Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) presidential candidate Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) came out with the latest in a long line of twisted policy ideas on Sunday during a visit to Taipei Port.
If one is to believe Ma, then the nation can further relax cross-strait restrictions, allow most of its high-tech and manufacturing operations to relocate to China and somehow increase the amount of container ships leaving the nation's ports.
As always with Ma, there was no substance to go with the sound bite.
But most startling of all is that, time and again, Ma is allowed to come out with such obviously contradictory statements without anybody challenging him.
Just last week, for example, he panned the government for its "rigid dogmatism" on foreign policy and for "inflexibly using the name Taiwan" to apply for WHO and UN membership — organizations that require full statehood as a condition for entry.
Ma's response: Taiwan should use its economic strength to apply for membership of the IMF and World Bank, also organizations that require full statehood.
His suggestion comes at a time when China's relentless pressure means Taiwan is having trouble just staying in organizations as obscure as the World Organization for Animal Health.
No doubt Ma believes that applying for membership to international bodies using the name "Republic of China" (ROC) — while claiming that the ROC is the "real" China, as he did in the US last year — is altogether more viable and less “rigid.”
Ma also recently reiterated his wishy-washy foreign policy and diplomacy ideas when he said he would demand China remove missiles targeting the nation before Taipei and Beijing could resume negotiations or reach a peace accord, adding that Taiwan and China should regard “freedom” and “democracy” as foundation stones for cross-strait dialogue.
As if the bullies in Beijing — who famously turned their guns on their own citizens just 18 years ago — are really going to bow to the demands of a nation that cannot even keep its own military arsenal up to date.
In case Ma wasn’t aware, “freedom” and “democracy” are words that don’t hold much currency in Zhongnanhai.
With demands like that on the table, don’t expect substantial cross-strait dialogue to resume anytime soon should he become president. If Ma sticks to his guns, then the so-called “peace accord” that is central to his cross-strait policy platform would appear to be dead in the water.
Ma left for India and Singapore yesterday, no doubt to once again espouse his paradoxical policy platforms on the international stage — where he knows they will not receive any serious scrutiny.
While in Singapore he will probably laud its government for turning the city-state into an economic success, while overlooking the authoritarian system it used to obtain its achievements, as he did in advance of his visit in an interview with the Straits Times last week. But then, no one should be surprised by a KMT figure extolling the virtues of authoritarianism.
It’s about time his opponents started taking Ma to task over these absurd declarations, because as we saw with his ridiculous dance on “independence being an option” and on the BBC’s Hardtalk last year, Ma’s poise is shielding him from accountability.
The public seem to have trouble penetrating the reflective veneer so carefully created by Ma’s well-crafted photo ops and sanitized interviews.
But if they really tried to look behind the Ma facade, they would discover the biggest contradiction of all: Ma is a “leader” with very few leadership qualities at all.
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In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.” Moreover, the two authors observe that those who denounce such legal threats to democracy are often “dismissed as exaggerating or
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