipei yesterday, which illuminated some of its rooms to spell out the word “Zero” after Taiwan reported no new COVID-19 cases for the third day this week.
Photo: EPA

Taiwan yesterday again registered no new cases of COVID-19 — the third time this week — as the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) said that travelers arriving from Southeast Asia, where the pandemic appears to be getting worse, would be the focus of stricter screening.

Taiwan can help shake off Huawei

Taipei Times Editorial

Governments worldwide are understandably focusing all of their energies on defeating the COVID-19 pandemic and mitigating the economic fallout from it. However, they must find additional bandwidth to deal with a fresh problem.

Adopting the policy of “Never let a good crisis go to waste,” China is trying to sneak through predatory acquisitions of key strategic assets and bribe governments into using Huawei Technologies equipment for their 5G networks.

Reasons for Taiwan to be hopeful

Denny Roy

In some ways Taiwan’s situation at the beginning of this year seems grim. Global economic disruption from the COVID-19 pandemic will disproportionately harm the nation because of its heavy dependence on exports. Chinese military activity near Taiwan, as well as verbal threats emanating from the Chinese government, have increased.

This has fueled speculation in Taiwan that Beijing has decided to politically incorporate Taiwan by military force and sees a window of opportunity while the US is temporarily preoccupied with the pandemic.

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