China ready to talk peace: Wen
　

DEJA VU: The Chinese premier’s speech to the opening ceremony of the NPC was almost a word-for-word revisiting of a speech President Hu Jintao made on Dec. 31

AP AND AFP , BEIJING
Friday, Mar 06, 2009, Page 1
　

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao (溫家寶) said yesterday that Beijing was ready to hold talks with Taiwan on political and military issues to end hostilities between the two sides.

In his opening address to the National People’s Congress (NPC), Wen hailed a significant improvement in ties and a major reduction in tensions over the past year between China and Taiwan.

“Positive changes occurred in the situation in Taiwan, and major breakthroughs were made in cross-strait relations,” Wen said in his annual “state of the nation” address.

“In the coming year, we will continue to adhere to the principle of developing cross-strait relations and promoting peaceful reunification of the motherland,” Wen told the 3,000 NPC delegates.

“We are ... ready to hold talks on cross-strait political and military issues and create conditions for ending the state of hostility and concluding a peace agreement” between the two sides, he said.

Wen’s remarks were a near word-for-word reiteration of offers made by President and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) General Secretary Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) in a Dec. 31 address.

Wen gave no additional details on the content of a peace agreement or what the talks on political and military issues would include. However, the tone of his remarks was far more conciliatory than the typically hawkish references to Taiwan contained in previous addresses to the congress.

Wen pointed to increased contacts between the two, particularly in the economic and financial fields, and vowed to provide financial and investment support for Taiwanese businesses operating in China.

“We will accelerate normalization of cross-strait economic relations and facilitate the signing of a comprehensive agreement on economic cooperation,” Wen said.

He also referred to Taiwan’s long ambition to participate in international organizations such as the UN, although he insisted the baseline criteria remained.

“We are ready to make fair and reasonable arrangements through consultation on the issue of Taiwan’s participation in the activities of international organizations,” Wen said.

But he said such participation would have to come under the “one China principle.”

Turning to the economy, Wen said China was facing unprecedented challenges from the global crisis but he was confident the country would still achieve economic growth of about 8 percent this year.

He acknowledged the Chinese economy, the third-biggest in the world, was hurting and the climate was not expected to get better soon in the face of a global recession that has weakened demand for Chinese goods.

Wen also promised the government would be more open and listen to public opinion.

“We need to make government affairs more open and transparent. We will ensure the people’s right to ... participate in, to express views on and to oversee government affairs,” he said.

However, he also cautioned that the government would not tolerate anything that affected stability.

In addition, the military needed to be modernized “across the board,” he said. The military would transform its training focus toward warfare tactics using more information technology applications, he said.

“We need to make our army more revolutionary, modern and standardized, focusing on enabling it to fully carry out its historic missions,” he said.

At the end of its nine-day session, the NPC will be asked to approve a 15.3 percent increase in defense spending to 472.9 billion yuan (US$69 billion) this year, according to a budget report.

On Wednesday, a parliament spokesman said the defense budget was set to rise to 480.7 billion yuan, up 62.5 billion yuan or 14.9 percent from last year.

No explanation was given for the discrepancy.

Taiwan not an obstacle to PRC-US military talk
　

By William Lowther
STAFF REPORTER IN WASHINGTON
Friday, Mar 06, 2009, Page 1

“Strategic miscalculations that could provoke outbreaks of regional or global conflict or instability would be extremely damaging to both China’s and our interests.”— David Sedney, US deputy assistant secretary of defense for East Asia

China continues to have “very strong and direct” objections to US arms sales to Taiwan, a meeting of the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission in Washington has been told.

US Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for East Asia David Sedney said that during talks with Chinese military leaders in Beijing last week he found that the level of concern remained high despite improved relations with the US and a reduction of political tension with Taipei.

But significantly, he said that while the Chinese objections remained strong, they were presented in such a way as to allow the talks to continue and not to stop other discussions.

The talks formally restarted US military-to-military exchanges with China, which Beijing cut off last year to protest former US president George W. Bush administration’s approval in October of a US$6.4 billion arms deal with Taiwan.

