SAN DIEGO An increasingly activist Republican National Committee is expected to dive into foreign policy once again with the passage of a resolution Friday to support Hong Kongs recent student-led demonstrations for democracy, The Washington Times has learned.
The resolution, which has been quietly making its way through the machinery of the 168-member GOP national governing body, is in part an attempt to pressure the next Republican president to honor U.S. commitments to defending the freedom of Taiwan, the island nation formally known as the Republic of China that the mainland People's Republic of China claims as its own.
The resolution, sponsored by Helen Van Etten, a Taiwan-born naturalized American citizen who is an RNC member from Kansas, has drawn no objection from RNC Chairman Reince Priebus and apparently has the support of the vast majority of the members on the national committee.
I want to see this resolution be a part of our RNC platform in 2016 so our next Republican president will not neglect our obligation to protect freedom and democracy for Taiwan and the South China Sea, Ms. Van Etten told The Washington Times.
She is able to make such policy assertions because of the changing nature of the national committee.
Unlike Mr. Priebus, past chairmen generally have keep the RNC out of national policy issues and focused on broad statements of Republican principles. The RNC statements usually become planks in the GOPs platform debated and approved at each presidential nominating convention.
As we all can gather, China has no intention to honor [the principle of] one country, two systems in Hong Kong or maintain its autonomy, said Mrs. Van Etten, chief audiologist for the Topeka school district in Kansas. So I realize it is Hong Kong s freedom at stake today; tomorrow it could be Taiwans time to lose its freedom and democracy under this formula for reunification.
Mrs. Van Ettens cause has support among conservatives and others well beyond the RNC, and it explicitly supports bipartisan bills in the Senate and House in defense of Taiwan. But such support often carries reservations in foreign policy circles across the political spectrum.
We certainly want to make clear to China in all of our communications that we will aggressively defend traditional U.S. interests in the region, said Jeremy Carl, a research fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution who follows U.S. policy in Asia and who gave his qualified support for Mrs. Van Ettens resolution. The people most likely to read this and pay attention to it are the Chinese on the mainland, who will doubtless be irritated by it.
Under the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act signed by President Carter, the U.S. withdrew recognition of Taiwan as a nation and instead recognized the Peoples Republic as the sole legal government of all of China. Washington thus explicitly acknowledged the mainland communist governments claim that Taiwan is part of communist China.
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Republican National Committee flexes foreign policy muscle in China showdown