Palace Politics

At dueling "palace museums" in Beijing and Taipei, art and politics go hand in hand

Jonathan Adams
Asia Times, February 23, 2007

When Taiwan National Palace Museum curator Yu Pei-chin began organizing the biggest ever exhibit of highly prized ru ware -- rare, light-blue-green ceramics fired in the early 12th century -- she called up her counterparts at Beijing's Palace Museum out of curiosity.

"How many pieces of ru ware do you have?" she asked a museum official.

"How many do you have there?" the official shot back.

"We have 21," Yu said.

"Perhaps we have about 20 pieces too," came the response. (Based on public information, Yu guesses the real number in Beijing is closer to 15.)

Yu didn't bother to ask whether Beijing could send over its ru ware for the exhibit -- "I knew it wouldn't be permitted."

So goes the frosty relationship between Taiwan and mainland China, which extends even to their cultural institutions. For decades, the cross-strait political impasse has spurred an enduring rivalry between government-run "palace" museums showcasing the cream of imperial Chinese art in Beijing and Taipei.

To this day, Beijing has the palace (more commonly known as the Forbidden City), while Taiwan possesses the best of the collection -- a fact that has been a long-standing bone of contention for Beijing and for Chinese nationalists. (One former employee of Taiwan's museum said that while she was studying art history in Paris, some earnest students from China constantly badgered her about how Taiwan must give back the art it had "stolen".)

The politicization of the collection is a source of frustration for Chinese art lovers and experts on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, who have nonetheless quietly built up contacts in the past decade through conferences and informal exchanges.

"The museum field shouldn't be political, but unfortunately the two palace museums cannot avoid politics," said another curator at Taiwan's museum.

Politics intruded once again recently, as the palace museum in Taipei held its grand reopening celebration last week after a long renovation. Beijing museum officials accused Taiwan's government of revising the museum's charter to de-emphasize the collection's Chinese essence.

Their complaints were echoed by some opposition legislators in Taipei, who accuse Taiwan's government of waging a "cultural revolution" to suit a pro-independence agenda.

Taiwan's museum director has denied any such campaign, but acknowledged the cabinet-proposed charter change, which would revise the wording of the museum's mission from collecting artifacts from ancient China to collecting "domestic and foreign" art. (That proposal awaits approval from the opposition-controlled legislature.)

In fact, throughout the collection's history, art and politics have been inseparable.

The Emperor Qianlong (1711-99) was fond of defacing palace artwork -- including some of the ru ware now on display in Taiwan -- with critiques or laudatory poems.

Ever since, successive governments have been putting their own stamp on the collection.

When Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang party fled to Taiwan in 1949, they took the best part of the collection with them and built a museum in the hills ringing Taipei to house it. During the Cultural Revolution era, that museum became Exhibit A in the Nationalists' claim to be the guardians of Chinese civilization, as their communist enemies across the strait went about destroying cultural relics in the name of creating a new China.

Then, in 2000, Taiwan's collection passed into the hands of the independence-minded Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) -- making President Chen Shui-bian the unlikely ward of what are considered the finest treasures of Chinese art.

For some in Taiwan, that was akin to giving the punk-rock teenage son the keys to Daddy's Jaguar.

Chen's political appointees at the museum have scandalized some of the island's traditionalists with moves to strip away symbols of the former authoritarian Taiwanese regime -- for example, by shunting a once-prominent statue of Chiang Kai-shek to a side wing.

Now, the latest director, Lin Mun-lee, is trying to bring a hip, multicultural flavor to the museum. She has invited young designers to create funky products based on the museum's greatest artworks, launched a snazzy publicity campaign to attract a new audience (the title: "Old Is New") and, most recently, brought in a Japanese Noh troupe to perform as part of the reopening celebrations.

Lin casts her efforts to jazz up the museum as ways to depoliticize the art and better connect it with the people, in line with the island's democratization.

But some on the island still can't help but see the continuation of a doomed campaign to play down links with the mainland and bolster a distinct Taiwanese identity.

"The palace museum represents our Chinese heritage," said one former museum staffer, adding that the DPP "wants to cut it off, but you can't cut it off -- the new Taiwan has to come from the old Taiwan. When you don't have roots, how can the flower bloom?"