Asked if the US had seen any “draw-down,” or reduction, in Chinese weaponry facing Taiwan, Sedney said “no,” there had been none and there was no change in the Chinese posture toward Taiwan.

Sedney said there was a willingness on both sides to discuss and come up with confidence-building measures “in this important and serious area” but did not detail what they were.

The commission hearing, held in a US Senate office building, was to examine China’s global military and security activities and their impact on US economic and security interests.

“As China emerges as a power with global ambitions, it is natural, indeed expected, that its military and security activities abroad will expand consistent with its capacities and strategic aims,” Sedney said in his opening statement.

“Far from seeking to contain China, US policy has been one of actively involving China in the international community of nations, and in this regard the United States has done much over the last 30 years to assist, facilitate and encourage China’s development and integration in the global system,” he said.

He said the US should take every possible opportunity to encourage China to wield its growing power and resources responsibly.

“US-China dialogue is crucial to this effort, due to the fragile dynamics of today’s economic and security environment,” he said.

In what appeared to be a reference to Taiwan, he said: “Strategic miscalculations that could provoke outbreaks of regional or global conflict or instability would be extremely damaging to both China’s and our interests. Our ongoing efforts at strategic dialogue have resulted in some incremental, modest progress.”

“I believe that we have become more successful recently at convincing the Chinese that our concerns are genuine — not simply an excuse to undermine China and its sovereignty, but in fact issues that a responsible world power needs to consider — but, of course, there is still a long way to go,” he said.

John Norris, US deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, said the US still had differences with some key elements of China’s security policy as well as a “lack of transparency about its military modernization.”

“We meanwhile will continue to abide by our obligation under the Taiwan Relations Act to make available arms for Taiwan to maintain a sufficient self-defense capability,” he said. “Where we have differences, we will continue to make our viewpoint on such matters clear to the PRC [People’s Republic of China], and we of course will defend our interests. But we cannot define our bilateral relationship on our differences to the detriment of possible progress on key US priorities.”

Bernard Cole, a professor at the National War College, said that China’s decision to send warships to the Arabian Sea to help with the fight against Somali pirates indicated a degree of confidence on Beijing’s part “about the Taiwan situation, a perhaps increasing confidence that de jure Taiwan independence is no longer in the offing, and that the PLA [People’s Liberation Army] may safely be dedicated to situations fitting China’s increasing role as a global power.”

“This in turn may indicate Beijing’s reordering or at least loosening of strategic priorities … If the PLA no longer has to devote its attention and resources almost solely to a Taiwan scenario, then it has forces available for Beijing to employ in military operations other than war. This possibility may be supported by China’s 2008 Defense White Paper, in which Taiwan was mentioned only once,” Cole said.

Retired Rear Admiral Eric McVadon pointed out the “seeming contradiction” of simultaneously engaging with a modernizing China and hedging against an emerging China “obsessed with Taiwan.”

“What is new is an influential China that now increasingly must be taken seriously militarily — as is dramatically illustrated by the existing submarine-launched cruise-missile threat to US Navy forces and the impending ballistic missile designed to hit ships at sea,” McVadon said.

“Even with the Taiwan issue unresolved, cooperation while hedging makes sense ... Maritime engagement with China would give the US Pacific Command and Pacific Fleet an added link for operational cooperation in the region and a means in this sensitive arena to maintain personal contacts and close communications both routinely and during a crisis,” he said.

“It would reinforce the idea of cooperation despite continuing differences across the Strait. Put another way, the Taiwan issue is not the whole story. The macro-view of US-China relations encompasses many areas of strategic alignment and cooperative efforts on profoundly important international security issues where expanded Chinese influence is not feared but welcomed,” he said.
　

Chen's former aides deflect blame at pre-trial hearing
　

IT WASN’T ME: The lawyer defending Ma Yung-cheng and Lin Teh-hsun said they were not responsible for auditing the presidential state affairs fund accounts
　

By Shelley Huang
STAFF REPORTER
Friday, Mar 06, 2009, Page 3

Former Presidential Office deputy secretary-general Ma Yung-cheng (馬永成) and former director of Chen Shui-bian’s office Lin Teh-hsun (林德訓) yesterday denied any wrongdoing related to the presidential “state affairs fund,” pinning the blame on other accounting secretaries.

