President Chen Shui-bian (
In May, Chen came up with a solution to opening direct links without having direct negotiations between Beijing and Taipei, which have been stalled for years on the issue of "one China." Chen's solution was to use a negotiation procedure similar to that used to reach an agreement on air links with Hong Kong, namely that commercial organizations could officially do the negotiating, with government officials acting as freelance "advisors," thus preserving the fiction of no direct government involvement.
Chen's idea was a brilliant one -- if opening direct links was what one really sought, as even Beijing quickly realized. In June, Beijing's vice premier and de facto Taiwan affairs supremo Qian Qichen (
Qian's concessions were admitted as official policy on Oct. 29 by officials from Beijing's Taiwan Affairs Office. And for 24 hours we might have thought that negotiations were just around the corner. Then the following day Chen announced that "Any form of direct transportation ... would involve the government's authority, which can't be replaced by any private body." Subsequent comments also showed that Chen has now rejected the Hong Kong negotiation model. What has yet to be explained is why?
Certainly there is massive opposition to direct links in the DPP itself. Could Chen simply be giving in to pressure from his party?
There is, however, a far more interesting theory. In mid-September the Control Yuan censured the government over its "active opening, effective management" policy, saying in effect that opening had been too active and management totally ineffective. The Control Yuan's report which investigated cross-strait financial flows showed that less than 2 percent of the capital invested in China ever returned as repatriated profits. What this suggested is that investment in China is a deadweight on Taiwan's economy. It sucks out capital and returns almost nothing.
This report, we believe, has been hugely influential in persuading the government that the self interest of business lobbyists is not the collective interest of all -- a mistake that the blue camp still seems to make. Hence the sudden and otherwise inexplicable about-face on direct links. China is a drain, as the TSU always said it was, and until this drain can be plugged it is nonsensical to increase the water flow.
If the blue camp or the business community want a counterargument they might argue that a lot of investment is to set up downstream capacity for companies and is a contribution to Taiwan's wealth in terms of exports. To which we would reply, let's see the figures. We do not necessarily subscribe to the Control Yuan's report, having reservations about its methodology, but it has reminded us that direct links means more China investment and it is foolish to allow this until we have determined how beneficial, or otherwise, investment so far has been. What we need now is serious input from the number-crunchers. The opening-to-China debate has been argued from positions rooted in ideology. Let both sides martial their figures. Let us, in Deng Xiaoping's (鄧小平) words, "seek truth from facts."
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