If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, yes, it does make a sound. By the same token, a secret deal struck between two parties without other parties or the public being informed can have a very real impact. And if a memorandum of understanding (MOU) is signed between Beijing and the WHO without Taiwan being consulted, it very clearly exists.
President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) statement on Monday to the contrary was, to put it bluntly, dumbfounding.
China’s “secret” MOU with the WHO is hardly secret — and both the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Department of Health have no problem acknowledging the existence of this document, which reportedly stipulates that communication between the WHO and Taiwan can only take place with Beijing’s consent.
After Presidential Office Spokesman Wang Yu-chi (王郁琦) said earlier this month that the Presidential Office was unsure whether the MOU existed, Ma made similar remarks on Monday, questioning the former Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) administration’s claim that an MOU was signed.
“We are uncertain whether China signed an MOU with the WHO ... but because [the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT)] was not in power at the time, we have no way of finding out,” Ma said in an interview with Taiwan’s China Television.
In light of past statements by officials in his administration, including Department of Health Minister Yeh Ching-chuan (葉金川) and Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrew Hsia (夏立言), Ma was setting himself up for trouble. Given their open and unambiguous discussion of the MOU, the president must have had a clear motive for an about-face that could only make him look disingenuous.
It seems unlikely that Ma or any other top figure in the KMT would doubt the MOU’s existence. In 2005, then-director of the KMT’s Mainland Affairs Department Chang Jung-kung (張榮恭) was quoted by several media outlets, including the Central News Agency, as saying that he had been informed of the MOU’s contents by Taiwan-related agencies in China. The MOU took effect on May 14, 2005, Chang told the media.
But the evidence doesn’t stop there. Although the MOU has never formally been made public, WHO Director-General Margaret Chan (陳馮富珍) mentioned the document in an interview with China’s state-run Xinhua news agency.
“On Taiwan’s participation in the WHO’s technical activities, Chan said the WHO would deal with the issue in accordance with a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed with China,” Xinhua reported on Nov. 27, 2006. “The MoU on Taiwan health and medical experts’ participation in WHO technical activities was signed between the Chinese Ministry of Health and the WHO Secretariat in 2005.”
“Facts show that the memorandum has played a positive role,” said Chan, then newly elected as the world health body’s director-general.
No one, it would seem, is denying the existence of the MOU except the Presidential Office. The goal, it seems, is to convince the public that Taiwan’s admittance to the World Health Assembly as an observer this year was not achieved through Beijing, as would be required by the MOU.
But traces of the MOU are everywhere. The question is what the president stands to gain from squandering his credibility.
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
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,
“I compare the Communist Party to my mother,” sings a student at a boarding school in a Tibetan region of China’s Qinghai province. “If faith has a color,” others at a different school sing, “it would surely be Chinese red.” In a major story for the New York Times this month, Chris Buckley wrote about the forced placement of hundreds of thousands of Tibetan children in boarding schools, where many suffer physical and psychological abuse. Separating these children from their families, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) aims to substitute itself for their parents and for their religion. Buckley’s reporting is
Last week, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), together holding more than half of the legislative seats, cut about NT$94 billion (US$2.85 billion) from the yearly budget. The cuts include 60 percent of the government’s advertising budget, 10 percent of administrative expenses, 3 percent of the military budget, and 60 percent of the international travel, overseas education and training allowances. In addition, the two parties have proposed freezing the budgets of many ministries and departments, including NT$1.8 billion from the Ministry of National Defense’s Indigenous Defense Submarine program — 90 percent of the program’s proposed
RSS