The Taipei District Court yesterday called Ma and Lin to a pre-trial hearing to review evidence related to the case against the former president.

Ma and Lin are accused of assisting the Chen family in embezzling NT$104.15 million (US$3.1 million) in government funds that were set aside for Chen’s discretionary use while he was in office. Prosecutors allege that more than NT$27 million was obtained using “inappropriate receipts” to claim reimbursements from the fund.

Defense attorney Richard Lee (李勝琛) cited Article 95 of the Accounting Act (會計法), which states: “Internal audit implemented by each authority shall be executed by an accounting officer.”

Lee said because his clients were not accounting officers, they did not know anything about the auditing process.

Lawyers said the expense reports, which form part of the evidence in the case, were lacking many dates, so it was unclear when the reports were drawn up or signed. While the reports bore Lin’s seal, there was no way to verify whether Lin stamped the reports and therefore the documents should be inadmissible as evidence.

“This clears Lin of any auditing responsibility,” Lee said.

Prosecutors responded by saying that nowhere in the Code of Criminal Procedure (刑事訴訟法) does it support the notion that the expense reports should be dismissed or prohibited, but rather the reports were direct evidence of forgery, so they should be admissible.

Presiding Judge Tsai Shou-shun (蔡守訓) said the court would evaluate the arguments before arriving at a decision.

Lee sought to blame Chen Chen-hui (陳鎮慧), the former president’s bookkeeper, and 10 other accounting personnel.

He asked the court to call Chen Chen-hui, former director-general of the Presidential Office’s accounting department Fon Shui-lin (馮瑞麟), former vice premier Yeh Chu-lan (葉菊蘭), accountants Chiu Chiung-hsien (邱瓊賢), Lan Mei-ling (蘭梅玲) and Liang En-tzu (梁恩賜), among others, to court for testimony.

Prosecutors opposed the move and questioned whether Lee’s motive for calling the witnesses together was to gather testimonies that would benefit the defendants. No decision was made on the request.

Tsai scheduled the next hearing for the morning of March 17. Chen Shui-bian’s trial will start on the afternoon of the same day.

228 bias? Think again

I was shocked to learn that a group of so-called “academic historians” has accused the 228 Memorial Foundation of being biased in its interpretation of the 228 Incident (“Academic accuses 228 Foundation of historical bias,” March 1, page 2).

If those historians who are supposed to be experts on Taiwanese history have a non-biased version of the truth, why aren’t they presenting evidence to the public to rebut the so-called biased interpretations agreed upon by academics the world over?

One of the historians even had the nerve to attack former US naval attache George Kerr, claiming that his interpretation of the 228 Incident was the result of Kerr’s support for the independence camp, which sullied the image of the regime of dictator Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石). What an outlandish accusation!

It is obvious that those so-called expert historians and their diehard KMT cohorts still do not accept the truth, known around the world, that Chiang and former president Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國) terrorized Taiwan for decades and massacred thousands of innocent people who were critical of their rulings.

Taiwanese should be grateful to Kerr, whose eyewitness account of the 228 Incident and the subsequent arrests and execution of Taiwanese is so well presented in his book Formosa Betrayed, which should be required reading for every college student.

In his book, Kerr wrote that a prominent person told him “he had witnessed the notorious ‘Rape of Nanking’ by the Japanese in 1937, but that this [rape of Formosa] surpassed it, for the Nanking Rape was a product of war, a wild outburst of wartime passion, whereas this was coldly calculated revenge perpetrated by the Nationalist Government upon its own people [in peacetime].”

Despite Ma’s gestures of reconciliation toward 228 victims’ families, the wound of the savage incident will never heal because Ma and his KMT followers continue to exonerate the Chiangs’ crimes by saying they did not do the killing themselves and therefore should not be held accountable.

KRIS LIAO
San Francisco, California

The 228 score remains unsettled
　

By Chen Tsui-lien 陳翠蓮
Friday, Mar 06, 2009, Page 8

A few days ago, two television stations — CTITV and CTV — broadcast a historical documentary, Revenge for the 228 Incident: The Rise and Fall of the 21st Division (二 二 八泯恩仇 — 二 十 一師興亡錄), a joint production of the two stations and the China Times (中國時報) newspaper.

