Taiwan is an APEC member and has for decades been a member of the WTO, but has not in recent years joined other regional trade blocs, such as the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP). This is due to political factors — especially member states’ concerns about tensions across the Taiwan Strait. At the same time, Taiwan faces obstacles in signing bilateral free-trade agreements with many other countries, having inked such deals with just a few countries such as Singapore and New Zealand.
The CPTPP is mainly composed of APEC member states, and its purpose is to promote market liberalization and achieve free trade. The RCEP is mainly composed of ASEAN member countries with the main goal of reducing tariffs and eliminating trade barriers. What is worth noting is that the US has remained absent from the CPTPP and the RCEP, even though Washington still aims to engage more with the Asia-Pacific region.
Instead, US President Joe Biden announced Washington’s plans for an Indo-Pacific Economic Framework at the East Asia Summit in October 2021. The Washington-led regional economic initiative was formally established in Tokyo in May last year, an indication that the US wants to deepen its integration with the Indo-Pacific region by collaborating with its democratic partners. Taiwan has not been invited to become a member of the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, but the signing of an initial agreement under the US-Taiwan Initiative on 21st-Century Trade last week seemed to symbolize Taiwan’s inclusion in the framework.
The Cabinet’s Office of Trade Negotiations views the initial trade agreement between Taiwan and the US as the first fruit of the most wide-ranging and comprehensive trade negotiations conducted by Taipei and Washington since 1979. The agreement represents a historic milestone in the two countries’ trade relationship and serves as a critical step toward signing similar trade agreements with other major trading nations. It would also provide Taiwan with more opportunities to take part in regional trade blocs, including the CPTPP, the office said.
The initial agreement covers five chapters on customs and trade facilitation, regulatory practices, domestic regulation of services, anti-corruption practices, and small and medium-sized enterprises. Its main elements are measures to facilitate trade and investment flows, and expedite customs clearances of Taiwanese products in the US. The agreement focuses on administrative efficiency and does not cover tariff reductions or exemptions.
The two sides are expected to continue negotiations on the remaining seven chapters of the US-Taiwan Initiative on 21st-Century Trade, which range from agriculture, digital trade and labor to the environment, state-owned enterprises and nonmarket practices. Some officials and economists have said it is hoped that after negotiations on all 12 chapters have been completed, there would be a chance of signing a free-trade agreement, although Washington has not expressed an interest in signing any such deal with Taipei.
Therefore, the government should work on the practical aspects and first wait to see concrete results from the US-Taiwan Initiative on 21st-Century Trade. Instead of fantasizing about a Taiwan-US free-trade agreement in an unspecified future, the government should pave the way for more in-depth and constructive bilateral trade talks with the US to deal with issues that stand in the way of mutual investment, such as eliminating double taxation.
The government could also use the initiative as a stepping stone toward signing bilateral trade agreements with other countries, and therefore avoid marginalization.
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,
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
Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) Acting Chairman Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) has formally announced his intention to stand for permanent party chairman. He has decided that he is the right person to steer the fledgling third force in Taiwan’s politics through the challenges it would certainly face in the post-Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) era, rather than serve in a caretaker role while the party finds a more suitable candidate. Huang is sure to secure the position. He is almost certainly not the right man for the job. Ko not only founded the party, he forged it into a one-man political force, with himself
RSS