President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) is a man in a hurry. He is pulling out all the stops to sign an economic cooperation framework agreement (ECFA) with China before a self-imposed June deadline.
The ECFA propaganda machine moved into top gear this week following last Sunday’s debate with Democratic Progressive Party Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), in which Ma has widely been regarded to have performed better.
During a press conference with foreign reporters a couple of days later, Ma’s answers seemed to suggest that absolutely every other government policy is now on hold until an EFCA is signed.
Why the rush?
The official reason is that the ASEAN Plus One (the one referring to China) trade bloc that came on line at the turn of the year is affecting the nation’s competitiveness, so Taiwan needs an ECFA to counter it.
Yet the ASEAN Plus One has already been in effect for nearly five months and Taiwan’s economic outlook gets rosier by the quarter, with sales, export orders and production in some cases setting new records.
Moreover, Tsai — a specialist in economic affairs — said during Sunday’s debate that ASEAN Plus One would have little effect because Taiwan’s main competitors are Japan and South Korea, and they are not yet part of the bloc.
So with the economic rationale for an ECFA on seemingly shaky ground, what other reasons could the Ma government have for its rush to sign the pact?
For answers, we need to look at Ma’s present situation and Taiwan’s election cycle. Midway through his four-year term and extremely unpopular, Ma is casting around for a life preserver after his pre-election promises of economic growth were torpedoed by the global financial crisis.
Yet, as mentioned, the economy is already starting to rebound, and will likely continue to rise as the world emerges from the meltdown’s aftermath.
Ma’s haste results from his desire to link the economic recovery to the signing of an ECFA. Any delay to the ECFA plan and it will be all too obvious the economy’s upward trend has nothing to do with the pact.
He is betting everything on the electorate believing that signing an ECFA was the policy masterstroke that brought economic recovery, and that this will deliver him another four years in the Presidential Office.
Once an ECFA is signed, two years may not be enough time for traditional industries to fully feel the pact’s ill effects, but it will buy Ma enough time to achieve two of his major goals: bringing Taiwan ever closer to China, in line with his party’s charter, while hoodwinking the public into thinking closer ties with Beijing have resulted in economic prosperity for all.
Although Ma and his officials have repeatedly said that an ECFA does not involve politics, the rush to sign it is entirely driven by political considerations.
It is a good plan, and in light of the last week, one that looks increasingly likely to succeed.
Those opposed to Taiwan’s eventual unification with China need to come up with a similarly well-crafted plan, and fast, if they are to deconstruct this myth, foil Ma’s plot and put the brakes on the ECFA juggernaut.
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,
RSS