After China maliciously stopped importing pineapples from Taiwan, effective from March 1, many overseas Taiwanese in the US voiced their desire to buy Taiwanese pineapples. However, when the Overseas Community Affairs Council offered to help them buy pineapples from Taiwan, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Chen Yu-jen (陳玉珍) accused the council of using state mechanisms to make propaganda for domestic consumption.
Taiwanese agricultural products have become overdependent on the Chinese market mainly because of the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement, which was signed during the administration of former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) of the KMT. The terms of the agreement, which allowed many of Taiwan’s farm products to be shipped to China tariff-free, help China to ensnare Taiwan with its “lure, trap and kill” strategy.
Now, just when pineapple farmers are in trouble, the KMT is mocking the government’s remedial measures. Does the KMT think that letting growers lose as much as possible is the right way to prove that sucking up to China is the only way forward?
Taiwanese fruits are outstanding compared with those of other countries. As long as the pro-China crowd gets out of the way and lets the government establish long-term sales channels, Taiwan can definitely break free of the Chinese market and make bigger profits elsewhere.
Having been in the US for more than a decade, I know that overseas Taiwanese have always been eager to buy quality Taiwanese fruit. When Taiwanese guavas arrived in the US last year, everyone did all they could to spread the word. Taiwanese fruits taste great and look great, too. They are suitable for sale as special-quality fruit in high-end US supermarkets.
For instance, when shopping at a rather upscale supermarket the other day, I noticed that Taiwanese starfruit had been placed in the most eye-catching position as a flagship product. Among fruits that are familiar to Americans, such as mangoes, pineapples and mandarin oranges, the quality of those grown in Taiwan is much higher than the usual ones available on the US market. As to fruits that are less familiar to Americans, such as wax apples, starfruit and dragon fruit, my American friends have found them easy to accept, so there should be a big potential market for them.
The only five fruits that Taiwan currently exports to the US are guavas, starfruit, mangoes, lychees and longans. Meanwhile, China sells the US five kinds of citrus fruit alone, while other Chinese fruits, such as bananas, apples and jujubes, are also widely available. It is hard to believe that Taiwan, with its advanced agriculture, cannot compete with China. All it takes is the will to do it.
There are also other obstacles that make it hard for Taiwanese fruit to compete. On March 11, Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Chiu Yi-ying (邱議瑩) revealed that a cold-chain chopping and packing center that the Council of Agriculture planned to set up in Kaohsiung’s Dashu District (大樹) was shelved while the KMT’s Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) was the city’s mayor.
This shows how, even though the central government is in the hands of the “pan-green” DPP, pro-China forces at the local level can make it very hard to set up the infrastructure that is crucial for farm produce exports.
China’s ongoing repressive actions have made overseas Taiwanese keen to buy Taiwanese pineapples. The campaign to place orders for dried pineapples launched by the Taiwanese associations of greater Seattle and greater Portland have won strong support from residents of Washington and Oregon, but this campaign cannot last forever.
As well as calling on those in charge of local governments in Taiwan to stop obstructing, let us hope that voters will no longer vote for pro-Chinese candidates who aim to sell out Taiwan and ruin its agriculture.
Chen Hsiang-jung is a committee member of the Taiwanese Association of Greater Seattle and a participant in the Taiwan Statebuilding Party’s training program.
Translated by Julian Clegg
In their recent op-ed “Trump Should Rein In Taiwan” in Foreign Policy magazine, Christopher Chivvis and Stephen Wertheim argued that the US should pressure President William Lai (賴清德) to “tone it down” to de-escalate tensions in the Taiwan Strait — as if Taiwan’s words are more of a threat to peace than Beijing’s actions. It is an old argument dressed up in new concern: that Washington must rein in Taipei to avoid war. However, this narrative gets it backward. Taiwan is not the problem; China is. Calls for a so-called “grand bargain” with Beijing — where the US pressures Taiwan into concessions
The term “assassin’s mace” originates from Chinese folklore, describing a concealed weapon used by a weaker hero to defeat a stronger adversary with an unexpected strike. In more general military parlance, the concept refers to an asymmetric capability that targets a critical vulnerability of an adversary. China has found its modern equivalent of the assassin’s mace with its high-altitude electromagnetic pulse (HEMP) weapons, which are nuclear warheads detonated at a high altitude, emitting intense electromagnetic radiation capable of disabling and destroying electronics. An assassin’s mace weapon possesses two essential characteristics: strategic surprise and the ability to neutralize a core dependency.
Chinese President and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Chairman Xi Jinping (習近平) said in a politburo speech late last month that his party must protect the “bottom line” to prevent systemic threats. The tone of his address was grave, revealing deep anxieties about China’s current state of affairs. Essentially, what he worries most about is systemic threats to China’s normal development as a country. The US-China trade war has turned white hot: China’s export orders have plummeted, Chinese firms and enterprises are shutting up shop, and local debt risks are mounting daily, causing China’s economy to flag externally and hemorrhage internally. China’s
During the “426 rally” organized by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party under the slogan “fight green communism, resist dictatorship,” leaders from the two opposition parties framed it as a battle against an allegedly authoritarian administration led by President William Lai (賴清德). While criticism of the government can be a healthy expression of a vibrant, pluralistic society, and protests are quite common in Taiwan, the discourse of the 426 rally nonetheless betrayed troubling signs of collective amnesia. Specifically, the KMT, which imposed 38 years of martial law in Taiwan from 1949 to 1987, has never fully faced its
RSS