Responding to a recent article by Kyodo News Agency titled “When Taiwan-Japan relations run afoul, there’s always Hatta Yoichi,” the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in Tokyo last week once again highlighted the government’s tendency to obfuscate and its refusal to acknowledge public apprehension about its policies.
The office called a passage in the report “groundless” that read “while Ma has wooed China, restarted formal negotiations across the Taiwan Strait and signed trade agreements with Beijing, Taipei’s relations with Tokyo have mostly stagnated.” Yet the office did not meet the allegations directly, choosing instead to rehash the old platitudes of President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) — no unification, no independence and no use of force — while adding that the ongoing negotiations with China are “based not on political but rather economic objectives.”
The response defies reality. If, as the office claims, Ma’s administration “wishes to enhance its substantial relationship with Japan,” then how do we explain a series of unnecessary and avoidable political spats since Ma took office?
Soon after Ma became president in May last year, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs recalled its envoy to Japan over a maritime incident near the Diaoyutai (釣魚台) involving Japanese and Taiwanese vessels. Less than a year later, it was raising a storm over perfectly acceptable comments by Japanese envoy Masaki Saito to the effect that Taiwan’s status remains “unresolved.” The Ma administration played the hurt party and refused to meet Saito for months.
If Taipei wanted to enhance relations with Tokyo, it would have handled those minor matters differently.
Meanwhile, Beijing continues to threaten Taiwan by deploying more missiles across the Strait, and Chinese academics and generals speak of war on visits to Taiwan — a rejection of the nation’s status far worse than Saito’s comments. Yet Ma says nothing. No Chinese officials are barred from coming; in fact, more are welcome.
If questioning Taiwan’s status were an offense in Ma’s eyes, then not a single academic or Chinese official would be allowed on this side of the Strait.
It is also evident that the objectives of ongoing negotiations with Beijing are, despite what the office says, not solely economic. Time and again, the top leadership in Beijing has said that economic integration is part of its plan to annex Taiwan. That the financial agreements are a Trojan Horse cannot be wished away.
This is not the first time a government agency defends its policies in such a matter. The Ministry of Justice has responded to open letters concerning the erosion of rights and liberties in Taiwan and the trial of former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁). Like the Tokyo office’s letter, the ministry’s replies engaged in avoidance while encouraging the illusion that the Ma administration is beyond reproach.
The truth, as Kyodo highlighted in its article, is that the Ma administration has neglected Japan at the expense of better relations with China, and that it is putting Taiwan’s sovereignty at risk by ignoring the political ramifications of “economic” deals. Unless the government provides clear, direct answers to those allegations, we will continue to treat its indignant responses as mere propaganda.
In a Facebook post on Wednesday last week, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Taipei City Councilor Hsu Chiao-hsin (徐巧芯) wrote: “The KMT must fall for Taiwan to improve.’ Allow me to ask the question again: Is this really true?” It matters not how many times Hsu asks the question, my answer will always be the same: “Yes, the KMT must be toppled for Taiwan to improve.” In the lengthy Facebook post, titled “What were those born in the 1980s guilty of?” Hsu harked back to the idealistic aspirations of the 2014 Sunflower movement before heaping opprobrium on the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP)
Some people are saying the weather has been wonderful this year. That depends on how one defines wonderful weather. The Ministry of Economic Affairs last week announced that the alert level for Taoyuan, Hsinchu, Miaoli and Taichung areas are to be raised from green to yellow, and that water pressure is to be reduced at night. Few households with water tower storage facilities would have noticed any restrictions on their supply, but people concerned with the water situation have been aware for some time that the lack of typhoons this year, coupled with low rainfall, has meant that in the
Although China’s “reform and opening up” has become an empty slogan, Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) still put on a show by touring southern China to mark the 40th anniversary of the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone’s establishment. His motive was not to regain the international community’s trust, but to shore up his power in China. Externally, it was a response to diplomatic setbacks, and it even revealed his adventurist attitude of not being afraid to go to war. When former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平) in 1992 conducted similar inspections, it was to suppress the “leftist wind” that was interfering with his
An increasing number of cafes and other businesses in Taiwan are keeping animals, which draw in people who are seeking the next perfect shot for their Instagram accounts. In the past these were mostly standard house pets, such as cats and dogs, which are accustomed to living indoors and being around people. However, raccoons have become popular, as well as alpacas and other “unusual” animals that require specialty care and specific environments to thrive. In late June, a customer recorded a video of the owner of a coffee shop in Taipei apparently unleashing a border collie on a raccoon, who was the star
RSS