Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

This week, Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) will visit Washington and meet with US officials and members of Congress. It will be a good opportunity for Washington to hear directly from the DPP’s presidential candidate what policies she will be pursuing if she is elected in January.

Tsai has recently issued a number of policy papers outlining her plans for Taiwan’s future, both in terms of domestic policies on socioeconomic issues and international policies on how she intends to enhance Taiwan’s relations with other countries, including China. She has laid out a strategy in which she strives for a more balanced development inside Taiwan, reform of the anachronistic judicial system, and a global strategy in which Taiwan reinforces its strategic partnership with the US and strengthens cooperation with other democracies in the Asia-Pacific region.

Much has been made in the past week of the hundreds of diplomatic cables concerning Taiwan that were among those released by WikiLeaks on Aug. 30, sparking a war of sorts among newspapers and TV stations to see which one can report most on the subject. Media organizations have been busy sifting through the 80 or so pages listing the Taiwan-related diplomatic cables to identify those that have the most news value. And judging by the Web hit counts, those efforts are not unwarranted.

The diplomatic cables’ appeal with the public stems from one characteristic alone: The great majority of them are classified (standard classification levels in Western government agencies are “unclassified,” “classified,” “secret” and “top secret,” with various means of narrowing the distribution list, such as “Top Secret, NATO/ISAF” or, for example, “UMBRA/ORCON for highly sensitive signals intelligence).