Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

China’s military thinking is outmoded and should learn from others, especially the US when it comes to modernizing its vast armed forces, a leading armed forces newspaper said yesterday.

A commentary in the People’s Liberation Army Daily said modernizing China’s military was central to reforms which have seen heavy investment in high-tech weapons like advanced fighter jets.

The pages of this newspaper and other liberal publications are filled with beautiful slogans about the need to “protect” Taiwan based on lofty principles such as democracy, justice and human rights. Commendable as these prescriptions may be, in and of themselves they are impotent in the face of the present challenges confronting this nation.

Although the intentions of the opinion writers who propose such measures are undoubtedly honorable, their prose often lacks the rigorous intellectual inquisitiveness that would give them true meaning, leaving us with little more than a constellation of presumptuous abstracts. In fact, more often than not, the ideals they espouse are at best a means to contrast what the authors are trying to protect with the entity that poses the most formidable threat to it — China.