Day: March 7, 2022

Taiwan’s foreign minister warned on Monday that the democratic island could be attacked by China, should the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) view the U.S. response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as “weak.”

“I believe that China’s leaders are … watching the situation and trying to draw their own conclusions,” Taiwan foreign minister Joseph Wu warned on day 12 of the Russian invasion.

“The danger is that if they believe that the West’s response to the Russian invasion is weak, and lacks impact, they could take that as a positive sign [for an invasion of Taiwan],” he said.

Taiwan, which was formerly ruled by the authoritarian Kuomintang government founded at the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911 and which made a transition to democracy in the 1990s, has never been ruled by the CCP, nor formed part of the People’s Republic of China.

As Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy has called on international volunteers to join the armed resistance against Russia, a Taiwanese man from the central city of Taichung posted his ID on Twitter, saying he was prepared to go to Ukraine and fight.

“I am proud of being Taiwanese, and want to defend democracy and freedom alongside our allies around the world,” the man, who said he was a former corporal in the Taiwanese military, wrote.

He feared death, but added: “I still have to do what I think is right.”

Wu said his ministry is closely following China’s next move, as well as the situation in Ukraine, which he said many in Taiwan found “inspiring.”

“Seeing the indomitable Ukrainian government and people fighting tirelessly, I want to say from the bottom of my heart that the people of Taiwan, who also face authoritarian oppression, have been inspired,” Wu said. “Like me, they are saying ‘we are Ukraine’.”

Wu’s comments came after Chinese premier Li Keqiang said his government had “accelerated the construction of a modern military logistics system and a modern military asset management system, modernized of weapons and equipment … and continued to deepen reforms of national defense capabilities and the military” during 2021.

“[We will] continue … to strengthen scientific and technological innovations to strengthen our national defense capabilities,” Li said in his March 5 work report to the NPC.

Budget likely higher

China’s Ministry of Finance submitted a draft budget to the NPC of 1.45 trillion yuan, an increase of 7.1 percent year-on-year, the biggest increase in military spending since 2019.

But Taiwan military expert Lin Ying-yu said the true figure is likely much higher than that.

“The cost of the armed police and stability maintenance don’t get presented in the defense budget … while a lot of investment and military R&D will be carried out via military-civilian integration, as has happened with fighter jets and the Beidou satellite system,” Lin told RFA.

Su Tze-yun, of Taiwan’s Institute for National Defense and Security Research, said military spending has more than quadrupled since CCP general secretary Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, doubling over the past decade.

“A large part of that has gone to pay rises for the People’s Liberation Army (PLA),” Su told RFA. “Salaries in the PLA have gone up by around 75 percent since Xi Jinping took office.”

“It’s about military stability, especially when the 20th Party Congress is due this year, and Xi Jinping will be seeking a third term in office,” he said.

Su estimated that China could have as many as 1,000 nuclear warheads by 2030.

“[They] will also have more projection capabilities, including the Dongfeng 41 missile launcher, new nuclear submarines and the H-20 stealth bombers,” he said. “This will shift the nuclear balance with the West, and shift the structure of geopolitics.”

Parallels rejected

In Beijing, Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi rejected parallels between Taiwan and Ukraine.

“The first thing we must be clear about is that the Taiwan issue is fundamentally different from the Ukraine issue, and there is no comparison between the two,” Wang told an NPC news conference.

“Taiwan is an inalienable part of China’s territory, and the Taiwan issue is entirely China’s internal affair,” Wang said, adding that the Ukraine issue was “a dispute between Russia and Ukraine.”

When the KMT regime under Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek fled to Taiwan in 1947 after losing a civil war to Mao Zedong’s communist troops, the Republic of China ceased to control most of China, but continues to be the official name of the Taiwan government.

Taiwan began a transition to democracy following the death of Chiang Kai-shek’s son, President Chiang Ching-kuo, in January 1988, starting with direct elections to the legislature in the early 1990s and culminating in the first direct election of a president, Lee Teng-hui, in 1996.

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

In recent years, Vietnam’s communist government has stepped up arrests of those it considers its opponents, including independent journalists, religious figures, land rights activists and environmentalists. While the number of prisoners keeps rising, and human rights groups say there’s no sign of a let-up, it’s not a blunt tactic.

In fact, security forces are increasingly surgical in who they target: people who have the ability to mobilize their fellow citizens.

That speaks to the insecurities and vulnerabilities of the Vietnam Communist Party (VCP), which rose to power not just through their leadership in the anti-colonial struggle against the French and Americans, but through their ability to mobilize the population. That remains a key function of the party.

