Taiwan President Quotes

In opting for large scale, Korean state planners got much of what they bargained for. Korean companies today compete globally with the Americans and Japanese in highly capital-intensive sectors like semiconductors, aerospace, consumer electronics, and automobiles, where they are far ahead of most Taiwanese or Hong Kong companies. Unlike Southeast Asia, the Koreans have moved into these sectors not primarily through joint ventures where the foreign partner has provided a turnkey assembly plant but through their own indigenous organizations. So successful have the Koreans been that many Japanese companies feel relentlessly dogged by Korean competitors in areas like semiconductors and steel. The chief advantage that large-scale chaebol organizations would appear to provide is the ability of the group to enter new industries and to ramp up to efficient production quickly through the exploitation of economies of scope.70 Does this mean, then, that cultural factors like social capital and spontaneous sociability are not, in the end, all that important, since a state can intervene to fill the gap left by culture? The answer is no, for several reasons. In the first place, not every state is culturally competent to run as effective an industrial policy as Korea is. The massive subsidies and benefits handed out to Korean corporations over the years could instead have led to enormous abuse, corruption, and misallocation of investment funds. Had President Park and his economic bureaucrats been subject to political pressures to do what was expedient rather than what they believed was economically beneficial, if they had not been as export oriented, or if they had simply been more consumption oriented and corrupt, Korea today would probably look much more like the Philippines. The Korean economic and political scene was in fact closer to that of the Philippines under Syngman Rhee in the 1950s. Park Chung Hee, for all his faults, led a disciplined and spartan personal lifestyle and had a clear vision of where he wanted the country to go economically. He played favorites and tolerated a considerable degree of corruption, but all within reasonable bounds by the standards of other developing countries. He did not waste money personally and kept the business elite from putting their resources into Swiss villas and long vacations on the Riviera.71 Park was a dictator who established a nasty authoritarian political system, but as an economic leader he did much better. The same power over the economy in different hands could have led to disaster. There are other economic drawbacks to state promotion of large-scale industry. The most common critique made by market-oriented economists is that because the investment was government rather than market driven, South Korea has acquired a series of white elephant industries such as shipbuilding, petrochemicals, and heavy manufacturing. In an age that rewards downsizing and nimbleness, the Koreans have created a series of centralized and inflexible corporations that will gradually lose their low-wage competitive edge. Some cite Taiwan’s somewhat higher overall rate of economic growth in the postwar period as evidence of the superior efficiency of a smaller, more competitive industrial structure.

In November, China’s vice minister of foreign affairs, Chiao Kuan-hua, delivered a speech to the United Nations that Bush thought “was clearly hostile to the United States, referring to us as bullies etc.” American officials were under strict orders not to reply except in warm generalities, but Bush, still stung by the Taiwan defeat and thinking of domestic U.S. opinion, argued for a stronger response. “If we appear to be pushed around by Peking at every turn,” Bush said, “the whole thing can backfire on the President.” Kissinger was unmoved by Bush’s views. To Kissinger the relationship with Peking was too sensitive and too momentous to be subject to the emotions of a given moment. To have Bush making a contrary case, even internally, was infuriating. The two men met in Washington. “He started off madder than hell,” Bush recalled. “I want to treat you as I do four other ambassadors, dealing directly with you,” Kissinger said, “but if you are uncooperative I will treat you like any other ambassador.” The threat did not sit well with Bush, who pushed back. “I reacted very strongly…and told him that I damn sure had a feel for this country and I felt we had to react” to provocative Chinese rhetoric. For two or three minutes—an eternity in such circumstances—both men spoke candidly and passionately. It was, Bush thought, “a very heated” exchange. Bush insisted he was arguing out of conviction, not self-interest. “I told him very clearly when he got upset that I was not trying to screw things up, I was trying to serve the President [by defending the U.S. against the Chinese attacks] and that it was the only interest I had,” Bush recalled saying. “He ought to get that through his head. I was not trying to get any power.” After hearing Bush out, Kissinger “really cooled down.

Nothing consumed more of the Department’s attention than the press. “Never again,” President Jiang Zemin vowed after Tiananmen, “would China’s newspapers, radio, and television be permitted to become a battle-front for bourgeois liberalism.” China, Jiang said, would never succumb to what he called “so-called glasnost.” Journalists were still expected to “sing as one voice,” and the Department would help them do so by issuing a vast and evolving list of words that must and must not appear in the news. Some rules never changed: Any mention of Taiwan’s laws was to refer to them as “so-called laws,” while China’s political system was so unique that reporters were never to type the phrase “according to international practice” when drawing comparisons to Beijing. When it came to the economy, they were not to dwell on bad news during the holidays, or on issues that the government classified as “unsolvable,” such as the fragility of Chinese banks or the political influence of the wealthy. The most ardently forbidden subject was Tiananmen itself; no mention of the 1989 protests or the bloodshed appear in Chinese textbooks; when the government discusses the events of that year, it describes them as “chaos” or “turmoil” organized by a handful of “black hands.” Journalists had little choice but to heed those instructions to such a degree that, even as China became more diverse and clamorous, the world of the news was an oasis of calm—a realm of breathtaking sameness. Newspapers on opposite sides of the country often carried identical headlines, in identical font. In May 2008, when a powerful earthquake struck the province of Sichuan, papers across the country proclaimed in near-perfect unison that the earthquake had “tugged at the heartstrings of the Chinese Communist Party.” The next morning, I rounded up the local papers and marveled at their consistency.