Still, despite such to-and-fro, low-key cultural ties between the two sides have been blossoming, driven in this case by experts whose passion for Chinese art transcends politics. Case in point: after sparring with the Beijing Palace Museum, curator Yu was surprised to get a call from the Henan Provincial Institute of Cultural Heritage and Archeology.

In 2000, more ru ware specimens were discovered in excavations on the mainland, and the Henan institute said that sending over pieces for Taiwan's current exhibit shouldn't be a problem.

Now, 12 sets are on display at Taiwan's museum, thanks to the assistance of a Taipei-based foundation that served as a middleman. The institute's Sun Xinmin visited Taiwan earlier this month for a conference on Northern Song Dynasty art, along with curators from Beijing's Palace Museum and the Shanghai Museum.

Yu and others say that such contacts have multiplied in the past decade, as art experts and officials regularly meet in such places as Shenzhen, Macau and Shanghai, and mainland experts make less frequent trips to Taiwan for special occasions.

Those ties are coming at what experts describe as an exciting time in the field.

"New excavations are changing our idea of what Chinese art is. Before we were sort of limited by this imperial collection," said Jane Ju, an art historian at Taipei's National Chengchi University. "There is interaction [between art experts on both sides] already, and there's going to be a lot more going on."

Such exchanges have a friendly and collegial tone, according to participants: they usually avoid politics, except when cracking jokes. (One Shanghai curator offered his solution for unifying the collection to a Taiwanese counterpart a few years back: "It's very simple. Just take all of your stuff, put it on a plane, and send it over.")

More relaxed government policies have facilitated such exchanges. In fact, a top official from Beijing's Palace Museum even visited Taiwan's museum a few years ago.

"The Chinese government has adopted a more open policy, so curators can come here more easily, and our curators can go to China," said Ho Chuan-hsing, with the Taiwan museum's department of painting and calligraphy. "Both sides can compare their works."

When officials from the vying palace museums meet, they often discuss the possibility of cooperation. But that seems unlikely for the time being. Treasures from Taiwan's palace museum have traveled to the United States and Europe, but the museum will not send artwork to the mainland without a legal promise of its return.

That's something Beijing has not, so far, been willing to give.

"It's a sensitive political issue," said the former director of Taiwan's palace museum, Shih Shou-chien, in an interview last year. Shih said the mainland authorities "just cannot treat Taiwan as an independent political entity, so they cannot provide that kind of legal guarantee".

In theory, the two museums could come up with a creative solution to fudge the sovereignty issue, such as going through a middleman, as was done with the Henan artifacts now on display in Taiwan.

And some see a possible thaw in relations if the more mainland-friendly Kuomintang takes power in Taiwan, which could make cooperation between the museums easier.

But for now, the ru ware and other treasures from the palace collection, assembled by emperors long ago, remain divided by cross-strait politics.

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Republic of Cynics

A recent Taiwan pride push has sparked a backlash from islanders sick of identity politics
Jonathan Adams
Newsweek Japan, February 21, 2007
(untranslated draft)

It must have been a slow day for mail delivery in Taiwan. Last Monday, scores of angry, yellow headband-wearing postal workers from all over the island left work to protest behind barbed-wire barricades in Taipei. The cause of their ire: the government’s decision to change their company’s name from “Chunghwa [Chinese] Post" to “Taiwan Post."

On the other side of the barriers, President Chen Shui-bian presided over the unveiling of the new “Taiwan Post” plaque—part of a recent push to rectify names that has included tweaking the titles of other state-run companies, changing the nation’s postage stamps, and last fall, changing the name of the main airport. Chen has said the steps are necessary to avoid confusion between Taiwanese and Chinese firms, and bolster “Taiwan consciousness.”

But the workers said the unnecessary name change had been rammed through without their input, and was a political ploy to deflect attention from the government’s incompetence.

A clerk at a convenience store near the protest aired a common complaint: “It will just cost a lot of money and create nuisance. I think Chen’s gone crazy—and he keeps causing problems for our relations with China.”

Indeed, many Taiwanese have grown sharply disillusioned with Chen’s focus on emotionally-charged identity politics—which is widely seen as part of his strategy to seal a legacy as the champion of Taiwan’s sovereignty before he steps down in May 2008.