The program asserts that, when Shanghai was surrounded by Communist forces toward the end of the Chinese Civil War, the 21st Division of the Nationalist Army — the division that a couple of years earlier had suppressed the 228 Incident in Taiwan — was annihilated by Taiwanese units of the Communist People’s Liberation Army (PLA). It goes on to conclude that the score for the 228 Incident was settled on the Bund in Shanghai all those years ago. The concept and conclusions of the program are rather far-fetched, so much so that it was hard to watch it through to the end.

Former Taiwanese soldiers interviewed in the documentary are presented as witnesses to the settling of scores. In reality, the trials and tribulations of these old men exemplify the experience of Taiwanese caught up in the turmoil of history and unable to decide their own fate.

Toward the end of Japanese rule in Taiwan, some young Taiwanese men served in the Japanese army and went to fight China. Others joined the Nationalist army after World War II and fought the Communists. When they lost in battle and were taken prisoner, they were transformed into soldiers of the PLA and started fighting against the Nationalist government’s army instead. In 1950, some of them were even sent to Korea to fight the Americans. Many Taiwanese who stayed in China went on to suffer in the tragedy of the 1960s Cultural Revolution. Through the fickle twists and turns of history, they changed identities many times in the space of just a few years. Unable to take their fate in their own hands, they were perhaps no longer sure who they were or what they were fighting for.

This TV documentary is based on — or maybe we should say lifted from — Hua I-wen’s (花逸文) book Taiwanese Soldiers in the Chinese Civil War (國共內戰中的台灣兵), published by Babylon Books in 1991, which gives an account of “these people who were abandoned by the Chinese Nationalist Party [KMT], mistrusted by the Chinese Communist Party and forgotten by Taiwan.”

They have indeed been forgotten by Taiwan for a long time, but now they have become a focus of attention because of the appearance in this documentary of an elderly former soldier, Dai Guoting (戴國汀), who talks briefly about how angry he felt when he heard about the 228 Incident.

These few words were made into the pivotal point of the documentary. As the saying goes, you can make nine bowls of soup with just one clam. The documentary picks up on Dai’s words and stretches them to say that Taiwanese soldiers who served in the 70th and 62nd divisions of the communist army took revenge by annihilating the 21st Division of the Nationalist army, and concludes that as the score for the 228 Incident has been settled, there is no need for antagonism between different groups in Taiwan.

The program is an attempt to sow confusion and shift attention away from the real issues.

First, in seeking the truth about the incident, relatives of 228 Incident victims and Taiwanese in general do not seek revenge, still less do they demand an eye for an eye. They do not wish to hunt down all those members of the 21st Division who carried out the suppression under orders. Rather, they demand that the KMT government accept responsibility.

Second, most surviving relatives of 228 victims are magnanimous people and are willing to forgive. Taiwanese in general also hope for reconciliation. The condition, however, is that the party that perpetrated the repression should admit what it did wrong and sincerely remedy its ills. Take for instance President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), who shed tears in memory of 228, but who also seeks to reinstate the name of the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall (中正紀念堂). Can this attitude contribute to reconciliation?

Third, the search for the truth about the 228 Incident has nothing to do with inter-community antagonism. It was the KMT government under Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) that sent troops to suppress the upsising on 228. The KMT does not equal the Mainlander community. In fact, the vast majority of Mainlanders who came to Taiwan did not arrive until 1949 and had probably never even heard of the 228 Incident.

Fourth, there were indeed Taiwanese soldiers in the Communist army when it wiped out a division of the Nationalist army during the Chinese Civil War, but to conclude that Taiwanese soldiers got their revenge by annihilating the 21st Division is a ridiculous interpretation of history.

The 228 Incident remains a topic of dispute in Taiwan. We need to work it out among ourselves and heal the wounds. To suggest instead that the Chinese army taught the KMT a lesson and got revenge for the 228 Incident on behalf of Taiwanese is absurd.

Chen Tsui-lien is an associate professor in the Graduate Institute of History at National Chengchi University.