2005 Taiwan-Strait Political-Military Game

It started on Friday and continued through the weekend -- about 100 young DPP staffers and future leaders attended a "political-military" game designed to help them learn about the thought-process of policy makers in the United States and China, and maybe more importantly to teach them how to prevent conflict in the Taiwan-strait.

Probably because I'm American, I was assigned to be one of the advisors to the U.S. president. It was enormously challenging since my mandarin is pretty bad and I'm not nearly proficient enough to understand what was going on, but I was able to pick out some sentences by myself, and two girls sitting next to me helped translate a lot. Today (Sunday) the DPP chairman arrived back from the U.S. to deliver a short speech at the conference and to congratulate us.

It was very interesting to see how these young Taiwanese handled the crises the "control room" staff would throw at them. One of the other advisors to the U.S. was a young woman who recently attended a model U.N. conference in Geneva -- she really knew what she was doing, as attested (at least partially) by her willingness to abandon Taiwan in circumstances where it was no longer in the U.S. interest to support it -- she understood clearly that the U.S. has it's own interests in mind, and that those interests might not always be the same as those of Taiwan.

It was the first time the DPP had hosted a conference like this, and although they did a really good job organizing and coordinating all the events, their inexperience in manipulating the delicate mock-crises eventually took a toll; in the span of forty minutes Saturday night, ( it was a pretty long day, from 8:00am til midnight) we learned that China was threatening Taiwan unless they immediately accepted the one-China policy, a Taiwanese dissident had assassinated the Chinese premier, Muslim extremists had captured and blocked the Singapore strait, and Pakistan had inexplicably seized the opportunity to invade India. Perhaps more restraint on the part of the control staff would have been more appropriate.

Even in the U.S., unhindered by language differences, I've always performed poorly at these kinds of mock-crisis conferences. I've thought a lot about why this might be, because it worries me that I can't respond quickly and effectively to crises. Certainly I'm not very comfortable with having to respond to something too rapidly -- I like to carefully and slowly think about what's going on. Moreover, there is very little information available, which can make it hard to see the outcomes that your decisions will produce. I'm also bewildered by the impersonal nature of the situation; events unfold and the control room tells us that the leader of a faraway country has declared war on his neighbor, but we can't personally confront that leader and communicate with him or her personally. This kind of ambiguity is very frustrating for me, (and ultimately, I think, relatively unrealistic), and combined with the expectation of a rapid response and the lack of important information, I become paralyzed and can't offer any useful suggestions. Although I enjoyed this conference and I learned a lot, my dismal performance echoed my failures at model U.N. conferences throughout high school. oh well.

Anyway, it was very interesting.