Next week Chen will take advantage of a significant date for Taiwan-first nationalists: the 60th anniversary of the 228 Incident, in which Kuomintang troops sent from China massacred tens of thousands after a local uprising against one and a half years of their bumbling rule. Chen’s lame-duck government plans to play up the date to the hilt, with a “Taiwan pride” sing-along in front of the Presidential Office, a huge concert in the evening, and the grand opening of a new national memorial hall.

But such is the extent of public cynicism that even some relatives of 228 victims think the beleaguered Chen is just using the tragedy to whip up political support.

"Political parties want to claim 228 so they can get credit,” said Liao Ji-bin, whose grandfather was shot and dumped into the sea north of Taipei by KMT military police in March 1947.

"Everyone knows why [Chen’s party] is claiming it—it’s just for elections. They want to remind people of the KMT’s killing and murder.”

Opposition to Chen’s latest campaign to strengthen Taiwan identity has come from all sides—including some unlikely sources.

Beijing warned that the name changes were part of a dangerous plot to reach full independence through tiny steps—a goal it would stop at any cost. The US spoke out against the changes, saying they may violate Chen’s pledges not to alter the cross-strait “status quo.”

But even former President Lee Teng-hui—widely viewed as the “godfather” of the Taiwan independence movement—shocked many by criticizing the government for using the independence issue, and the renaming of state-controlled firms, for selfish political gain.

"The changes should be done step by step and quietly, rather than done while the polls approach,” he complained. Ironically, many observers said Lee’s own comments were equally self-serving: they think he’s trying to save his own small, hardline pro-independence party from extinction by giving it a moderate makeover.

To be sure, the irritation with identity politics doesn’t mean Taiwan identity itself is in retreat. Chen’s name games still have a market in the deep south, the base of support for his Democratic Progressive Party. And survey data shows that island-wide, Taiwan identity keeps rising: Last June, 44.4 percent identified themselves as only Taiwanese, compared to 23.1 percent in 1996—and the number identifying as only “Chinese” has been in steady decline.

The Taiwanese dialect is more widely-spoken than ever, and is now the lingua franca not only in the south and on the streets, but also in the legislature. Chen’s government can take some credit for that, say observers.

“Chen has delayed exchanges between mainland China and Taiwan and put in place regulations to remind people that China is the enemy,” said Hsu Yung-ming, a political analyst at the Academia Sinica in Taipei. “This helps people identify as Taiwanese.”

But rising Taiwan pride is also fueled by such unlikely figures as MC Hotdog—a Taiwanese rapper whose hit song “Wo Ai Tai Mei” (I Love Taiwanese Chicks) last year helped fuel a taike pop culture fad that celebrated the island’s earthy rural culture: betel nuts; tacky, bright-colored clothes; dyed hair and blunt talk.

In fact, Taiwan identity is now more a social and cultural trend than a political one. “Taiwan identity is rising, but that doesn’t mean that the numbers of people who want Taiwan independence is also rising,” said Wu Nai-teh, a sociologist at the Academia Sinica.

The number of self-identified DPP supporters has dropped in the past two years, even as Taiwan identification continues to rise. And over the last ten years the number of survey respondents who clearly support independence has bounced between 10% and 20%, while support for maintaining the “status quo” has risen from 35% to 60%.

So while it may now be hip to be Taiwanese, independence diehards are still a decidedly lonely bunch—a fact that should come as comfort to China.

“If [Beijing] is realistic, they realize Taiwan is only 90 miles from China and it’s not going to drift away,” said Lin Wen-cheng, an expert on cross-strait relations at National Sun Yat-sen University in Kaohsiung. “We can’t cross the red line—we are not going to declare Taiwan independence. That’s the consensus among political parties in Taiwan.”

Now, some politicians are trying to respond to islanders’ embrace of Taiwan identity, but mounting distaste for divisive identity politics.

Lee’s attempt to reinvent his Taiwan Solidarity Union party is a case in point: his party hopes to sidestep the unification-independence debate with pragmatic proposals to improve people’s livelihood: letting in Chinese tourists and investment, reducing university fees for low-income families. “We have to rethink our national direction,” said Lee Shang-ren, head of the party’s legislative caucus. “Emphasizing the people’s welfare is most important.”

