to prevent or mitigate future cyber attacks by China.

China has significantly ramped up pressure on Taiwan since Tsai Ing-wen was democratically-elected as the country’s president in January 2016. As Beijing’s external pressure on Taiwan grows, pressure for action is building on the Tsai administration, both from the opposition as well as from within her own party. The confluence of these factors will make it harder for the Tsai administration to sustain her administration’s pragmatic efforts to maintain the “status quo” in cross-Strait relations without greater international support.

The Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific of the U.S. House of Representatives on Foreign Affairs held a hearing titled “Reinforcing the U.S.-Taiwan Relationship”. U.S. Representatives and several expert witnesses discussed the current geopolitical situation facing Taiwan. The expert witnesses included MarkStokes, the Executive Director of the Project 2049 Institute, Julian Ku, a Professor of Constitutional Law at the Maurice A. Dean School of Law, and Tiffany Ma, Senior Director of Bower Group Asia. The expert witnesses’ statements were incisive but contained a few misrepresentations of important concepts that, without clarification, could negatively affect U.S. policy going forward. This article points out and clarifies a few of the errors made in the statements. Part I addresses a few puzzling statements in the testimony of Mark Stokes.

Following the failure of China and the US to resolve trade and other issues earlier last year, the Trump administration launched a Section 301 investigation into Chinese Intellectual Property practices, which is the genesis for the proposed $50 Billion in US trade sanctions on