Taiwan-Singapore soup turns
bitter-sweet By Jens Kastner
TAIPEI - Taiwan's media has been abuzz
with the notion that the island's ties to
Singapore have taken a dramatic nosedive lately.
In the past few weeks, Taipei's representative to
the city-state has been recalled supposedly over
misbehavior, and even decades-old bilateral
military cooperation was reportedly suspended.
Some observers see Beijing pulling the strings
while others say the media have made a mountain
out of a mole hill.
In mid-February, the
story broke that Vanessa Shih, the island's
representative to Singapore, had been assigned to
a new post
because the Singaporean
government was strongly displeased with her. At a
party on occasion of the Republic of China (ROC)
National Day, she not only dared to display the
ROC flag in public but also sung the ROC anthem,
the reports read.
Given that Singapore
like most other nations recognizes Beijing's
People's Republic of China (PRC) but not Taipei's
ROC, Shih's moves, if indeed conducted in public,
amounted to a diplomatic faux-pas. It was
furthermore alleged that Singapore's founding
father Lee Kuan Yew and other high-ranking
officials did not like Shih's making contact with
Chen Show Mao, a member of the opposition Workers'
Party who happens to be an immigrant from Taiwan.
Notwithstanding that Shih's three-year
appointment was just about to come to a natural
end, and that the Taiwanese Ministry of Foreign
Affairs quickly labelled the story "inaccurate",
the developments led to intensive media coverage
on the island.
The situation soon got even
worse: After Taiwan's Minister of National Defense
Kao Hua-chu visited the Singapore Air Show, the
largest aerospace and defense event in Asia,
Taiwanese media claimed Kao had conducted secret
military exchanges with Singaporean military brass
on the sidelines of his trip. Those talks were the
highest level bilateral military exchanges in
recent years, and because Taipei had promised to
keep them secret, a raging Singaporean government
ordered the suspension of all military
cooperation, so went the speculation.
This
story was also dismissed by Taiwanese officials,
as were rumors that talks on a Taiwan-Singapore
free trade agreement (FTA) had since fallen victim
to the spat. What the reports chose not to mention
was that last year, too, saw significant
military-related visits to Singapore by Taiwanese
figures, namely Chief of General Staff Admiral Lin
Chen-yi and former Minister of National Defense
Chen Chao-ming.
Although geographically
not exactly neighbors, Taiwan and Singapore have
held strong ties. After the Chinese Civil War,
both the predominantly ethnic Chinese societies
shared deep distrust against Mao's communism. When
in the 1970s tiny Singapore started building its
Singapore Armed Forces (SAF) to deter potential
military adventurism by much more populous
Malaysia and Indonesia, the Taiwanese under
then-president Chiang Ching-kuo offered timely
assistance by providing training areas because
land in the city-state is of extremely short
supply.
Taiwan's and Singapore's troops
did not train together, and neither was there an
official military alliance, but even today, the
SAF's infantry and special operation forces train
in various locations over the island. The
existence of the "Starlight" program became
undeniable in 2007 when a Taiwanese F-5 crashed
into a military base near Taipei, killing three
active-duty Singaporean servicemen, as well as
injuring a few others who happened to be in the
wrong spot at the wrong time.
After
Singapore switched diplomatic relations from the
ROC to the PRC in 1990, it resisted more than
other countries in the region pressure from
Beijing to cut ties to the island, and Lee Kuan
Yew and his ministers continued to visit Taipei
when Chiang's successor Lee Teng-hui ruled over
the island.
The Far Eastern Economics
Review in 2004 described how these trip were
handled: "Singapore ministers officially take
leave, notice of which is published in the
government gazette, so they can describe the trip
to Taiwan as private; Singapore informs Beijing,
which asks that the visit not take place and
threatens unspecified consequences if it does;
Singapore goes ahead anyway."
Later on in
Lee Teng-hui's presidency, and especially after
the island's first direct presidential elections
in 1996 which Lee won, Taiwan-Singapore relations
soured significantly, however. Taiwan's Lee and
the city-state's Lee developed a personal
antipathy, and ties hit rock-bottom when Lee
Teng-hui's successor Chen Shui-bian, next to
generally messing up Taiwanese foreign relations
with his drives for independence, famously
described Singapore as "a booger-sized nation".
In 2008, the Kuomintang's (KMT) Ma
Ying-jeou became president in Taipei, and the
climate between the two became friendlier.
In May 2011, apparently after Beijing has
given its nod, ties became so friendly that talks
on an FTA were started, making the city-state the
first nation that maintains diplomatic ties to the
PRC carrying out such a move.
Then it was
all messed up by a tipsy diplomat and a defense
minister who of all things chose the spotlights of
the world's third largest airshow for conducting a
cloak-and-dagger mission, local media says.
Unsurprisingly, some Taiwanese observers
see Beijing behind the Vanessa Shih scandal. They
believe that while the Chinese consented to a
Taiwan-Singapore FTA before Taiwan's presidential
elections in mid-January to give Ma Ying-jeou
political ammunition, after Ma's win, they wanted
to end his fantasies of gaining "international
space".
Others say that because the Ma
administration's enthusiasm for diplomatic
breakthroughs was so great that it perturbed
cautious Singaporean leaders. Neither theory is
implausible, but this isn't true of the
allegations that Singapore planned to scrap
military ties.
The Singaporeans have for
decades insisted on a strong US military presence
in the Asia-Pacific region and are offering the
Americans usage of naval facilities for warships.
The main function of which is to counter China's
maritime presence in the region's seas. Such a
move against Taiwan would suggest the Singaporeans
made a swift u-turn and had begun dancing to
Beijing's tune.
This would've set alarm
bells ringing in Washington as well as in
China-wary regional capitals, further complicating
the US's evolving strategy of cementing alliances
and extending its physical presence in Southeast
Asia. A perceived drift into Beijing's orbit - and
perhaps even making use of China's long-standing
offer to switching from Taiwanese to Chinese soil
for military training - wouldn't benefit the SAF
much, given its dependency on sophisticated
US-made weapon systems.
When approached
for comment, Jean-Pierre Cabestan, professor at
and head of the Department of Government and
International Studies at Hong Kong Baptist
University, saw the Taiwanese media's analyses as
a laughing matter.
"The ex-representative
should be decorated, given a medal for having sung
the ROC national anthem," he said. "Singapore will
recover sooner or later, and the spat won't
dramatically affect the ongoing FTA negotiations.
Not to mention military ties. The Singaporeans
need to train their army somewhere, and they still
prefer Taiwan to Malaysia, don't they?"
Jens Kastner is a Taipei-based
journalist.
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