Taiwan, China, and other things. Recovered from the defunct TypePad platform.
Does anyone remember the singing mice from the movie "Babe"?
Turns out the concept wasn’t entirely fictional after all. The Nov 2nd edition of the Taipei Times reprinted a story from The Guardian about the ultrasonic songs that mice make. Click on the link below for more:
Audio Clip #1 (Pitch reduced by 4 octaves)
Audio Clip #2 (Speed and pitch reduced 16X further)
Their songs are very similar to that of birds warbling away. Quite pretty, actually.
An interview with a retired Japanese Air Force rear admiral:
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2005/10/31/2003278138
The admiral believes that an outright invasion of Taiwan from China would fail because China couldn’t control the sea lanes between the two countries for logistical support for the troops it would land. He also thinks that a blockade would fail, because Chinese submarines are easy to detect.
Needless to say, he predicates these outcomes upon intervention by America and Japan on the side of the Taiwanese.
UPDATE (Nov 17/05): Interestingly, the former Japanese officer doesn’t feel that the 8 submarines President Bush offered to Taiwan are needed. Wretchard at The Belmont Club disagrees, and thinks they’re crucial.
Back around May or June, it became clear that there would be a leadership contest within the ranks of the KMT for a new chairman. The chairman at the time, Lien Chen, had lost two presidential races, and his attempts to have the March elections declared null and void were going nowhere. Unless the KMT wanted to to be led by its own version of Harold Stassen, Lien had to go.
Lien still had his supporters however, and they began to grow more vocal. The nadir came when a group of elderly men kowtowed on hands and knees in front of him on national television, weeping and begging him for the sake of the party not to resign. It was suspiciously like a scene from Imperial China, where a man had to decline supplicants three times before he accepted the job of Emperor.
One of the two contenders for the post, by the surname of Wang, hedged his bets. Wang said that he was eager to get the job, he was champing at the bit, he was raring to go. Unless of course, Lien still wanted the job. In that case, Wang would graciously bow out, because obviously the party would be much better served with a two-time electoral loser at its helm.
The other contender, hizzonner Mayor Ma Ying-jeou of Taipei, was made of sterner stuff. Ma wanted the job, whether Lien quit or not. Suddenly, Lien’s "unanimous annointment" strategy began to fall apart.
It’s safe to say that no foreigner could ever have predicted the gambit that Lien would then employ. It could only have been conceivable to someone raised in the Chinese culture of ‘filial piety’. For what happened next was that an old KMT stalwart named Ma Ho-ling went to the press and weighed in on the issue.
If my son runs against Lien Chan, said Mayor Ma’s father, I will commit suicide.
Gee, thanks for your support, Dad.
Lien ended up resigning, Mayor Ma became the new KMT chairman, and Ma’s father didn’t drink any cyanide-flavored kool-aid.
I repeat the story now, because yesterday, Ma’s father was hospitalized.
On this matter, my heart goes out to Mayor Ma. His father however, gets no sympathy from me.
Moloch is said to have been an early semitic god who feasted on the flesh of his worshippers’ own children.
We would be wrong to think that he had vanished into antiquity:
For Moloch lives. Still today, he lives.
Hat tip to Sandmonkey (Oct 31, 2005 entry).
Would reunification of Taiwan and China be an easy thing? Not according to this story from Taiwan News:
Cultural gap between Taiwan, China seen as substantial
The three major points are:
The Taiwan News had an interesting story about the intelligence of dogs. In some ways, dogs seem to be smarter than wolves or even chimps(!), because dogs pay attention to the things that people do. That is to say, they’ve been bred to socialize with people, so they watch for social cues that can help them solve problems.
Hat tip to Dog Pundit for this story:
Members of "The Religion of Peace" cut off the heads of 3 schoolgirls in Indonesia.
The victims were 16 years old.
(Photos from Reuters via Dog Pundit.)
Happy Ramadan, Jihadi assholes.
i-2
Currently, the most serious military threat to Taiwan is not invasion, but blockade. The Chinese have a huge submarine fleet, which if unopposed, could easily accomplish this. Hence this story from The Taipei Times, which outlines Taiwan’s need for better submarine detection aircraft.
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2005/10/25/2003277279
Don’t expect this to get fixed any time soon, though. Taiwan’s KMT party has blocked voting on the special weapons bill 31 times (or is it now 33?) in the legislature, and doesn’t seem to be in a mood for compromise. Why you might ask, is the KMT blocking the purchase of weapons it itself requested from America in the late 1990’s?