The great concentration of wealth in the hands of the owners of chaebol has also had the consequence feared by the KMT in Taiwan: the entry into politics of a wealthy industrialist. This happened for the first time with the candidacy of Chung Ju Yung, founder of Hyundai, for president in the 1993 election. There is, of course, nothing wrong with a Ross Perot-style billionaire’s entering politics in a democracy, but the degree of concentrated wealth in the Korean business community has made other political actors on both the right and the left nervous. The result for Korea thus far has not been propitious; while losing the election to Kim Young Sam, the seventy-seven-year-old Chung was jailed in late 1993 on rather specious corruption charges—a warning to all would-be politicians among the business class that their participation in politics would not be welcome.74 Despite the apparent anomaly between its Chinese-style familistic culture and its large corporations, Korea continues to fit my overall hypothesis. That is, Korea, like China, is a familistic culture with a relatively low degree of trust outside kinship. In default of this cultural propensity, the Korean state has had to step in to create large organizations that would otherwise not be created by the private sector on its own. The large Korean chaebol may have been run more efficiently than the state-owned companies of France, Italy, and a number of countries in Latin America, but they were no less the product of subsidy, protection, regulation, and other acts of government intervention. While most countries would be quite happy to have had Korea’s growth record, it is not clear that they could achieve it using Korean methods.

What is at stake for people around the world, from Spain and Argentina to Hungary and Poland, when they throw off dictatorship and establish a liberal democracy? To some extent, the answer is a purely negative one based on the mistakes and injustices of the preceding political order: they want to get rid of the hated colonels or party bosses who oppressed them, or to live without fear of arbitrary arrest. Those living in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union think or hope that they are getting capitalist prosperity, since capitalism and democracy are closely intertwined in the minds of many. But as we have seen, it is perfectly possible to have prosperity without freedom, as Spain, or South Korea, or Taiwan did under autocratic rule. And yet in each of these countries prosperity was not enough. Any attempt to portray the basic human impulse driving the liberal revolutions of the late twentieth century, or indeed of any liberal revolution since those of America and France in the eighteenth century, as merely an economic one, would be radically incomplete. The Mechanism created by modern natural science remains a partial and ultimately unsatisfying account of the historical process. Free government exercises a positive pull of its own: When the president of the United States or the president of France praises liberty and democracy, they are praised as good things in, themselves, and this praise seems to have resonance for people around the world.

My vision. In 2027, Israel’s leader will become convinced that Iran is fielding its nuclear arsenal. Israel will ask us to destroy that arsenal for them, using our submarines and ASW aircraft. If we refuse, Israel will attempt to do it alone. There our scenario becomes a true three-body problem. China—wishing to be seen as taking the moral high ground—announces that if we attack Iran, it will seize and hold Taiwan, arguing that Iran has just as much right to self-defense as the Israelis. At that point, the best predictions of our experts are that, if we fulfill the Israelis’ wish, we will set ourselves on the road to global nuclear war. At the very least, the U.S. president will have to disappoint our closest ally and religious cousin in the Middle East—Israel—while at worst, we might actually have to attack Israel to prevent them initiating Armageddon out of paranoia.

Our world is far more dangerous now than it was when President Obama took office. His Nobel Peace Prize notwithstanding, peace is receding today faster than it has in a generation. President Obama and Secretary Clinton projected weakness, and weakness has proven provocative. Today, Russian president Vladimir Putin is on the march in Ukraine and eyeing the Baltic states. China is making an aggressive effort to exert global power by intimidating U.S. allies and demanding new territorial concessions, from South Korea to Japan to the Philippines to Taiwan and Singapore. Cuba is exporting arms to North Korea.

After I left the White House, when Trump abandoned the Kurds in Syria, there was speculation about who he might abandon next.27 Taiwan was right near the top of the list, and would probably stay there as long as Trump remained President, not a happy prospect.

did not require the proposed sale of U.S. FX-15 fighter jets. At the end of their discussion, Reagan asked Lee Kuan Yew to carry the message to Taiwan President Chiang Ching-kuo that it would be difficult to supply all of Taiwan's requests and that President Chiang should not press for high-tech weapons at the moment, but that he, President Reagan, would not let Chiang down. A

Oh the President promised more money, sure, Dieckman thought as he slumped in his chair, but how much of that’s actually going to get to us? The military’s going to be clamoring for more funds now with the Chinese fleet conducting military exercises off of Taiwan. Deke scratched out some rough figures for the mission

On August 8, McCone met the president at the White House to discuss the wisdom of dropping hundreds of Chinese Nationalist soldiers into Mao’s China. The president had approved the paramilitary operation. McCone was dubious. Mao had surface-to-air missiles, and the last U-2 flight that the CIA had sent over the Chinese mainland, McCone told the president, had been spotted and tracked by Chinese communist radars twelve minutes after takeoff from Taiwan. “That’s humorous,” said Kennedy’s national-security aide, Michael Forrestal, the son of the late defense secretary. “We’ll give the President another U-2 disaster.” And what would the cover story be this time? the president joked. Everyone laughed. One month after this meeting, Mao’s forces shot down a U-2 over China.