The party’s turn to the center is no surprise for those who have watched Lee’s shape-shifting career: a Communist Party member as a young man, he became chairman of the fiercely anti-communist, pro-unification KMT in the late 1980s, then left the KMT in 2000 to start the strongly pro-independence TSU. Still, analysts say his latest move may be one about-face too many: Lee’s influence has faded, and it will be difficult for him to convince his “deep green” supporters to shift to the center with him.


That leaves room for others to follow a similar strategy, though. Some DPP moderates back a similar focus on pragmatic economic policies, and their preferred candidate Su Tseng-chang is considered a strong potential contender for the presidency in 2008.

The KMT candidate Ma Ying-jeou—still considered the frontrunner in the 2008 race despite being charged with corruption last week—backs direct cross-strait flights as a way to jump-start the economy.

Back at the postal protest, Tang Wen-tai, 56, head of the Banciao city postal workers’ union, said workers were most angry about having their concerns ignored. “We didn’t have a say,” said Tang. That’s the way more and more Taiwanese feel about the island’s political discourse—and politicians might do well to start listening.

Lin Chong-pin interview

Taiwanese security expert on China's missile test and East Asian security

Newsweek Web exclusive, Jan. 25, 2007

News that China had destroyed one of its own satellites with a missile last week sent shockwaves through capitals from Washington to Tokyo. But for security experts like Lin Chong-Pin, who have closely watched the rise of China’s military in recent decades, Beijing’s capability came as little surprise. Lin has studied the People’s Liberation Army as a scholar, and verbally sparred with China as a top Taiwanese government official. Now, he watches developments across the Taiwan Strait and in the region from his perch at a Taipei think tank. NEWSWEEK’S Jonathan Adams spoke with Lin about Beijing’s satellite-slaying test, the cross-strait military balance and China’s ambitions for regional domination. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: Why did China decide to go ahead with this antisatellite test?

Lin Chong-Pin: This didn’t happen overnight. I remember in the late ‘80s they were talking about “occupying the heights” in the future, which meant space … The technology has reached a stage at which it now can be tested.

How much of an impact would China’s antisatellite capability have on a Taiwan Strait conflict?

The very obvious implication is that a replay of the 1996 scenario would be questionable. That was when the U.S. sent two aircraft carrier groups to the Taiwan Strait [after China launched two missiles near Taiwan], resolving rising military tension. Now, because U.S. satellites are threatened, the operation of the aircraft carriers—for them to arrive and fire missiles at [Chinese military] installations—are being compromised.

To what extent?

When your eyes are knocked out, how can you shoot accurately? It’s a way to say, “You have to think twice before you decide to send aircraft carriers again.” So it’s throwing a monkey wrench into the decision-making in Washington, D.C., when there’s a crisis in the Taiwan Strait—to intervene or not intervene, that is the question.

How strong is the U.S. commitment to help defend Taiwan, in your view?

I think right now it still remains pretty strong. Washington has said officially that if there is a conflict not caused by Taipei’s provocation, then the U.S. is obliged to intervene. But when you compare the statements over the years, you can see that the resolve of partner states is gradually weakening. Of course we understand, [the U.S.] has a bleeding war abroad and a triple deficit at home. So you have to think twice about [intervening in a Taiwan conflict] in the future.

Could China be calculating that the United States might stay out of a Taiwan conflict?

That doesn’t seem to be the case. China’s new grand strategy is to squeeze out the leading influence of the United States in East Asia without war, but with economy and culture. The rapidly modernizing military capabilities of [China’s People’s Liberation Army] will serve as a backbone of Beijing’s extra-military instruments, like diplomacy.

There’s a very strong consensus among the leaders in Beijing [that] the most important thing for China now is to seize this window of opportunity, which has not occurred in centuries: “There’s no serious threat outside China, this is the time when we can make economic growth.” So they want to have a peaceful environment and achieve economic growth first.

How much has the cross-strait military balance tilted in China’s favor?

We can say that the naval qualitative crossover has already occurred. The [Taiwanese] Air Force is still there competing, it’s balancing, but if Taiwan does not try harder, it will be tipped over. And in ballistic missiles, there’s no comparison: They have them, we don’t.

