Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait (ARATS) Chairman Chen Yunlin (陳雲林) visited last week to ink four deals that address direct sea and postal links, daily charter flights and food safety. Although the meeting was nominally meant to discuss cross-strait economic policy, it quickly became political.
It is difficult to believe that the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) administration of Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) couldn’t see what was coming. Ma should know that a sizable percentage of Taiwan’s population viewed Chen’s arrival as yet another symbolic blow to Taiwan’s political autonomy.
Deploying 7,000 police officers over a four-day period and restricting the public’s freedom of movement were a recipe for disaster. Ma either misjudged public opinion, showing how ineffective he is as the nation’s top decision-maker, or he didn’t care about the political ramifications of his actions — at least not in Taiwan.
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) politicians, for their part, acted as if they were surprised at the violence that erupted during the protests. The DPP has known for a long time that the ARATS chairman was coming to Taiwan. That the party didn’t find some means of negotiating with the administration seems to demonstrate that it is continuing with the methods that the previous opposition suffered from — the refusal to accept the mandate of those who hold executive power.
The KMT refused to cooperate with the DPP when it was in power for eight years. But saying that this justifies unintelligent politics is as useful as saying the Ma administration can do whatever it pleases because of the perception — real or created — that the former administration of Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) was corrupt. Neither does anything to help Taiwan’s evolving democratization and international status.
Taiwan’s electorate, for good or bad, chose the KMT in the last presidential and legislative elections. The DPP has to accept the fact that it no longer wields executive power and needs to work as diligently as possible within the confines of the current situation. It might not agree with how the KMT negotiates with China, but the presidential election showed that in the economic field, cross-strait liberalization is what a majority of Taiwanese want.
What Taiwanese don’t want is to be ruled by China, and it is here that the DPP has much more room to maneuver. It could, for example, have relented on cross-strait trade while suggesting an alternative location for the meeting. This would have retained all the pageantry that the KMT wanted while keeping negotiations within the economic realm.
Hindsight, of course, helps to put events in a more rational perspective. What the events of last week demonstrate is a total failure of Taiwan’s leaders to act effectively. The DPP is struggling to communicate a coherent message because it refused to work with the Ma administration, while the KMT failed because it refused to listen to voices outside the party and reverted to time-dishonored tactics reminiscent of the Martial Law era. In the end, it is Taiwanese who suffer.
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