Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good Seeing this newsletter as a forward? Sign up here. January 10, 2024 | |
|
What Taiwan's Election Is About |
As Taiwan prepares to vote for its next president this Saturday, analysts say mainland China isn't the only thing, or even necessarily the main thing, on voters' minds.
"The future of Taiwan's relations with the mainland have dominated the campaign—it always does," The Economist writes. (Mainland China looms large over Taiwanese politics, as Beijing considers the island to be a runaway province, not a country of its own.) "Yet that question will not straightforwardly decide who becomes Taiwan's next president. That is clear at the rallies, where voters talk as much about domestic concerns such as wages and housing as geopolitics." At East Asia Forum, T.Y. Wang echoes the point: "Though the 'China factor' remains the key political cleavage in society, and the most important factor affecting citizens' electoral behaviour, it has not been as big of a campaign issue in the 2024 elections as in the 2020 polls." At the same site, Chung-min Tsai and Yves Tiberghien write: "(T)he dominant features of the campaign so far are the stability and resilience of Taiwan's democratic and political processes, policy convergence on core strategic questions across parties and the focus of the campaign on socio-economic issues, not the contest in the Asian geopolitics."
The race is a three-way affair between the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), the party of current President Tsai Ing-wen, the platform of which calls for Taiwan's independence from China; the Kuomintang (KMT), the party of China's nationalists who fled to Taiwan after their 20th century civil war with China's communists, which favors closer relations with the mainland; and a third party, the Taiwan People's Party (TPP), "which is campaigning mainly on bread-and-butter issues," as The Economist puts it. The DPP candidate, Lai Ching-te, is viewed as the favorite and "has provoked particular ire in China, having described himself in 2017 as a 'pragmatic worker for Taiwan independence,'" The Economist writes.
Some say that no matter who wins, the status quo (or something like it) will continue. "The three candidates and their parties are all approaching cross-Strait relations from different perspectives," John Fuh-sheng Hsieh writes in a Nikkei Asia op-ed. "The truth, however, is that Taiwan's next president, whoever he is, is unlikely to make a hugely dramatic shift in cross-Strait ties due to continuing domestic and external constraints." |
|
|
Where is Taiwan heading, politically? At the BBC, Rupert Wingfield-Hayes examines the island's evolution: "Neither Chiang (Kai-shek, the 20th century Chinese nationalist leader), nor Mao (Zedong, the communist leader), conceived of Taiwan as a separate place with a separate people. But that is what it has become. … (Mainland) China has become richer, stronger and an unmistakable threat. Taiwan has become a democracy and is in the middle of yet another election where its ties with Beijing are being tested. No matter the result of Saturday's vote, its freedom is a danger to the Chinese Communist Party's hopes of unification. … The answers to a decades-old question—Do you see yourself as Chinese or Taiwanese?—are getting mixed up (in Taiwan). For Beijing that is alarming. For Taiwan's political parties, it is a delicate, new dance, where ideological certainties are being quietly shelved." |
|
|
The End of 'Françafrique'? |
As France24 journalist Florence Villeminot explained it to English-speaking audiences in 2016, the term "Françafrique" is an in-some-ways-controversial catch-all for France's sphere of influence in its sub-Saharan African former colonies. Contested for years, some wonder if that relationship is finally ending.
Coinciding a wave of coups in the West and Central African region known as the Sahel, antipathy toward France has risen. At The Wall Street Journal, Gabriele Steinhauser and Noemie Bisserbe chart the trend and the factors surrounding it—including tonal mistakes by France, a French military effort that has struggled to counter the region's jihadist insurgencies, conspiracy theories, and post-colonial resentment. "Across much of francophone Africa," they write, "deriding the French has become the most powerful rallying cry, with putschist regimes, opposition leaders and civil-society activists blaming their former colonial power for years of underdevelopment and government mismanagement. The backlash has also undermined U.S. efforts to fight a jihadist uprising in West Africa that has killed some 41,000 people since 2017. ... Taken together, the backlash against France across Africa has morphed into one of the biggest anti-Western rebellions since the end of the Cold War."
The trend is unfolding as the region faces serious problems. Aside from coups—seven in the last four years—the Sahel suffers from security threats as a hotbed of jihadism. As the Global Briefing noted, in December Maria Nicoletta Gaida and Didier Castres predicted at the Foreign Policy Research Institute that in coming years the Sahel could see the development of "institutionalized violent chaos" in an ungoverned zone 10 times the size of Italy or the rise of something like a caliphate. |
|
|
'The Discovery of Europe' |
Writing under that headline in The New York Review of Books, Álvaro Enrigue reviews Caroline Dodds Pennock's "On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe," an account of Indigenous Americans brought to Europe after the late 1400s. Following Columbus' voyage on behalf of the Spanish crown, Enrigue writes, globalization began in earnest: "(E)normous intercontinental migrations became common, with people brought forcibly from Central Africa, the Philippines, and China to the new Spanish kingdoms in the Americas. Most residents of Mexico City or Lima in the late sixteenth century were not of indigenous or European descent."
We may think of European relations with the Americas in that era as uni-directional, when it comes to human movement, centered exclusively on the forcible transport of enslaved Africans westward. Not so, Enrigue writes: "(H)undreds of thousands of other indigenous people went to Europe during the sixteenth century. … The vast majority … were brought there as slaves. … Dodds Pennock finds credible the estimate that there were 650,000 American slaves in Spain alone. Many of these captives died in servitude, but some sued for and won not only their freedom but return tickets and compensation for labor unwillingly provided. Others went to Europe—as advocates, entertainers, or spouses—and established themselves in royal, religious, and legal courts."
Pennock's book divides anecdotes by the roles various Indigenous people played in this new social drama, Enrigue writes. Enrigue describes some whose doings ramified through history, for example: "The mestizo Blas Valera—born in the Andes to a Quechua-speaking noblewoman and the son of a conquistador—became a professor of humanities in the Jesuit College of Cádiz after being prosecuted in Peru because of his dangerous ideas. In his preaching and lectures he established the bases for an indigenous Catholic theology. His writings were burned by British and Dutch invaders in the 1596 sack of Cádiz, but his calls for an inclusive, flexible faith survived as part of the Jesuits' eclectic providentialism—which was essential for the globalization of European values. The echoes of his silenced voice resounded in the liberation theology that flourished in Latin America during the cold war, and they can still be heard in the ideas of Pope Francis, an Argentine Jesuit." |
|
|
| You are receiving this newsletter because you signed up for Fareed's Global Briefing.
To stop receiving this newsletter, unsubscribe or sign up to manage your CNN account | |
® © 2024 Cable News Network. A Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All Rights Reserved.
1050 Techwood Drive NW, Atlanta, GA 30318 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