Given these trends, what should Taiwan do?

Well, militarily speaking, it’s very simple: we should buy weapons. But it’s not that easy. Our economy is not doing well, and the prevailing sentiment of society does not support the purchase of expensive weapons. Young people don’t like military service. And most people do not even think about the military competition.

How likely is it that the cross-strait standoff will lead to war?

Less and less likely. Beijing’s highest priority on Taiwan is what I would call absorption without war. Beijing has an increasing number of instruments to do that, including economy, cultural exchanges, manipulation of media, strangulation of Taiwan’s international space and psychological warfare.

Additionally, if there was a war, Beijing would face the result of bloodshed in Taiwan and the damage to the economic infrastructure. After a conquest, Beijing would have to face a rebellious population … The military option is the last option. And even the military option has never been to strike the U.S. and destroy Taiwan. Rather, it’s to deter the U.S. from coming in, and to seize Taiwan—like grabbing a beautiful, smiling bride into your embrace. That’s the idea.

How successful has China's strategy been so far?

I’ll give you one example. Before, when Taiwanese leaders inched toward independence, either in rhetoric or in action, Beijing would go ballistic. Now, they do nothing. Then Washington comes out the very next day, jumps up and issues a warning to Taipei. This is what I call going through Washington to contain Taipei. And it’s working.

What about Japan? It’s also seeking a larger security role in the region. What direction do you see China-Japan relations taking?

In November 2004, [China-Japan] tensions rose because of the submarine intrusion [when a Chinese submarine entered Japanese waters]. In the very same month, Tokyo announced to the world that Japan’s trade with China surpassed that between Japan and the United States. It was a point of no return … Japan realized that its economic recovery after 10 years of slump in the 1990s was largely due to its trade with China. And the business community also put a lot of pressure on the government in Tokyo to improve relations. So political relations have already warmed up.

But pessimists say that China and Japan’s interests will inevitably clash.

Beijing knows very well they would lose a war with Japan. They know how good the Japanese Navy, and even its Air Force, are. So they’ll try to avoid military confrontation.

The United States intends to pull back some forces to Guam, and reduce its presence in South Korea and Japan. How will that affect regional security?

For now, I think Beijing prefers to see the presence of the U.S. military in this region, because Beijing is worried about Japan, and thinks the U.S. can restrain Japan. But as the U.S. voluntarily withdraws, because of a lack of capabilities or a lack of economic wherewithal, somebody will have to step in. Will it be Japan, China or both? I think by that time, they will work out something together, because it’s in their best interests … Growing economic interdependence will become more and more important as time goes on, and will constrain military confrontation. And the trend has already begun.

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Don't Bank On It

Scandal highlights banking sector's woes

Jonathan Adams

Asia Times, January 18, 2007

The latest financial scandal to rock Taiwan - and one of its biggest in recent years - has shown that despite much talk of reforming the banking sector, the island still has a long way to go.

The "financial storm", as Taiwan's media call it, began early this month when two subsidiaries of the Rebar Asia Pacific Group announced they had filed for insolvency. That led to a run on the Chinese Bank, a member of the Rebar group, on January 5.

The government quickly moved to take over that and another Rebar firm to calm panicked customers. Then it emerged that the chairman of Rebar had fled to China late last month, and was reportedly holed up in a Shanghai luxury hotel with his wife.

Last week saw an around-the-clock media frenzy as the chairman's relatives were hauled in for questioning, regulators scurried to contain the fallout, the head of the nation's financial watchdog stepped down, and politicians began pointing fingers over who else might be to blame.

Most analysts said the bank run would not impact the larger banking industry, Asia's fourth-largest. But it's just the latest in a series of troubles to plague the overcrowded sector.

Taiwanese banks remain frozen out of the mainland China market by the cross-strait political impasse. Meanwhile, plans to consolidate and reform the financial sector have stalled. The government hoped foreign investors would help shake up the industry by buying stakes in local banks, but so far such activity has been limited.

Now, the Rebar fiasco has highlighted some of the sector's dubious lending practices, and the need for better oversight of the island's financial firms.

"The run on the Chinese Bank is just a symptom of a larger issue, which is how do we deal with the banking sector?" said Chen Ming-chi, with the Institute of Sociology at Taiwan's National Tsing Hua University.

