Week 44: Taipei Calling
Week 44: Taipei Calling
A potential opportunity in Taiwan, and my latest essay on family court issues.
Earlier this week I went to see Taiwan’s foreign minister, Joseph Wu, speak at an event organised by La Trobe University. Wu wasn’t actually in Melbourne – official visits are difficult for senior Taiwanese ministers – but he beamed in from Taipei. I’d been invited along to the event by the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office – Taiwan’s de facto consulate in Melbourne. The previous week I had met with a couple of members of staff to discuss their journalism program – to travel to Taiwan, immerse myself in several issues, write some articles.
(I wrote a piece for The Diplomat on Wu’s remarks, linked below in this week’s reading).
This would an incredible opportunity that I hope comes to fruition. Although my research background hasn’t focused so much on Taiwan, I remain sympathetic and incredibly interested in the country (as Eliot Cohen wrote recently, let’s stop with the official fiction and call Taiwan what it actually is).
Given my interest in the (poor) use of language in public writing I’ve been thinking that there would be a good article in challenging the lazy descriptors of Taiwan’s two largest political parties. With elections coming up in January we will undoubtedly see more of the false binary of “pro-independence” Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and the “pro-Beijing” Kuomintang (KMT). These descriptors get attached to almost every article written on Taiwan politics, but the are simply not accurate – with these parties’ actual positions being far more complex and nuanced.
The opportunity would not be until next year – I have a few other ideas that would be interesting to write about, so I’ve got a bit of time to do some research and plan them out more fully.
High Stakes Status
This week a new essay of mine for Movement of Mothers was published. The essay was initially going to be about a high profile custody battle in California involving a musician. Yet naming names has become a bit fraught, so I pivoted to a more general piece on how we as societies respond to – and coddle – high status men. And how vultures that circle around family courts feed off these sentiments – seeing economic opportunity in protecting men’s honour by obscuring and downplaying violence. With family courts proving themselves very pliable when it comes to what should be their objective of protecting children.
The essay notes that there has been an important victory in California recently with the introduction of Piqui’s Law – named after a five year old boy who was murdered by his father after the family court ignored evidence of the danger this man posed. Alongside mandating training around domestic abuse for family court judges, the law has also banned “reunification camps”. These are monstrous businesses that have been built on the premise that children have no right to their own feelings – and fears – about a parent they avoid contact with, and need to be bullied and brainwashed into “overcoming” these fears (usually by also separating them from the parent – mostly mothers – who they feel safest with).
That these business have become a major tool courts have used in custody outcomes is a sign of the brutality that has become embedded in these institutions. The hope is that other states in the United States will take California’s lead and ban these ghouls from operating.
This Week’s Reading
Facilitating the Desires of High Status Men
Grant Wyeth – Movement Of Mothers
“Yet there remains a disconnect between how we desire a justice system that places sympathy for victims at the core of their application of the law and of the values we hold to create and influence our laws. Our justice systems nominally operate via principle and promise that each person is of equal worth. However the outcomes we produce suggest otherwise. We can’t entirely blame justice systems for this. They are a reflection of our social values – in particular, the way we see men’s interests as of greater importance and the fascination we maintain with their power and violence.
I write “we” because I believe we all have a responsibility to improve our social norms. Men especially have a central role in regulating and reforming the behaviour of other men – to create forms of masculinity that eschew violence, domination, and fragile narcissism. The key to completely defeating the parental alienation industry is giving it nothing to feed off, and this will require more than just laws that ban some of their rancid activities. It will require abusive men overcoming their aggrieved entitlement, and for us all to stop legitimising this behaviour.”
In Australia, Taiwan’s Foreign Minister Appeals to Shared Values
Grant Wyeth – The Diplomat
“Yet Wu was keen to stress that this deterrence is not simply a matter of military might and cooperative security partnerships; he noted that democratic resilience was also an essential element. This democratic resilience is twofold. It come from domestic populations having commitment to democratic principles, and this is buttressed by a network of international partners that share the same commitments. It’s important in this framework to make democracy – and its interdependent relationship with liberalism – global norms that governments, political parties, media outlets, and civil society groups are all dedicated to preserving and enhancing.
The broad concept that Wu was seeking to convey was that deterrence is a collective effort, not only through security architecture and partnerships, but through mutually beneficial trading relationships, educational and cultural exchanges, and the protection and enhancement of democratic norms. This network of interaction builds trust and resilience; it demonstrates an appreciation for pluralism and a rejection of unchecked power and authoritarian lusts.”
Faith and Foreign Policy: How the Pacific Views the Israel-Gaza Conflict
Grant Wyeth – The Diplomat
“Issues concerning Israel and Palestine are highly polarising at the best of times, and are always subject to an abandonment of nuance. Hamas undoubtedly understood the uncompromising reactions it would create outside of the immediate region when it launched its assault on October 7. Inducing greater polarisation throughout the world would have been a secondary objective, and with this they have been incredibly successful. Current events have established a new litmus test of human decency, depending on which “side” you are on.
States, however, make decisions on far more complex criteria than individuals that post on social media, and alongside the centrality of religion to Pacific culture any response to current events in the U.N. General Assembly would not have been taken lightly. Smaller states feel global instability in ways that states with greater resources do not. The resolution may have nominally been about a ceasefire, but as with all such votes, there are far wider considerations to make.”
