The government claims that if an economic cooperation framework agreement (ECFA) or a comprehensive economic cooperation agreement (CECA) is not signed with China, Taiwan's export competitiveness will plunge. However, half of Taiwan’s exports are electronics and information-technology products, which are already exempt from customs duties thanks to Information Technology Agreements signed with other countries. This means that these products will not be affected by any free-trade agreement (FTA) between other countries or any regional economic cooperation.
Exports to East Asia are mostly raw materials and component parts for re-export. Since these countries have export tax-refund measures in place, imports are in effect tax-exempt. Although Taiwan will be hurt to a certain degree by the launch of the ASEAN Plus Three — China, Japan and South Korea — the damage will be lower than 0.2 percent of the nation's GDP. It will neither devastate the economy nor obstruct and marginalize development.
Economic and trade opening and cooperation always has its pros and cons, but as the government debates an ECFA or a CECA, it exaggerates the gains and glosses over the losses, just like it has done when pushing for other policies of opening up to China.
For example, President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) has repeatedly emphasized that the opening of direct links would make it more convenient to sell agricultural products to China, while ignoring the fact that this would make it easier to sell Chinese agricultural products in Taiwan. Since the opening of direct transport links, the amount of cheaper Chinese agricultural products sold to Taiwan is actually five times greater than that of Taiwanese agricultural products sold to China. With the ECFA or CECA proposal, the government would make things even worse.
Government officials and others say the signing of an ECFA or CECA will attract trans national enterprises to invest in Taiwan. They said the same thing when they promoted the relaxation of restrictions on Chinese investment by Taiwanese businesses and the opening of direct links. However, the expected benefits have not materialized. As a result, they now claim that since products imported to China from Singapore and other ASEAN member states are duty-free, Taipei must sign an ECFA or a CECA with Beijing in order to improve Taiwan’s export competitiveness.
Looking at how the government keeps telling bigger lies to cover up for previous lies, I wonder if an ECFA will be followed by claims that Taiwan is unable to compete with Shanghai because Shanghai uses the same currency and laws as the rest of China, so Taiwan should use the same currency and laws. Are we on the road to unification?
Lu Chun-wei is a research fellow at Taiwan Thinktank.
TRANSLATED BY EDDY CHANG
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁) has caused havoc with his attempts to overturn the democratic and constitutional order in the legislature. If we look at this devolution from the context of a transition to democracy from authoritarianism in a culturally Chinese sense — that of zhonghua (中華) — then we are playing witness to a servile spirit from a millennia-old form of totalitarianism that is intent on damaging the nation’s hard-won democracy. This servile spirit is ingrained in Chinese culture. About a century ago, Chinese satirist and author Lu Xun (魯迅) saw through the servile nature of
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
Monday was the 37th anniversary of former president Chiang Ching-kuo’s (蔣經國) death. Chiang — a son of former president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), who had implemented party-state rule and martial law in Taiwan — has a complicated legacy. Whether one looks at his time in power in a positive or negative light depends very much on who they are, and what their relationship with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is. Although toward the end of his life Chiang Ching-kuo lifted martial law and steered Taiwan onto the path of democratization, these changes were forced upon him by internal and external pressures,
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus in the Legislative Yuan has made an internal decision to freeze NT$1.8 billion (US$54.7 million) of the indigenous submarine project’s NT$2 billion budget. This means that up to 90 percent of the budget cannot be utilized. It would only be accessible if the legislature agrees to lift the freeze sometime in the future. However, for Taiwan to construct its own submarines, it must rely on foreign support for several key pieces of equipment and technology. These foreign supporters would also be forced to endure significant pressure, infiltration and influence from Beijing. In other words,