Successful negotiations frequently involve concessions on the part of negotiators. If common ground is to be found between parties with conflicting goals, give and take is unavoidable.
Negotiators generally make concessions on matters of lesser importance while being more hard-nosed on core interests — which are usually identified before negotiations begin.
Since the late 1980s, when Taiwan and China began informal negotiations, such considerations have not only defined each side’s core interests, but also the pace of negotiations, sometimes leading to their unraveling. This is why former presidents Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) and Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) — and even the Beijing-friendly administration of President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) — insisted on first addressing practical matters of trade, tourism and services before tackling the more contentious aspects of national identity and independence/unification.
Ma’s policies, however, are now engendering a form of dependence, and negotiations have shifted from executive bodies (the Straits Exchange Foundation and China’s Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait) and political parties (the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Chinese Communist Party) to include civil society, with business organizations and interest groups now in the game. In the process, these groups have also been compelled to make concessions, however one-sided they appear.
The problem is that such groups often lack the tools and refinement that allow professional negotiators to make more careful decisions.
One such group that has unwittingly entered cross-strait negotiations is Taiwan’s tourism sector, which has asked the Kaohsiung City Government and the organizers of the Kaohsiung Film Festival not to proceed with the screening of The 10 Conditions of Love, a documentary about exiled Uighur activist Rebiya Kadeer. Tour companies fear the Chinese government will act on its threat to cancel tour and hotel reservations.
Initially, Kaohsiung authorities said the film would be presented as scheduled. Then, in an apparent concession, they announced that the film would be shown ahead of schedule and without film festival trappings and services.
For people like Kaohsiung Tourism Association chairman Tseng Fu-hsing (曾福興), even this concession was “regrettable” — he would rather have seen the movie dropped altogether.
What this decision represents, though, is more than the ordinary give and take: When concessions are made on core values — freedom of expression, in this case — flexibility may appear to some, such as the filmmakers who pulled their works from the festival in protest at the schedule change, as capitulation rather than a concession.
Regrettably, the tourism industry is thumbing its nose at basic democratic principles.
Whatever this rag-tag band of tour operators did for a living before the Chinese started arriving, they must have had to work harder. Of more concern, however, is the likelihood that Beijing is counting not only on greed to bend minds, but also entrepreneurial ineptitude and sloth — longstanding characteristics of the nation’s tourism industry.
Such behavior, added to the Kaohsiung City Government’s dilly-dallying on the matter, could send a worrying signal to pro-Taiwan elements.
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,
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