Taiwan Loses Panama to China

Panama’s Vice President and Foreign Minister Isabel de Saint Malo (L) and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi shake hands as they exchange documents after signing a joint communiqué on establishing diplomatic relations, in Beijing on June 13, 2017. GREG BAKER/AFP/GETTY IMAGES)

 

The island just got lonelier.

Taiwan has lost one of its precious few allies. Panama cut diplomatic relations with Taiwan on Tuesday. The Panamanian government said there was “only one China” and Taiwan is part of it. This is another blow to the independence of a small island nation trying to keep free from the Communist control of China.

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China is the second biggest user of the Panama Canal. Since 1997, the Trumpet has tracked and reported how Chinese companies have gained control of the majority of the ports and loading bays of the Panama Canal, the latest of which was bought in June of last year. Chinese investment in the Central American nation is growing as Chinese companies are developing the purchased ports in Panama and developing the land around the Panama Canal.

Xi meets Taiwan opposition leader, stresses ‘One China’

Chinese president Xi Jinping met the leader of Taiwan’s opposition party Tuesday as Beijing’s relations with the island’s new president worsen.

Xi met Kuomintang (KMT) leader Hung Hsiu-chu at the Great Hall of the People, the official Xinhua news agency said.

China cuts official contact with Taiwan over new president

BEIJING: China said Saturday (Jun 25) that communications with Taiwan had been suspended after the island’s new government failed to acknowledge the concept that there is only “one China”.

Relations between the two sides have grown increasingly frosty since President Tsai Ing-wen won Taiwan’s leadership by a landslide in January and took office in May, ending eight years of rapprochement.

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“The bilateral communication mechanism has been suspended,” TAO spokesman An Fengshan said on its website.

Special Report: How China’s shadowy agency is working to absorb Taiwan

This is a Chinese ‘charm offensive’ in full motion. It’s of course more wise than gunboat diplomacy, for which they already have thousands of missiles ready at a moment’s notice to rain down on Taiwan, but equally as dangerous in the long-term for the United States. The end-game aim for China is to push America completely out of Asia, for a regional Asian bloc and have nations (for example) such as Japan, both Koreas and Vietnam under its protectorate umbrella.

 

(Reuters) – Ever since a civil war split the two sides more than 60 years ago, China has viewed Taiwan as a renegade province that needs to be absorbed into the mainland. To that end, the legion of Taiwanese businessmen working in China is a beachhead.

In June, hundreds of those businessmen gathered in a hotel ballroom in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen. They were there to toast the new head of a local Taiwan merchants’ association. They sipped baijiu liquor and ate seafood as a troupe performed a traditional lion dance for good luck. An honored guest, senior Communist Party official Li Jiafan, stood to deliver congratulations and a message.

“I urge our Taiwanese friends to continue to work hard in your fields to contribute to the realization of the Chinese dream as soon as possible,” said Li, using a nationalist slogan President Xi Jinping has popularized. “The Chinese dream is also the dream of the people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait – our dream of reunification.”

Li, who ended his speech to beating drums and loud applause, is a department chief in the Shenzhen arm of the United Front Work Department, an organ of the Communist Party’s Central Committee. Its mission: to spread China’s influence by ultimately gaining control over a range of groups not affiliated with the party and that are often outside the mainland.

United Front documents reviewed by Reuters, including annual reports, instructional handbooks and internal newsletters, as well as interviews with Chinese and Taiwanese officials reveal the extent to which the agency is engaged in a concerted campaign to thwart any move toward greater independence by Taiwan and ultimately swallow up the self-ruled island of 23 million.

The Coming Taiwan Independence Surge

The fact that the occupation of the Taiwan legislature by student activists earlier this spring was woefully under-reported, is disappointing for a number of reasons. Primarily, the world missed an opportunity to see the changes in social and political identities sweeping across the island nation. These generational changes that are taking place in Taiwan, along with external factors such as China’s treatment of Hong Kong and its increasing bellicosity in its littoral areas, are going to reshape local politics in a way that suggests in the not-too-distant future, there is going to be a powerful new impetus for independence in Taiwan.

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This Taiwanese identity is unlike that of its forbearers. The young lack the hatred over the political killings, and colonial economic exploitation by the KMT authoritarian regime that drove their grandparents’ generation. Nor are they politically timid and quiet like their parents. Their identity, still being fleshed out, is inclusive, absorbing KMT imagery, such as the ROC flag, but assigning new home-grown meanings to it. It includes the KMT as a political party but rejects all of its China-related territorial and cultural claims. At the heart of this identity, as the Sunflower Movement shows, is an immense reverence for Taiwan’s democracy, with which they grew up.