US-Taiwan Business Council president Rupert Hammond-Chambers told a Washington conference that President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) is in a hurry to sign an economic cooperation framework agreement (ECFA) with China in case his party does poorly in year-end regional elections.
Hammond-Chambers said a poor result in the elections would “undermine” Ma’s credibility and cost him significant support for his policies.
“Ma’s stature and his ability to be proactive in his engagement with China, especially on ECFA, is very much tied-in with his significant mandate from March of last year,” Hammond-Chambers said at the American Enterprise Institute conference titled “Free Trade Agreements in Asia: Implications for Taiwan and the United States.”
If the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) does poorly in the elections, there will be a perception that “the people have pushed back on some of the things he has done,” Hammond-Chambers said.
Even if that were related more to Ma’s performance during the Typhoon Morakot disaster than to an ECFA, a political loss would slow the president’s ability “to do the big things that he wants to do,” Hammond-Chambers said.
“[This] is why he is in a hurry to get ECFA done, to get the framework agreement signed,” he said.
“Ma would like to see it done before early December when these local elections are launched, and try to set it in stone before the unpredictable outcome of the elections,” he said.
“We spend a lot of time here in the US dwelling on the political-military issues of Taiwan-China relations, but the people of Taiwan are mostly interested in their own economic welfare and how that is being represented by their elected leadership,” he said.
Hammond-Chambers said that Taiwan’s isolation was not sustainable in a rapidly integrating region. As the US was not prepared to sign a Free Trade Agreement, China and Taiwan were talking “every single day” about an ECFA, he said.
“China has a single goal when looking towards Taiwan and that is to move the ball forward, however incrementally, towards unification,” he said. “But Taiwan continues to have some inter-agency issues over how to handle ECFA. What we are seeing is a somewhat ad hoc approach to dealing with the issues as the government works through and tries to understand how it is going to address negotiating the deal.”
Thus, while China wants to move as quickly as possible and to talk about “more sensitive matters,” Taipei’s democracy and Ma’s constitutional limitations have kept the brakes on, Hammond-Chambers said.
“China has a significant leadership change in 2012. This engagement policy with Ma and the Kuomintang [KMT] has taken place under the leadership of [Chinese President] Hu Jintao [胡錦濤], who will move on after 2012. And surely Hu will want to see some of the gains from this policy attached to his legacy as president,” he said.
The night before the conference, Hammond-Chambers said, he was playing a board game at home with his young daughter.
“It was one of those games that features a map of the world and the countries are color-coded and there was China and Taiwan and they were the same color,” he said.
“I looked at the box and it said ‘Made in China.’ I put my daughter to bed and went back downstairs and we have several board games with maps of the world, and all were made in China. And when I examined them, all showed Taiwan and China to be the same color,” he said.
“It’s just a little thing, but it demonstrates how relentless the Chinese are when it comes to Taiwan,” he said. “They are just relentless.”
TENSIONS: The Chinese aircraft and vessels were headed toward the western Pacific to take part in a joint air and sea military exercise, the Ministry of National Defense said A relatively large number of Chinese military aircraft and vessels were detected in Taiwan’s vicinity yesterday morning, apparently en route to a Chinese military exercise in the western Pacific, the Ministry of National Defense (MND) said. In a statement, the ministry said 36 Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) aircraft, including J-16 fighters and nuclear-capable H-6 bombers, crossed the median line of the Taiwan Strait or an extension of it, and were detected in the southern and southeastern parts of Taiwan’s air defense identification zone (ADIZ) from 5:20am to 9:30am yesterday. They were headed toward the western Pacific to take part in a
Honor guards are to stop performing changing of the guard ceremonies around a statue of Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) to avoid “worshiping authoritarianism,” the Ministry of Culture said yesterday. The fate of the bronze statue has long been the subject of fierce and polarizing debate in Taiwan, which has transformed from an autocracy under Chiang into one of Asia’s most vibrant democracies. The changing of the guard each hour at the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall in Taipei is a major tourist attraction, but starting from 9am on Monday, the ceremony is to be moved outdoors to Democracy Boulevard, outside the eponymous blue-and-white memorial
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) supports peaceful unification with China, and President William Lai (賴清德) is “a bit naive” for being a “practical worker for Taiwanese independence,” former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) said in an interview published yesterday. Asked about whether the KMT is on the same page as the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) on the issue of Taiwanese independence or unification with China, Ma told the Malaysian Chinese-language newspaper Sin Chew Daily that they are not. While the KMT supports peaceful unification and is against unification by force, the DPP opposes unification as such and
CASES SLOWING: Although weekly COVID-19 cases are rising, the growth rate has been falling, from 90 percent to 30 percent, 14 percent and 6 percent, the CDC said COVID-19 hospitalizations last week rose 6 percent to 987, while deaths soared 55 percent to 99, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said yesterday, adding that the recent wave of infections would likely peak this week. People aged 65 or older accounted for 79 percent of the hospitalizations and 90 percent of the deaths, the majority of whom have or had underlying health conditions, CDC data showed. The youngest hospitalized case last week was a six-month-old, who was born preterm and was unvaccinated, CDC physician Lin Yung-ching (林詠青) said. The infant had a fever, coughing and a runny nose early this month, but