Let’s compare notes on two discourses, one implemented in 1979 and another that emerged soon after President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) administration proposed signing an economic cooperation framework agreement (ECFA) with China.
The first is the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA), whose Section 2b(4) states that it is the policy of the US “to consider any effort to determine the future of Taiwan by other than peaceful means, including by boycotts or embargoes, a threat to the peace and security of the Western Pacific area and of grave concern to the United States.”
The second comes from Ma and his Cabinet, which have repeatedly said that signing an ECFA with China could help normalize cross-strait economic and trade ties and prevent Taiwan from being marginalized in the international trade arena. The concept was pushed further earlier this month, with TV ads promoting an ECFA claiming that if Taiwan failed to sign the trade pact, it would sink and end up isolated like North Korea.
Officials in the Ma administration also claim that the entry into force of the ASEAN-China free-trade agreement (FTA) and ASEAN Plus Three (China, Japan and South Korea) also threatens Taiwan’s competitiveness within those trade blocs. The only remedy, we are told, is an ECFA with China.
What these officials, from economists all the way up to Ma, don’t tell us is that this so-called marginalization is not the natural outcome of regional free trade but, rather, politics, pure and simple. Under normal circumstances, the emergence of regional FTAs would not threaten individual economies because all could decide to join, or to sign countervailing FTAs on a case-by-case basis. This, however, doesn’t apply to Taiwan and the reason for this is simple: Beijing’s obstructionism. Under normal circumstances, Taiwan would be free to join ASEAN Plus Three or sign FTAs with regional economies, but Beijing has used its growing economic and political clout to deter countries from doing so.
This shows — and this brings us back to the spirit of the abovementioned section in the TRA — that rather than making decisions free of external interference, Taipei is being compelled to do so. In simple terms, this means: Sign an ECFA with China, whose impact on Taiwan’s sovereignty is uncertain, or else be marginalized, with the promise of continued pressure by Beijing on other countries to block the signing of FTAs with Taiwan. The latter situation would represent a form of embargo, even without the threat of force, which compels us to adopt definitions of this coercive tool that better reflect today’s realities.
The reason why the Ma administration has pushed for an ECFA so actively while ignoring calls for further consultations or more protracted negotiations is that it has been pushed into a corner by Beijing. The administration’s choices are not being made in the best interest of Taiwan, but rather because, in the current situation, an ECFA would be the least nefarious option. This is coercion, pure and simple.
Rather than fight and seek to awaken its allies to this underhanded assault on the right of Taiwanese to determine their own future, the Ma administration has played along with Beijing’s strategy. All along, it has been Beijing setting the agenda, leaving Taipei little choice but to serve as a poster boy by propagandizing the virtues of the trade agreement.
An ECFA is not the panacea the Ma administration has said it would be. It is a gun pointed at Taiwan’s head, and it will be fired should Taiwan fail to sign it.
On May 7, 1971, Henry Kissinger planned his first, ultra-secret mission to China and pondered whether it would be better to meet his Chinese interlocutors “in Pakistan where the Pakistanis would tape the meeting — or in China where the Chinese would do the taping.” After a flicker of thought, he decided to have the Chinese do all the tape recording, translating and transcribing. Fortuitously, historians have several thousand pages of verbatim texts of Dr. Kissinger’s negotiations with his Chinese counterparts. Paradoxically, behind the scenes, Chinese stenographers prepared verbatim English language typescripts faster than they could translate and type them
More than 30 years ago when I immigrated to the US, applied for citizenship and took the 100-question civics test, the one part of the naturalization process that left the deepest impression on me was one question on the N-400 form, which asked: “Have you ever been a member of, involved in or in any way associated with any communist or totalitarian party anywhere in the world?” Answering “yes” could lead to the rejection of your application. Some people might try their luck and lie, but if exposed, the consequences could be much worse — a person could be fined,
Xiaomi Corp founder Lei Jun (雷軍) on May 22 made a high-profile announcement, giving online viewers a sneak peek at the company’s first 3-nanometer mobile processor — the Xring O1 chip — and saying it is a breakthrough in China’s chip design history. Although Xiaomi might be capable of designing chips, it lacks the ability to manufacture them. No matter how beautifully planned the blueprints are, if they cannot be mass-produced, they are nothing more than drawings on paper. The truth is that China’s chipmaking efforts are still heavily reliant on the free world — particularly on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing
Keelung Mayor George Hsieh (謝國樑) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) on Tuesday last week apologized over allegations that the former director of the city’s Civil Affairs Department had illegally accessed citizens’ data to assist the KMT in its campaign to recall Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) councilors. Given the public discontent with opposition lawmakers’ disruptive behavior in the legislature, passage of unconstitutional legislation and slashing of the central government’s budget, civic groups have launched a massive campaign to recall KMT lawmakers. The KMT has tried to fight back by initiating campaigns to recall DPP lawmakers, but the petition documents they
RSS