This is just about stupid symbolism, but Jesus Christ, how embarrassing it is that the U.S. feels it has to tip-toe around Beijing's sensitive issues at a summit for democracies that China wasn't even invited to attend:
A video feed of a Taiwanese minister was cut during U.S. President Joe Biden's Summit for Democracy last week after a map in her slide presentation showed Taiwan in a different color to China, which claims the island as its own.
Sources familiar with the matter told Reuters that Friday's slide show by Taiwanese Digital Minister Audrey Tang caused consternation among U.S. officials after the map appeared in her video feed for about a minute.
The sources, who did not want to be identified due to the sensitivity of the matter, said the video feed showing Tang was cut during a panel discussion and replaced with audio only - at the behest of the White House.
The Biden Administration explains this as being about not wanting to contradict the U.S.'s one-China policy, but that explanation simply doesn't cut it. The map was part of Taiwan's presentations, not the U.S.'s. No one could possibly interpret that to be a reflection of U.S. policy in any way, and the color coding on the map accurately reflects the position of Taiwan. So what is the problem? Are foreign countries that participate in summits now all required to adopt the official U.S. position on everything when they speak? Doesn't that undercut the very concept of a summit, where countries can get together and discuss their differences?
In any case, isn't the decision to invite Taiwan to the Summit an even bigger contradiction of the U.S.'s official one-China policy? Were any other countries the U.S. does not recognize invited? I don't see any others (okay the EU is not a country, but it is an organization of countries, all of which the U.S. does recognize).
