Formosan Association for Public Affairs Holds Youth Program, Calls for Taiwanese Unity
Between June 24th and June 30th, Washington DC based Taiwanese-American lobbying organization Formosan Association for Public Affairs (FAPA) held the 2019 Taiwan Emerging Leaders Workshop. Young Taiwanese professionals aged between 20 and 40, many of whom traveled from Taiwan, attended the event to learn about the perspective of a DC-based Taiwanese-American organization.
The event featured 5 days of speakers, experts from over the US on topics of diplomacy, economics, China’s influence operations, and Taiwan’s security.
Rupert Hammond-Chambers, president of the US-Taiwan Business Council, brought on concerns of the arms industry from an American perspective. According to Hammond-chambers, the US-Taiwan trade relations is a “strategic glue.” Though the relations has been robust in the past years, he also noted that Taiwan’s lack of an effective security clearance process is a potential obstacle to further sale of advanced weapon platforms to Taiwan.
Robert Sutter, professor at George Washington University, labels current PRC activities towards Taiwan and the US as a “whole-of-state” approach to gain influence. According to Sutter, China is now in a pure competition with the US, ambitious to take over the world’s high-tech manufacturing to gain advantages in producing arms.
Gerrit van der Wees, former Dutch diplomat and publisher of Taiwan Communique, brought a lighter side by presenting on the Taiwan-Europe relations, juxtaposed with the imminent danger most panelists warned of. He, now an adjunct professor at George Mason University, also describes the three schools of thought in Washington on the Taiwan Relations Act — those wishing to maintain the status quo, those hoping for more development, and those hoping for normalization of the US-Taiwan relations.
Topics presented by the speakers largely surrounded around the US-Taiwan-China trilateral relations. Extensive discussion and Q and A were held on topics such as PLA activities and its implication on Taiwan, Taiwan’s defense industry, China’s One Belt One Road ambition, and China’s influence operations around the world.
Topics such as the European experience with countering disinformation, presented by a speaker of Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Lab, also applies the European experience with social media manipulation. Disinformation and election interference is a major issue faced by Taiwan today. Nuances such as PRC’s Legal Warfare in the South China Sea, which also brought up Taiwan’s de-facto control over the Taiping/Itu Aba island, also brings light to little-known yet highly important facts.
“In general, we hope our friends from Taiwan can understand US-Taiwan relations and Taiwan’s international environment better,” says Dee Wu, Policy Coordinator at FAPA,”Many of them could be the future leaders of Taiwan and having such knowledge would be important not only to them but also for their country.”
Throughout the event, participants also actively shared and explained their differing vision of Taiwan’s future, which is highly polarized within Taiwan itself and muddled by issues such as the legitimacy of the ROC constitution, Taiwan’s authoritarian past, and legality of combating Chinese infiltration and influence operations in Taiwan. Participants were grouped for debates on topics such as the US Indo-Pacific Strategy, Taiwan’s name and representation in sports events, and the introduction of an anti-annexation and anti-infiltration act.
During the debate on the anti-annexation and anti-infiltration act, a legislative assistant working for Taiwan’s New Power Party (時代力量) in the Legislative Yuan, who asked not to be named publicly, took part in drafting of the bill itself. Assigned to argue against the bill at the conference debate, he highlighted transparency and executability issues in the bill itself.
The bill, which in the current proposed form would be executed by Taiwan’s National Security Bureau (NSB), has a point of concern in that the NSB today is the same intelligence agency which helped to sustain Taiwan’s authoritarian regime prior to 1996.
A participant who currently works as an engineer at Facebook, said that he enjoyed being exposed to a different topic than the ones he is professionally involved in.
These participants spoke on the condition of representing their own beliefs, not the views of the organizations they are affiliated with.
The group was composed of a particularly politically diverse crowd, who avidly shared their perspective and view of Taiwan’s politics from different angles. Participating the conference in Washingon DC, the group seemed more relaxed to express their political opinions, a change from the tense and divisive political environment in Taiwan. The audience included legislative assistants of different parties in the Legislative Yuan, engineers in the tech industry, lawyers, international organization professionals, defense subcontractors, import-export businesspeople, and Taiwanese college/university students.
The group made a visit to Capitol Hill and the Twin Oaks estate, previous residence of the ROC ambassador to the US prior to the severance of diplomatic relations in 1979.
At the end of the event, FAPA staff raised awareness of the threat China poses to the livelihood and democracy of Taiwan in many dimensions — influentially, economically, militarily, diplomatically. The workshop is a rare experience for the Taiwanese crowd to discuss political issues, since such discussions are frequently avoided as a taboo in Taiwan.