VOA Chinese, Feb 8, 2011.
http://www.voanews.com/chinese/news/20110207-US-TAIWAN-POLICY-115514579.html
My comment:
(a) Often I wonder whether American scholars know what administration is thinking. How come sometimes they talk as if they are cocksure. I started wonder when former president Chen Shui-bian was in the receiving end of displeasure. Were they speaking for themselves? Were they part of a trial baloon?
(b) Shelley Rigger is currently Brown Professor of Political Science, Davidson College, Davidson, North Calorina.
http://www3.davidson.edu/cms/x12025.xml
And Davidson, North Carolina
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davidson,_North_Carolina
may be in the countryside. (I am unsure, because I am not familiar with that state.)
I first heard of her more than a decade ago, when she was probably an assistant professor in Davidson, concentrating her research on ELECTIONS of Taiwan. She was bashful and stayed out of limelight. It is unbelievable that a decade later, she is some sort of Taiwan/China expert.*
* Then again When I first met MIT assistant professor Thomas Christensen, I could not imagine that he would serve as
"Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, with responsibility for China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Mongolia ▪ July 2006-July 2008."
(c) The report cites
Shelly Rigger, Accentuating the Positive and Eliminating the Negative in Taipei, Washington and Beijing. Foreign Policy Research Institute, February 2011.
http://www.fpri.org/byauthor.html#rigger
Note:
(i) Founded in 1955 and based at Phildelphia, Foreign Policy Research Institute is different from Foreign Policy magazine. (The latter was founded in 1970 by Samuel Huntington and Warren Demian Manshel, and now published by the Slate Group, a division of Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, LLC, in Washington, D.C.)
(ii) Johnny Mercer (1909-1976) was an American lyricist and wrote the lyrics of the 1944 song
Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive
, whose lyrics admonished: "You got to ac-cent-tchu-ate the positive E-lim-i-nate the negative And latch on to the affirmative Don't mess with mister inbetween"
http://www.stlyrics.com/songs/j/johnnymercer6830/accenttchuatethepositive255648.html
(iii) elide (vt; Latin elidere to strike out, from e- + laedere to injure by striking)
(d) The VOA report states, "戴维森学院的任雪丽教授认为 * * * 台湾人民希望维持独立现状无意与中国统一。"
(i) "独立现状"--that the status quo is Taiwan is an independent nation--is what pres. Chen asserted but not accepted by the Bush (George W Bush) administration (which did not elaborate what status quo meant but that US was the only nation that could interprete the meaning of status quo).
(ii) The counterpart of Prof. Rigger's article is:
"Leaders in Taipei are accountable to an electorate that has no interest in unification, and wants Taiwan to remain independent in practice, if not in theory."