Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

US naval transit a warning to China, experts say

Taipei Times

The passage of two US guided missile destroyers through the Taiwan Strait on Saturday was not an isolated incident, but a signal of the expansion of the US’ military presence in the region, Institute for National Policy Research executive director Kuo Yu-jen (郭育仁) said yesterday.

US forces in Japan and Guam are to expand their reach to the south and west respectively, he said, adding that the US military is likely to normalize naval drills around Taiwan as a check on China.

Military prisons from Martial Law era to be probed

Taipei Times

The Transitional Justice Commission is to investigate military detention and discipline centers established during the Martial Law era, as part of a plan to conserve the negative heritage sites and establish historical truth, a commission member said yesterday.

The commission has received a list of 45 negative heritage sites compiled by the Ministry of Culture and some sites are military compounds that the National Human Rights Museum’s investigators could not reach, the member said on condition of anonymity.

US ready to parry Chinese threat

Parris Chang 張旭成

US Secretary of Defense James Mattis visited Beijing for the first time from Tuesday to Thursday last week. Tensions between the US and China have been rising and there are many thorny issues between them.

Mattis had meetings with senior Chinese defense officials, as well as Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), during which he expressed the US’ stance and listened to China’s position.

Trump right to doubt ‘one China’

Joseph Bosco

Since then-US president Richard Nixon traveled to China and began Washington’s abandonment of official diplomatic and military relations with Taiwan, several shorthand policy phrases have defined the fraught Taiwan-US-China relationship.

The three main notions are: “one China,” cross-strait stability or the “status quo,” and strategic ambiguity.

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