The Maoist Roots of Xi’s Economic Dilemma
Jeremy S. Friedman – Foreign Policy
“But Xi also seemed to share Mao’s suspicion of the dangers of unleashed private enterprise and has instead focused his efforts on further centralizing control over China’s political, economic, cultural, and ideological domains.
Xi’s priorities in these efforts have often reflected an obsession with avoiding a Soviet-style collapse. The CCP studied the fall of the Soviet Union carefully to avoid such an outcome for itself. In the 1990s, its analysis of the Soviet collapse gave a great deal of attention to the problems of the planned economy and its failure to adequately provision the population, making the embrace of market reforms a logical approach to preserving political stability. In the Xi era, however, diagnoses of the Soviet collapse reflect different priorities, becoming ever narrower and focused on a single factor above all: ideology. According to current-day Chinese scholars of socialism, the Soviet Union collapsed because its ruling party had lost faith in Marxism-Leninism, become complacent and corrupt, and consequently lost touch with the people, who similarly no longer believed in the party’s ideology. This internal fear was compounded by contemporary global events. Following the Arab Spring and the post-Soviet color revolutions, both Moscow and Beijing believed that the West was using democratization to undermine its enemies, with them at the top of the list. There was a pervasive worry about political and ideological subversion—and a particular fear on Xi’s part that he could become China’s Mikhail Gorbachev.”
Ami Ayalon, Gilead Sher & Orni Petruschka
“That initiative proposed that Israel could secure peace with the entire Arab world in exchange for its withdrawal from the West Bank and Arab-dominated parts of Jerusalem. A workable modification would include a limited territorial swap to reduce the number of Israeli settlers that would have to be relocated to about 100,000, proper security arrangements, and an agreement on how to resolve the issue of Palestinians who left Israeli territory in 1948. This is the only possible outcome that can enable Israelis and Palestinians to live in peace and secure their prosperity, and it will render Israel safer, more legitimate, and more aligned with its own founding national values of freedom and justice.
Netanyahu cannot direct any part of this process—not the peace process, and not the war, either. He has completely lost the trust of not only his foes but now, also, many of his friends. And lately, he has lost the trust even of members of the top ranks of the Israeli security establishment. On October 29, he created chaos with a late-night tweet that shifted blame onto Israel’s intelligence agencies for missing the signs of Hamas’s attack. He later deleted the tweet and apologized, but this kind of impulsive, defensive episode that undermines hardworking officials and threatens his fragile unity government may well recur. Most important, he cannot lead Israel in a unique moment that requires the country to seize an opportunity to change the direction of its conflict with the Palestinians. He must resign immediately if Israel is to have any chance of rebounding from the destruction he has wreaked on its security, economy, and society.”
The Israel-Hamas War Will Reshape Western Politics
Ross Douthat – New York Times
“In that fairly distant past, the politics of Israel-Palestine broke down into alignments that were familiar and decades-old. On the pro-Israel side in the U.S. were three broad factions: Zionist Democrats, centrist and liberal; neoconservative hawks; and evangelical Christians. As you moved leftward, sympathy for the Palestinians increased, with American progressives and European conventional wisdom finding common ground in their critiques of the Israeli occupation. Finally there was also a rightward form of anti-Israel sentiment, held by Arabist realists and Pat Buchananite populists and European reactionaries — but in the aftermath of 9/11, with neoconservatism ascendant, this felt increasingly marginal.
These broad groupings still exist — evangelicals are still very pro-Israel, the Democratic president is a Zionist liberal, the progressive movement is pro-Palestinian — but in the current crisis you can see a more complex alignment taking shape, with implications that extend beyond the Israeli-Palestinian question alone. Here, very provisionally, are some ideological trends and tendencies worth watching.”
[click through to read an interesting summary of new groups and ideas emerging]
China’s Two-Faced Approach To Gaza
Michael Shuman – The Atlantic
“In the Middle East, Beijing has vociferously called for an end to the fighting between Israel and Hamas and claims to take an evenhanded approach to the belligerents. But the Chinese government is, in effect, backing Hamas—and therefore terrorism. Xi’s position on Gaza is identical to his stance on the world’s other major conflict, the war in Ukraine. There, too, Beijing has asserted principled neutrality and even launched a peace mission, while at the same time deepening ties to Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin.
Beijing seeks to exploit both of these crises in order to undermine the United States and promote its own global leadership. To this end, Xi backs the aggressor, blames the United States for the resulting disorder, and then portrays himself as the more responsible peacemaker with better solutions to the world’s problems. China and Russia are in this game together: Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi had the chutzpah to call for a cease-fire in Gaza in discussions with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, while the Russian army was grinding up civilians in Ukraine.”
A bit over a decade ago I spend a few months in the southern Indian state of Kerala. I was in a town called Palakkad, and the nearest big city was Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu. So I would spend a lot of time on the buses going between Palakkad and Coimbatore. Local tip – if you get the bus via the town of Pollachi, instead of going directly between Coimbatore and Palakkad, the scenery is much better (that is, spectacular).
Anyway, bus drivers in southern India all seem to have a deep fondness for Tamil cinema in the 1980s, and would always play an incredible selection of music. Mobile coverage wasn’t so great back then, so trying to Shazam the songs was difficult, but I have subsequently been able to track down some favourites. This is a particularly gorgeous song.