It’s official: Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) and President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) will hold a televised debate on the proposed economic cooperation framework agreement (ECFA) on April 25.
After months of avoidance and foot-dragging, the two leaders will finally bring the issue into the nation’s living rooms and force everybody, regardless of political persuasion, to confront the tough questions that are raised by the proposed pact.
For Ma, this will be an opportunity to explain why the nation so desperately needs the cross-strait deal, as well as to shed much-needed light on the many shadowy corners that have characterized the negotiations so far. In poll after poll, Taiwanese have expressed frustration at not knowing enough about the ECFA deal, and time and again the Ma administration — primarily Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) — has blamed this lack of understanding on poor communication. So here’s your chance, Mr Ma, to resolve your administration’s communication problem.
As for Tsai, the debate will be an occasion to articulate the nation’s apprehensions and to force Ma to confront those fears. For Tsai to emerge as the “winner” in the debate, however, she will also have to present alternatives to an ECFA to show how the DPP would address the challenges posed by regional economic integration. In other words, this will be an opportunity for her to show that rather than simply being “against” something, the DPP actually has constructive ideas.
It is to be hoped, as well, that the participants will be able to put the ECFA talks in context. If it treats them in a vacuum, or purely from an economic point of view, the debate will only accomplish half of what it should. For there is no doubt that while, on the surface, the pact concerns narrow matters of trade (something the Ma administration has emphasized in its attempts to comfort the public), very real political implications lie behind it, including Taiwan’s sovereignty.
One question that Tsai should ask Ma is why his administration is willing to sign an ECFA with a country that, despite allegedly warming ties in the Taiwan Strait, maintains its military threat against Taiwan. Is this an instance of the contradictory policies inherent to large governments, or rather part of China’s well-honed united front strategy? Ma has often said he would make China dismantling the missiles it has aimed at Taiwan a precondition for negotiations; and yet, how many deals have been signed since he first made that comment, while the number — and deadliness — of those missiles keeps increasing?
Nations in a state of war do not sign free-trade agreements with one another. While there is speculation that Ma and his Chinese counterpart, Hu Jintao (胡錦濤), might sign a “peace” agreement around 2012, without a demonstrated commitment on China’s part to stop threatening Taiwan, there would be nothing peaceful about it.
Why this matters now, in the context of a debate on an ECFA, is that the trade pact, along with everything else the Ma administration has signed with China in the past two years, is being negotiated with a belligerent partner. If both sides are not treated as equals, or if dishonesty is the strategy of one of the parties, an ECFA will not create a more prosperous Taiwan, but will rather be one of a series of acts of capitulation on Ma’s part that would all but obviate any “peace” agreement.
It will be Tsai’s responsibility to raise those questions and put them in their larger context. And it will be Ma’s to put such fears to rest.
Ideas matter. They especially matter in world affairs. And in communist countries, it is communist ideas, not supreme leaders’ personality traits, that matter most. That is the reality in the People’s Republic of China. All Chinese communist leaders — from Mao Zedong (毛澤東) through Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平), from Jiang Zemin (江澤民) and Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) through to Xi Jinping (習近平) — have always held two key ideas to be sacred and self-evident: first, that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is infallible, and second, that the Marxist-Leninist socialist system of governance is superior to every alternative. The ideological consistency by all CCP leaders,
The US on Friday hosted the second Global COVID-19 Summit, with at least 98 countries, including Taiwan, and regional alliances such as the G7, the G20, the African Union and the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) attending. Washington is also leading a proposal to revise one of the most important documents in global health security — the International Health Regulations (IHR) — which are to be discussed during the 75th World Health Assembly (WHA) that starts on Sunday. These two actions highlight the US’ strategic move to dominate the global health agenda and return to the core of governance, with the WHA
Just as the cause of the Kursk submarine disaster remains shrouded in mystery — the nuclear-powered Russian submarine suffered an explosion during a naval exercise on Aug. 12, 2000, and sank, killing all 118 crew onboard — it is unlikely that we will ever get to the bottom of the sequence of events last month that led to the sinking of the Moskva guided missile cruiser, the flagship of the Russian navy’s Black Sea fleet. Ukraine claims it struck the vessel with two missiles, while Russia says ammunition onboard the ship exploded and the ship tipped over while being towed
The war in Ukraine continues, and lines are slowly being drawn in the sand. Nations have begun imposing sanctions; few can ignore the reality of Russia’s aggression and atrocities, especially as it edges to the possibility of making a full declaration of war. For Taiwan, this resurrects a different reality, the tangled web of its own complex past and how as a colony of Japan, it became involved with Russia, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). Some role reversals are immediately evident. Taiwan is now an independent nation and the CCP rules China. The CCP indirectly
RSS