President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) administration on Tuesday was all jubilance after the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) was signed in Chongqing, China, saying that it had managed to sign the pact in a way that upheld Taiwan’s sovereignty.
While it is too soon to tell whether the breakneck pace with which the deal was negotiated (about six months) and the legislature’s likely rubberstamping of the ECFA documents will hurt Taiwan’s interests, the mechanism used to complete the process most certainly did. In that regard, the Ma administration could be accused of dishonesty.
The reason for this is one important point that reports in the international media have generally missed — the ECFA was not signed by two governments but rather, two quasi-official bodies, the Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF) and the Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait (ARATS). No government official on either side of the Taiwan Strait — and more importantly, no elected government official on Taiwan’s side — was involved in the signing.
By relying on two semi-NGOs (the SEF receives government funding) to sign the deal, Taipei allowed Beijing to portray the ECFA as a domestic matter rather than one between two internationally recognized sovereign states. This alone, despite the alleged absence of “political” language in the ECFA documents, sends a dangerous political signal to the international community.
To an outside observer, most Taiwanese appear to support the ECFA and the process has an aura of legitimacy, with the legislature — which, with three-quarters of the seats, is dominated by Ma’s Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) — set to “review” it this month or next.
However, all of this is pure theatrics meant to deceive people whose understanding of the domestic realities in Taiwan can only, by virtue of where they are, be superficial. No matter how hard his administration tries to make it appear legitimate, the fact remains that, unlike free-trade agreements signed by Taipei with other countries, the ECFA was not signed by the Taiwanese government or the Republic of China government, but rather by a semi-official body on its behalf. This is enough to cast doubt on an agreement that is likely to have wide-ranging repercussions on Taiwan’s sovereignty.
While the SEF-ARATS dyad was set up in the 1990s to explicitly avoid the sovereignty issue during negotiations between Taiwan and China, we may, with the ECFA, have reached a point where that instrument has outlived its usefulness, as this deal is of far more consequence than anything the two bodies previously achieved. When it comes to agreements, pacts or treaties that affect a state in its entirety, something more official is required, especially when one party has made no secret of the fact that it sees the agreement as a political instrument — something Ma finally acknowledged on July 2.
Beyond who signed it, there are also important unanswered questions as to how Taipei and Beijing interpret the agreement.
At this point, we still don’t know whether the ECFA is or isn’t a treaty, as the Ma administration has purposefully obfuscated on this point, and in so doing scaled new heights of rhetorical convolution.
On July 2, Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) did a U-turn when he said the ECFA was not a treaty, but rather a cross-strait agreement the contents of which are similar to a treaty. This new stance, added to what Ma has said and Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng’s (王金平) position that the ECFA is not a treaty but an agreement, reinforces the view that the ECFA does not involve two countries, as treaties can only be signed by sovereign states. Making the ECFA a non-treaty would underscore the fact that the trade agreement is a domestic matter, just as Beijing wants.
Given the Ma administration’s aversion to the details being made public, it wouldn’t be surprising if it ended up regarding the ECFA as a treaty domestically — in which case the legislature would not be required to review it item by item (only approving or rejecting it as a whole) — but a non- or quasi-treaty externally, to not anger Beijing (ironically, this puts the opposition in a quandary, because only by not designating the ECFA a treaty can the document be debated clause by clause, as it has requested).
Quasi-treaties and quasi-governmental agencies: For an agreement of such scope, that’s too many in-betweens and far too much Orwellian newspeak for comfort.
By refusing to clearly state the nature of the agreement and by relying on semi-official bodies to sign it, the Ma administration has created so much uncertainty that accusations the ECFA is a threat to Taiwan are increasingly hard to deny. What we need is clarity.
J. Michael Cole is deputy news editor at the Taipei Times.
A failure by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to respond to Israel’s brilliant 12-day (June 12-23) bombing and special operations war against Iran, topped by US President Donald Trump’s ordering the June 21 bombing of Iranian deep underground nuclear weapons fuel processing sites, has been noted by some as demonstrating a profound lack of resolve, even “impotence,” by China. However, this would be a dangerous underestimation of CCP ambitions and its broader and more profound military response to the Trump Administration — a challenge that includes an acceleration of its strategies to assist nuclear proxy states, and developing a wide array
Twenty-four Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers are facing recall votes on Saturday, prompting nearly all KMT officials and lawmakers to rally their supporters over the past weekend, urging them to vote “no” in a bid to retain their seats and preserve the KMT’s majority in the Legislative Yuan. The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which had largely kept its distance from the civic recall campaigns, earlier this month instructed its officials and staff to support the recall groups in a final push to protect the nation. The justification for the recalls has increasingly been framed as a “resistance” movement against China and
Jaw Shaw-kong (趙少康), former chairman of Broadcasting Corp of China and leader of the “blue fighters,” recently announced that he had canned his trip to east Africa, and he would stay in Taiwan for the recall vote on Saturday. He added that he hoped “his friends in the blue camp would follow his lead.” His statement is quite interesting for a few reasons. Jaw had been criticized following media reports that he would be traveling in east Africa during the recall vote. While he decided to stay in Taiwan after drawing a lot of flak, his hesitation says it all: If
Saturday is the day of the first batch of recall votes primarily targeting lawmakers of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). The scale of the recall drive far outstrips the expectations from when the idea was mooted in January by Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) caucus whip Ker Chien-ming (柯建銘). The mass recall effort is reminiscent of the Sunflower movement protests against the then-KMT government’s non-transparent attempts to push through a controversial cross-strait service trade agreement in 2014. That movement, initiated by students, civic groups and non-governmental organizations, included student-led protesters occupying the main legislative chamber for three weeks. The two movements are linked
RSS