Taiwan:Cairo Declaration and Taiwan's status

It is almost 65 years since the Cairo Declaration. Jerome Keating looks at the rhetoric of it and asks why the status of Taiwan remains undetermined after all this time.

4 comments

  • Kai

    Okay, it doesn’t take a Ph.D to spot the rhetorical problems in Jerome’s piece. What started off as a reasonable foray into history and international legalities devolved into canned appeals to emotions…right about here:

    It is also time to recognize that the real greed and threat to instability in the Taiwan Strait is from the People’s Republic of China and not the freedom loving people of Taiwan.

    Simple question: So what about all the money loving people of Taiwan?

    Ideology and aspirations are important, but let’s not pretend pragmatics don’t exist. If nothing else, the Taiwanese as a whole, much like their Chinese counterparts, are a practical sort. Trying to insinuate arbitrary distinctions between the two sides as one being “freedom loving” and the other as “anything but freedom loving” is intellectual dishonesty and even rhetorical immaturity.

    I’m disappointed. There are far better appeals to reason than this and I thought a pH.D could’ve done better.

  • Please kai — loving money and loving freedom are not mutually exclusive. Your own logic is badly flawed.

  • Kai

    Please Michael, I never said they were. Please re-read what I wrote and think harder. As much as I acknowledge your punditry on Taiwan matters, one of the persistent logical fallacies of the arguments advanced by and evident in what Jerome wrote and what you write is the appeal to emotion, blithely pretending other arguments don’t exist, grossly simplifying and ultimately misrepresenting the contentious issues as “freedom-loving vs. not-freedom-loving.”

    As I said, that is intellectually dishonest and rhetorically immature. Me throwing a few harsh words in there might be a bit immature as well, but I promise to do my best focusing on the actual points without being intellectually dishonest about it.

    At the end of the day, one should have the testicular fortitude to differentiate between someone trying to honestly represent the situation OR someone trying to advance an agenda where accurate representation of the facts or positions of those involved are only of secondary importance. Tell me where you stand, Michael. If the latter, then there’s not much for us to talk about. We care about different things: You, your ends; me, your means.

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