Dealing with it correctly has broad implications for the island's future. Taiwan is now a services-based economy (services account for more than 70% of gross domestic product and most of the island's jobs), which means further productivity gains and development depend on improvements in key service sectors such as banking and finance.

For several years, industry analysts have sent a blunt message: give Taiwan's banks an extreme makeover, or risk losing long-term competitiveness and becoming even more sidelined from regional economic integration.

"Without access to China in the medium term, the banking sector is structurally moribund," wrote consultancy Macquarie Research in a note last year. "We need the structure of the operating environment to change."

Access to mainland China appears to be off the table at least until May 2008, when a new president will take power in Taiwan.

The island's government bars its banks from providing anything more than consulting services in the mainland. The opposition sponsored a bill to change this last year, but it has gone nowhere, said Christina Liu, an opposition legislator and finance professor at both Taipei's National Taiwan University and Beijing's Tsinghua University.

She said that days after the bill passed its first reading in Taiwan's legislature, Beijing made it clear that it would only allow Taiwanese banks to open shop in the mainland if a cross-strait memorandum of understanding were inked.

The condition of such a memorandum is Taiwan's acceptance of the "one China" principle - a non-starter for the current independence-leaning government.

That roadblock has some Taiwanese tearing their hair out over lost opportunities. Taiwanese banks would seem to have distinct advantages in the China market, with their shared language and ties - particularly in commercially vibrant southern coastal provinces such as Fujian, which is the closest culturally to Taiwan. And they have a built-in customer base of Taiwanese living and working in the mainland.

But with Taipei-Beijing relations still frosty, the island's banks are left to gaze wistfully across the strait, as the big foreign players such as HSBC and Citibank get a rapidly growing head-start in the land grab in China.

"Taiwanese banks are stuck here - they can't do any business in mainland China," said Liu. "It's really a shame, because we [could] have so many customers there."

With the door to the mainland bolted shut for now, that leaves mergers and acquisitions as the way forward for the industry. Consultants have long bemoaned Taiwan's packed banking sector, which included more than 50 firms in 2000, serving only 23 million people.

In a 2005 report, the consultancy McKinsey argued that an ideal number would be about 15 at most, including one or two "regional champions" that would have the scale to compete in the mainland Chinese market. It urged Taiwan to follow South Korea's example and push ahead with the politically tough task of sweeping banking reforms - and to avoid Japan's example of merely "stapling" together bad banks to create bigger, but not necessarily better, players.

"Both industry and government could continue to pursue their incremental approach and hope the competitiveness of the financial sector and broader economy does not further erode," wrote McKinsey. "Or they could take bold steps to change the rules of the game and put Taiwan back on the Asian banking map."

The incremental approach appears to have won the day. The current administration has talked up consolidation and established ambitious goals, but the results have been modest.

Holding companies formed to spur consolidation have not performed as well as hoped. Taiwan now has 43 banks, with other mergers and privatization plans for state-run banks stalled.

Meanwhile, the government has worked to attract foreign interest in the sector, sending road shows abroad to lure big financial players into buying stakes. That campaign has had some success: last year several foreign firms bought stakes in Taiwanese banks, including Standard Chartered's bid for a controlling stake in Hsinchu International Bank.

But a more recent deal, Citibank's reported talks to acquire a stake of the Bank of Overseas Chinese (BOOC), have foundered amid vocal opposition from the bank's union leaders. And analysts don't expect many more such deals: both Hsinchu and BOOC are small banks, while the larger state-run banks are seen as less attractive targets.

All of this leaves many less than impressed with the government's reform efforts.

"Our government puts very strict limits on investment in China, while encouraging banks to merge and attract foreign investment as a substitute for going to China," said National Tsing Hua University's Chen. "I don't think the government formula can sustain itself, and it's not good for the banking sector. As long as there are limits on going to China, I think the problem will still be there."

Still, some see a silver lining in the cloud over Taiwan's banks. Wu Chung-shu, a research fellow at the Academia Sinica's Institute of Economics in Taipei, says the worst may be over for the industry.

It has rebounded from a credit bubble in 2005 and early last year, and its bad-loan ratio has come down from more than 8% in 2002 to just over 2% now. Now, Wu says the Rebar crisis will prompt the government to crack down harder on shaky firms.

