Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

With US President Donald Trump signing into law the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2019, the US and Taiwan should conduct joint military exercises to counter China’s increasing pressure on Taiwan, a US academic said in an article published on Tuesday.

In the article published by the Foreign Policy Research Institute, June Teufel Dreyer, a professor of political science at the University of Miami and a senior fellow at the institute’s Asia Program, said that Beijing has adopted what might be called an “anaconda strategy” to force Taiwan to surrender.

The drive for signatures for national referendums to coincide with the Nov. 24 nine-in-one elections has ramped up, with two issues standing out: three proposals against same-sex marriage and a proposal to change Taiwan’s designation from Chinese Taipei to Taiwan at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

The same-sex marriage proposals represent the downside to putting so much power in the hands of the public — it gives hate groups a voice and a chance to further propagate their ideas. These anti-LGBTQ organizations have been making noise for a long time, but this actually legitimizes their cause in the eyes of the public by giving them a concrete reason and target to go out and persuade people to agree with their views.