A Chinese-British history writer said Saturday Taiwan must learn from Ukraine and formulate a comprehensive and self-sufficient national security framework to defend against Chinese aggression.
Speaking at a forum hosted by the pro-independence Taiwan New Constitution Foundation (TNCF), writer Wang Hao (??) said ensuring one’s own defense was “the biggest lesson we can learn” from the ongoing conflict between Ukraine and Russia.
To this end, Wang said it was imperative that the government take action to strengthen military training, civilian-based defense, conscription, power grid resilience, and information warfare.
However, Wang said that given international support had proved a boon for Ukraine, Taiwan should also “internationalize” the question of its own sovereignty to counter Beijing’s framing of the issue as a domestic dispute.
Wang described the Russia-Ukraine conflict as the “last chapter” of the Cold War between the U.S. and the former Soviet Union, with a “new Cold War” between Washington and Beijing likely to dominate global politics in the years to come.
He predicted that U.S. support for Ukraine, as well as sanctions and other measures, would ultimately lead to Russia’s political, military, and economic “defeat,” allowing the U.S. to turn its attention to Asia.
Just as Russia is now being isolated from the international community, Wang said Washington and its allies would seek to exclude China — the U.S.’ largest trading partner and the world’s second-largest economy — from the fields of economics, trade, finance, and technology.
Among the other speakers at the forum, TNCF Deputy CEO Raymond Sung (???) argued that Taiwan’s top focus should be strengthening its claims on and expressions of sovereignty, in order to make up for its lack of formal international recognition.
Meanwhile, Chang Kuo-cheng (???), a professor at Taipei Medical University’s Center for General Education, said he believed Taiwan’s most urgent task was to reckon with its authoritarian past through a process of transitional justice.
“Imagine if in Ukraine at this moment there were still people memorializing Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, or traveling to Russia to hear speeches by President Vladimir Putin,” he said, in an apparent allusion to figures in the opposition Kuomintang.
The Taiwan New Constitution Foundation, founded by veteran independence activist Koo Kwang-ming (???), supports drafting a new constitution to replace the current Republic of China Constitution, as well as pushing for Taiwan’s normalization as a sovereign country.
Source: Focus Taiwan News Channel