"Rebar will push the government to deal with under performing banking companies by telling them to get out of the market or merge with other firms," Wu said. "You're going to see more consolidation in the banking and insurance industries. But the number of banks is not the main issue; it's how to get these banks to operate in a more efficient way."

Figuring out how to do that will be one of the most pressing questions for Taiwan's government in the coming years.

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The Internet Trembles

A quake that snapped cables wiring Asia has exposed the fragility of the Net
Jonathan Adams
Newsweek International, January 29, 2007

In 1866, the British ship Great Eastern lowered a grappling hook by rope down to the frigid Atlantic Ocean floor far below. Its quarry: a line that had snapped the previous year during one of the first attempts to lay a transatlantic cable connecting the United States with Europe. One hundred and forty years later, repair ships are performing the same task, using essentially the same methods, in the Luzon Strait between Taiwan and the Philippines. They're trying to snag at least six cables that were damaged in a massive Dec. 26 earthquake off the coast of Taiwan. The mangled cables are out of reach of remotely controlled submersibles often used in such work. By the latest estimates, the task won't be finished until at least mid-February.

While the earliest transatlantic lines bore messages in Morse code, the cables near Taiwan carried 90 percent of East Asia's voice and Internet traffic. A month after the earthquake, services in the region were still not back to their full capacity. The disruption to data traffic underscores how much the virtual world still depends on the low-tech network of physical cables, wires and microwave transmitters that gird the globe—and how vulnerable services migrating to the Internet can be. "We put all our eggs in a small number of baskets," said Geoff Huston, chief scientist at the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre in Brisbane. "And this was the worst possible case of cable snap."

To be sure, the damaged lines aren't affecting most users now, aside from slow connection speeds and a few inaccessible sites. But for a few days after the quake, international phone-service outages and e-mail delays of several hours or more were widespread throughout East and Southeast Asia. Telecom operators quickly rerouted traffic away from the damaged area, beaming voice over satellites and sending e-mails scurrying along alternate routes. Taiwan's Chunghwa Telecom said in some cases Internet data sent from Taiwan to Hong Kong, only some 650 kilometers away, were going through routers in the United States. And Singapore Telecom said its U.S.-bound traffic was taking a detour Down Under—through an undersea cable west of Australia, across Australia from Perth to Sydney and through a southern link across the Pacific—or going west via Europe.

Rerouting alone does not necessarily slow Internet traffic much, experts say, as "packets" of data leap across the globe down the path of least resistance. But Internet service providers and telecoms can send only so much through the pipes at once—particularly if they're all using the same detours. So data back up at the servers run by the sender's ISP, like a traffic jam on a high-way on-ramp, waiting for its turn to fly through the global network. Moreover, satellites aren't a good alternative for Internet data: they can carry only one thousandth the capacity of a typical underseas cable, says Huston. Which is why Hong Kong ISPs were still operating at only 80 percent capacity three weeks after the earthquake, and telecoms in Taiwan and Singapore said that their bandwidth capacity remained below normal.

The disruption was far worse for consumers of "real time" data—online stock quotes, voice calls made over the Internet through services like Skype, and multiplayer online games that chew up bandwidth and require quick responses from fellow "warriors" on the other side of the globe. The Internet was not originally designed for such uses, in which even minor delays or interruptions can sharply degrade service quality. "These are now consumer technologies that users expect will work," said Paul Wilson, APNIC's director general. "If they don't, people will get a lot more stroppy than they used to."

The outage challenges assumptions about the fully wired world to come, in which Internet devices will jabber to each other without the need for human input. It may not be a disaster if your cell phone can't get through to your car, muses Hong Kong Internet pioneer Pindar Wong, but what if your pacemaker gets cut off from your doctor's computer across the Pacific? It's not clear how devices, rather than generally tolerant human beings, would deal with delays and outages. "This was a wake-up call," says Wong. "Are we building on solid foundations, or are we building on quicksand?" Asian telecoms say they'll boost satellite capacity and buy more cables to make their infrastructure more robust. But analysts are skeptical that they'll make the needed investments. Without them, the Internet of tomorrow is likely to remain vulnerable to the next quake.

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