Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

Welcome to China” — the greeting I received at the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) National Policy Foundation in January is symptomatic of current cross-strait developments in Taiwan. The government’s cross-strait package of technical agreements and the forthcoming economic cooperation framework agreement (ECFA) will drain Taiwan’s political energy and divert attention away from other key matters for years to come. This is unavoidable as the government’s policies are out of touch with reality. Indeed, they blindly inflate divisions instead of attempting to unify people in Taiwan’s divided society.

The cross-strait package also diverts attention from efforts to inform others about what Taiwan can bring to the world. Instead, an increasing amount of hard work is now being spent to correct misunderstandings about Taiwan in Europe. For example, an ECFA is believed to be an approach that fits with the EU’s “one China” policy.

In 1972, before then-US president Richard Nixon’s visit to China, US national security adviser Henry Kissinger was expounding his “balance of power” theory. This saw the US working with China to keep the Soviet Union in check over the next 15 years. Another 20 years on, the US president has changed tack, teaming up with Russia against China.

This rotation of the triangle of relations between the three powers took place almost 20 years later than Kissinger had predicted, but now we have US President Barack Obama’s administration concentrating once more on US-Russia relations: They recently signed the first nuclear weapons pact between the two countries in two decades. The US has clearly decided its best bet is to lean toward Russia to keep China under control.