Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

Dalai Lama is still outfoxing Beijing

Michael Danby

Set in the foothills of the Himalayas, Dharamsala, India, is the seat of Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama and the headquarters for the eight Tibetan exile settlements throughout India. To establish their refugee status in India, each of the 180,000 Tibetans is given a personal audience with the Dalai Lama.

During the past decades, many young Tibetans, starved of their culture and facing repression by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), have trekked across the Himalayas to India. This process was anecdotally recorded in the moving documentary The Cry of the Snow Lion.

WHO NAME GAME: WHO Web site inflames uproar

Taipei Times

The WHO has not wavered on its position that Taiwan is a part of China despite extending an invitation to the Department of Health under the designation “Chinese Taipei,” new information from the WHO reveals.

The stance, already evident from a leaked internal WHO memo released by Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Kuan Bi-ling (管碧玲) last week, was strengthened by the new disclosure yesterday of the organization’s internal publishing policies that state Taiwan is “a province of China.”

Beijing will not go to rehab

Taipei Times Editorial

In recent months, a number of Chinese apologists have made the case that “abandoning” Taiwan to China would help improve strategic cooperation between Washington and Beijing. In their view, Taiwan remains the last impediment to a flourishing relationship between the two giants, and therefore yielding to Beijing’s irredentist claims on Taiwan would somehow unlock a future of manifold promises and stability.

In the name of journalistic neutrality, this newspaper has given space for this argument and has allowed those who disagree with such a strategy to also make their case. However, facts alone suffice to discredit calls for the international community — and ultimately on Taiwanese themselves — to sacrifice Taiwan for a more constructive relationship with Beijing.

What about protecting Taiwan’s democracy?

Chen Mei-chin 陳美津

Several US academics have argued in recent articles that the US should distance itself from Taiwan because China’s power and influence are rising and it would become more “costly” for the US to maintain close ties with Taipei, and in particular maintain its defense obligations under the Taiwan Relations Act.

Charles Glaser of George Washington University argued along those lines in a recent article in Foreign Affairs, while Bob Sutter, of the same university, recently painted an equally gloomy picture, saying that the rise of China is giving Beijing leverage over Taiwan. Glaser added that in light of Taiwan’s weakening economic, diplomatic and military positions, the status quo in the Taiwan Strait was becoming unsustainable, meaning Taiwan has very limited options for its future and unification with China was virtually inevitable.

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