One gets the distinct impression that China bails President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) out whenever he gets into trouble — when the economy is sluggish, China sends Chinese tourists and signs an economic pact with Taiwan; when farmers can’t find a market for their fruit, Beijing obliges; when Ma agrees not to challenge China on issues of sovereignty, he is offered a diplomatic truce.
However, the honeymoon between Ma and Beijing seems to be over, as the delays in negotiations over the investment protection agreement to be signed by Straits Exchange Foundation Chairman Chiang Pin-kung (江丙坤) and China’s Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits Chairman Chen Yunlin (陳雲林) show.
The topic is slated for the seventh round of talks between the two. Taiwan hopes to discuss an international arbitration mechanism, but China regards investment protection issues as a purely domestic affair and doesn’t see the need for an international arbiter or application of the word “international.” It is therefore quite a contentious topic, one on which neither side’s negotiators are willing to compromise.
The resolution of any cross-strait investment protection disputes will involve judicial jurisdiction rights. In the absence of a third party to arbitrate, Taiwan will fall into Beijing’s trap of having the arbitration undertaken within Beijing’s preferred framework. The situation is even more sensitive with the presidential election looming. Ma’s campaign team wants the investment protection agreement signed to secure the votes of Taiwanese businesspeople in China, but the government also cannot compromise on sovereignty because that would hurt Ma’s chances of re-election.
Until now, the topics for cross-strait negotiations have been economic or cultural in nature. By avoiding politically sensitive issues, China has been able to give the impression of being friendly to Taiwan. However, the talks have been getting progressively more complex and far-reaching and they will only get tougher. If China concedes on economic benefits in certain areas, it expects Taiwan to pay the price by implementing political compromises.
Even if Beijing holds back for now, giving Ma the space he needs to secure a second term, Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) will want to see evidence that his policy of ensuring Ma serves two terms, if indeed he does, pays dividends before Hu himself cedes to his successor. This means that Beijing will be pushing Taiwan to come to the negotiating table.
The government is deluded in thinking that Beijing is always going to support Ma and that Ma can keep delaying the negotiations that China wants to see. If Ma is sincere about “eventual unification,” one would expect his second term to mark the beginning of the unification process. If he shies away from “eventual unification,” China will up the ante if he gets his second term. If the talks fail to materialize, hell hath no fury like Taiwan can expect from Beijing.
Beijing has no love for Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Chairperson and presidential candidate Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), but it doesn’t have any expectations of her, either. If Tsai is elected, there will be an initial period in which China observes what she does.
When voters weigh up which candidate to support, they might want to consider how far the politicians are likely to deviate from their rhetoric and how perilous this might be.
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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