President Chen Shui-bian's (
Let's focus on "opening" first.
For businesses that have already invested in China illegally, the question is one of suitable punishment rather than management. It will not be until after the government lifts restrictions on China investment that "active" or "effective" management can mean anything.
In fact, we do not need a complicated economic theory to understand this. Our common sense tells us that the move to open up to China must be taken gradually rather than abruptly. We should allow a small-scale "opening" for a period of time as a feeler, and if the results are good, it will not be too late to adjust the policy in a more active direction.
That the government has espoused "active management" is a clear indication of the failure of the previous policy, in which management was neither active nor effective.
"Active management" is therefore simply a case of closing the gate after the horse has bolted. After four-and-a-half years, the government has finally realized that active opening to China can only be achieved on the basis of effective management.
When the previous policy of "active opening, effective management" was announced, there was plenty of talk of "effective management," but little was actually done. If there is only talk and no action, the shift from "active management, effective opening" to "active opening, effective management" is a meaningless word game.
Speaking of word games, we must mention Ma Ying-jeou (
Since Ma took the KMT chairman's post, he has called for "active treatment of the KMT's assets," which has led an unsuspecting public to believe that, given Ma's leadership record, the KMT will finally hand back its stolen assets to the government.
But what the public did not know was that Ma's use of the word "treatment" (chuli,
Even worse, in a recent interview with international media, Ma said that the ultimate goal of the KMT was "Chinese unification." Whether his idea of unification contains deluded implications of "unifying China" or the more threatening ones of "Chinese unification," we will need the help of Ma, a master of word games, to explain.
Bill Chang is a member of the Taiwan Association of University Professors and of the Northern Taiwan Society.
TRANSLATED BY LIN YA-TI
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) trip to China provides a pertinent reminder of why Taiwanese protested so vociferously against attempts to force through the cross-strait service trade agreement in 2014 and why, since Ma’s presidential election win in 2012, they have not voted in another Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate. While the nation narrowly avoided tragedy — the treaty would have put Taiwan on the path toward the demobilization of its democracy, which Courtney Donovan Smith wrote about in the Taipei Times in “With the Sunflower movement Taiwan dodged a bullet” — Ma’s political swansong in China, which included fawning dithyrambs