The actual excuses that the KMT offers for their actions seem to change from week to week. Here’s a brief list, constructed from memory, along with rebuttals:
1. The price is too high.
The old KMT of Chiang Kai-Shek or Chiang Ching Kuo would have jumped at the opportunity to buy weapons to resist China; the new KMT spurns the chance. Government offers to remove certain items from the bill to reduce the price have left the KMT unmoved. Of course money not spent on weapons can be used to build schools or roads, but what good does that do you if your country’s children are turned into communist serfs?
2. The weapons are outdated.
There is some truth here. The weapons are, in fact, not America’s top-of-the-line. However, what actually matters is whether the weapons are qualitatively better than the ones available to China. (I believe that this is true for the weapons under discussion.) What this argument seems to say is that Taiwan doesn’t like outdated weapons; it instead prefers really, really outdated weapons. Like the ones it currently has.
3. The Americans just want to make money selling weapons to us.
First of all, if selling weapons to the Taiwanese was such a profitable enterprise, why is it that no one aside from America does it anymore? Secondly, people have literally thousands of needs that are met by purchasing things from others. You expect to pay the security guard in your apartment building a fee, so why on earth would anyone expect to get Patriot missiles for free?
4. The weapons are useless anyways. America won’t intervene in the event of a Chinese attack, so resistance will merely delay the inevitable.
Sad to say, there might be some truth here. Taiwan would probably fall to a Chinese attack without direct American help. However, it’s total conjecture to say that the Americans wouldn’t help. I personally think that they would, but I cannot be certain.
If the KMT really believes that America won’t help Taiwan during crunch time, then it should publicly inform the Taiwanese electorate, and run a political campaign advocating open and transparent negotiations for Taiwan’s immediate surrender. If it wins, then it should avoid the "inevitable" and try to get the best deal that it can.
The failure of the KMT to do this betrays an utter lack of sincerity on their part regarding this argument.
5. The Second Gulf War shows how self-defeating invasion can be. The Taiwanese would fight like tigers, possibly with even more ferocity than the Iraqi "insurgents".
Maybe they would, and then again, maybe they wouldn’t. I could be wrong, but I don’t think that the Taiwanese have any religious ideology promising them 72 virgins if they die in a suicide bombing. Insurgencies can be crushed, and the Chinese would have no qualms in employing much harsher measures against Taiwanese resistance than Americans are using in Iraq. Surely this should be Taiwan’s last choice for a defensive strategy, not its first.
6. Taiwan could unilaterally disarm and it would be perfectly safe. In the current international climate, China would be prevented from attacking Taiwan by the UN and international opinion.
This bizarre "theory" was actually forwarded in an editorial in a Taiwanese newspaper (The China Post). You might want to ask the Tibetans how well that worked out for THEM.
7. We don’t want an arms race with China.
You’re already in an arms race with China – they’re racing and you’re standing still. Soon you’ll be left by the wayside.
I was at the Warner Village cinemas in Taipei earlier this week to see the new "Wallace and Grommit" movie. It was pretty good, although I don’t think it’s necessary to put sexual innuendo into a family movie to get adults into the theaters.
In the lobby was a 3D widescreen television. This was a kind that I’d never seen before, which didn’t require the wearing of any special glasses.
It was mostly just playing TV commercials – French commercials. Razors floated in front of the screen while rotating. Pop bottles doing the same, then pouring out their contents. The best was one for a detergent or fabric softener, where a feather gently swayed from side-to-side as it fell through the air.
Most of them were very well done, like the concession stand ad with popcorn bursting out of the screen, threatening to hit the viewer. One or two weren’t very good, and just gave me a headache. For some reason, seeing all of this reminded me of some of Schwartzenegger’s sci-fi action flicks. The future looks very cool, indeed.
Anyone out there interested in the political wrangling over a flood prevention bill here in Taiwan?
No, didn’t think so.
Since it’s such a slow news day, I thought I would feature kind of a sad story about a missed opportunity that was outlined in Sunday’s Taipei Times. Back in the early ’70s, the Republic of China (Taiwan) still held the seat reserved for "China" on the UN Security Council. It became clear to everyone except the Taiwanese government that the ROC would lose its seat to the People’s Republic of China. While there were many who wanted dual UN recognition for the PRC and the ROC, Chiang Kai-Shek was set against it. He was certain that the ROC would be able to cling to its seat.
The rest is history. Taiwan lost that security council seat, and because of the obstinancy of an aged dictator, wasn’t even given the consolation prize of a General Assembly seat. For the last 15 years or so, newly-democratic Taiwan has gone to the UN, cap-in-hand, asking for the seat that it could have had in 1971.
Each time, its request is rebuffed. And the chance that it was once given may never come again.
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2005/10/23/2003277026