Sirs,
As the U.S. Navy Pacific Command worries over the growing military threat posed by the PLA to the people of Taiwan, Japan and other neighbouring islands, the imperative to form a rational domestic political strategy becomes ever more urgent. Given the objective of impeding the political annexation of Taiwan by the government in Beijing, a more defensive posture to the layout and organization of Taiwan's political institutions could be achieved by a strategy of aggressive devolution and repudiation.
Further to the recent "five city" reform in which city and county jurisdictions were merged to form "greater" metropolitan areas, an aggressive campaign to complement this reform with devolution of significant political authority would perhaps go some way to make this island less easily bought, sold and controlled from just one pivot point, and thus less easily annexed to China.
In addition to devolution of political authority, the defensive posture of Taiwan's institutional geography could be enhanced further by the repudiation of the received Western wisdom of economic interventionism whereby government departments are responsible for the funding, planning and control of areas of vast economic importance. The uncritical acceptance of the modern marxist mantra that only government can provide currency, courts, police, schools, hospitals etc has gone on for so long that few dare to question whether it is any longer sustainable, let alone just. The government of Taiwan could seek to reduce the national debt by extricating itself from its monopolistic funding and control of many such industries.
In short, a general, three-pronged strategy of devolving, repudiating and privatizing much of the institutional layout and organization of Taiwan would go some way to prohibitively raising the political and economic costs of a Chinese attempt to annex and control this green and blue island.
Yours freely,
Michael Fagan.
(Sent: Thursday 30th December 2010. Unpublished by the Taipei Times)
Postscript: curiously, the email in which this letter was sent to the TT has bounced several times. I wonder...).
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