These days, social media is the primary means of influencing people. Unlike China with its Great Firewall and ban on foreign social media platforms, Vietnam’s internet is open, though heavily policed. For an autocratic regime it’s a double-edged sword. Social media allow people to share information the government doesn’t like, but it also allows government to follow trends, see what people are angry about, and monitor the mood of the country. And of course, it is comparatively easy to police.

The Vietnamese government has failed in creating domestic alternatives to Facebook, but it has had more success through its efforts to police foreign social media platforms. Its cybersecurity law introduced in 2019 required foreign tech firms to store data in-country and established local corporate offices.

Vietnam is a sufficiently large and growing market that the firms have largely complied, though the law has been unevenly enforced, the result of bureaucratic tussles between the Ministry of Public Security and the more outward-looking economic ministries who worry about the law’s impact on foreign investment.

At first, Vietnam’s cyber forces monitored the internet to identify dissenting voices and they were able to develop their own algorithms to figure out who the key influencers were. As a result, the first wave of influential internet users who had switched from clandestine, “samizdat”-style pamphleteering to having large on-line followings, were arrested and silenced.

The focus has shifted to independent journalists, since all media is directly or indirectly controlled by state and party organs, and subject to censorship.

Intrepid voices have tried to establish their own independent YouTube TV channels and Facebook news sites. Again, the government has not gone after all of them, but they have figured out who has the most influence, what sites are the most watched and read by a population that largely mistrusts state media.

If someone has experienced an injustice perpetrated by the government, or is railing about an adverse government policy, the communist regime takes little notice. There are literally millions of people that do this all the time. What concerns the regime are those who have a following and who can mobilize the population into taking action.

Nguyễn Ngọc Như Quỳnh, better known as “Mother Mushroom,” gained a huge following for her reporting on a Chinese-owned bauxite mine and other environmental issues. She made environmental issues a middle class concern, and being able to speak English helped her attract international attention. She was arrested in 2016 and was later resettled in the United States.

The political activist Pham Doan Trang, who was arrested in October 2020, was a particular headache for the Vietnamese government as she was not philosophically inclined in her writing. Instead, she communicated Vietnamese laws, constitutional rights, and procedures in ways that ordinary people could understand. She exposed how the government violated its own laws, garnering her a large following. She’s now serving a nine-year sentence for spreading “propaganda against the state.”

In October 2021, a court sentenced five journalists from one of the most popular independent media organs, Clean Newspaper, to lengthy prison sentences. Le Van Dung, also known as Le Dung Vova – who ran the “CHTV” news channel on Facebook – was one of the most popular independent journalists and arrested in July 2021. He was so wanted that the government took the unusual step of authorizing a nationwide criminal warrant for his arrest. Another popular video journalist, Nguyen Thai Hung, and his wife, were arrested in the middle of a live stream. His YouTube channel had some 40,000 subscribers.

One well-known former journalist and writer, Pham Chi Thanh, received a five-and-a-half-year sentence for his satirical writings.

Nguyen Van Oai was released from prison in January 2022 after serving a five-year sentence for organizing protests against a 2016 toxic waste spill that killed tons of fish off the coast of central Vietnam, for which Taiwanese company Formosa Plastics admitted culpability and paid damages. His quick mobilization of the local community made him an immediate threat. He and other activists were the only ones imprisoned over the unrest.

That Mother Mushroom and Pham Doan Trang had won multiple foreign awards and had deep international networks of support only amplified their voices at home. International recognition raised concerns of foreign interference amongst the conservative party elite.

But the government will also target individuals before they have the chance to gain a bigger following. In 2021, Vietnam arrested nearly 40 bloggers and persons who disseminated “anti-state” material online. Most of them were little-known but all were activists on hot-button issues, such as China, the government’s mishandling of the pandemic, land disputes, and corruption. Clearly, some initiative is taken by local-level security forces and prosecutors in pursuing these cases.

Vietnam has also started to use tax evasion charges against dissidents. It remains to be seen if it will take a leaf out of China’s playbook and start targeting other social influencers, including movie stars and musicians, who use their platforms to address pressing social issues. China has used tax investigations and its control over studios, airwaves, and media to destroy careers. Formerly ubiquitous celebrities have become non-people overnight.

But the Vietnamese party’s broader strategy is already clear – no one is able to mobilize outside of the VCP.

Zachary Abuza is a professor at the National War College in Washington and an adjunct at Georgetown University. The views expressed here are his own and do not reflect the position of the U.S. Department of Defense, the National War College, Georgetown University or RFA.