Senate Panel Votes to Allow Navy to Call at Taiwanese Ports

Proposal in armed services committee’s bill would roll back nearly 40 years of U.S. deference to China under “One China” policy

WASHINGTON—The Senate Armed Services Committee approved a major change in U.S. policy toward Taiwan as part of an annual defense-policy measure, voting to allow regular stops by U.S. naval vessels in a move that is likely to anger China.

In a bipartisan 21-6 vote, the panel approved re-establishing “regular ports of call by the U.S. Navy at Kaohsiung or any other suitable ports in Taiwan and permits U.S. Pacific Command to receive...

China is expanding her influence into the Pacific. The Philippines is falling into their sphere of influence, and Japan is looking at some hard choices.

Pushing back is saying we are going to play the game now.

Russia is the thing that concerns me. We are shooting at their strategic ally. The fact that we don’t have a full blown war with Russian troops storming into Turkey means that Russia does not want, or is not able to, fight a war.

“Native” can be a bit of a tricky designation in Taiwan. The true natives are people who arrived in Neolithic times and are the ancestors of the Polynesians: Hawaiians, Maori, Easter Islanders, Tahitians, etc.

Then, there were successive waves of immigration from the mainland over thousands of years of different people - mainly Southern Chinese. Finally the most recent wave of Chinese people arrived in 1948-49 at the end of the Communist Revolution.

People who trace their ancestry to those waves of Southern Chinese tend to think of themselves as “Taiwanese” but not “Native.” They will also tend to speak Taiwanese and not Mandarin. The more recent arrivals will be more likely to think of themselves as Chinese, but again there is a generational split. Most young Taiwanese will get offended if you call them Chinese. The blending of Ethnicity and Nationality in Taiwan is unusual and interesting.

As for the DPP and the KMT: the KMT was, for decades, a moderately-to-very corrupt and oppressive military dictatorship. Through those years, relationships have been established between individual party members and local, rural community leaders. Often those local leaders have become or are members of the KMT party. Among older and more traditional folks, interpersonal relationships are EXTREMELY important. This is “guanxi” a concept which translates as ‘connections’ but doesn’t really have an analogue in English or Western society. Guanxi is important at every level in Taiwan, but among older and more rural Taiwanese, it is the paramount concern, beyond self-interest or personal politics.

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