The pan-green camp is trying hard to block the cross-strait service trade agreement, both in the legislature and through mass campaigns.
Many experts are talking about how this agreement will hurt Taiwan, although the general public is too busy making a living to have the time and energy required to gain an understanding of what is going on in the world of politics.
This is also why most of the active opposition to the agreement comes from the pan-green camp and those opposed to President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九).
There is no need to try to understand details of the agreement, as simple reasoning is enough to make the public understand the damage it could inflict on the nation.
Taiwan’s service industry consists mainly of small businesses that are already under pressure from big business.
If big Chinese corporations are allowed to enter Taiwan, small business operators will come under even more pressure. However, the Ma administration does not concern itself with these small enterprises.
Big corporations are the only ones that stand to gain from the service trade agreement, as they have the resources to expand into the Chinese market.
However, the Chinese market is huge, and Taiwanese businesses will not have much of an impact on it.
This is very different from the small Taiwanese market, which will not be able to withstand the onslaught of Chinese firms.
It is clear that the companies that will benefit from the trade agreement are the ones already operating on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, whereas the small companies in the domestic service industry will be stuck with the short end of the stick.
The question that should be asked is: Why does the Ma administration want to sacrifice the nation’s many small business operators for the benefit of a few big corporations?
Most people think the resources supporting the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) interests come from its party assets, but the benefits these assets bring to the party are small in comparison to the resources it gets from business owners.
However, these business owners do not contribute resources to the party without getting anything in return, so it is a mutual exchange in which the government uses its power to pay back business owners.
It is like the government is taking money in exchange for protecting those businesses.
Everyone gets upset when organized crime extorts protection money, but the biggest offender in this respect are not organized crime ventures, it is the government.
The KMT is not the only party that has aligned with business owners.
The Liberal Democratic Party in Japan has done the same thing, but since Japan has strict regulations controlling political contributions, collusion between government and big business is not too outrageous.
The KMT is different, because it has made protection for money a system and has ways of laundering the illicit funds.
The money from business owners goes to the party coffers, and the party then passes it on to individual politicians.
Therefore, there is a quid pro quo relationship between political parties and big business that turns such payments into a so-called “political contribution” instead of bribes.
This relationship allows the party to take protection money and launder it via the party coffers.
Chen Mao-hsiung is a retired National Sun Yat-sen University professor and a member of the Northern Taiwan Society.
Translated by Perry Svensson
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan. In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new
If you had a vision of the future where China did not dominate the global car industry, you can kiss those dreams goodbye. That is because US President Donald Trump’s promised 25 percent tariff on auto imports takes an ax to the only bits of the emerging electric vehicle (EV) supply chain that are not already dominated by Beijing. The biggest losers when the levies take effect this week would be Japan and South Korea. They account for one-third of the cars imported into the US, and as much as two-thirds of those imported from outside North America. (Mexico and Canada, while
I have heard people equate the government’s stance on resisting forced unification with China or the conditional reinstatement of the military court system with the rise of the Nazis before World War II. The comparison is absurd. There is no meaningful parallel between the government and Nazi Germany, nor does such a mindset exist within the general public in Taiwan. It is important to remember that the German public bore some responsibility for the horrors of the Holocaust. Post-World War II Germany’s transitional justice efforts were rooted in a national reckoning and introspection. Many Jews were sent to concentration camps not
RSS