Ever since President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) took office, he has pursued a pro-China policy that has caused concern throughout Taiwan because we have effectively placed our independence and sovereignty in the hands of his administration. During the two years he has been trying to sell the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) to the public, he has consistently said that he would safeguard everything that needs safeguarding and assured us that the deal was purely economic in nature and would not effect Taiwan’s autonomy. He also promised that he would not discuss the issue of unification with China during his presidency.
However, as Sun Zhe (孫哲), a professor at Beijing’s Tsinghua University recently said, China is now considering writing a “Taiwan Law” and deliberating the possible replacement of the Straits Exchange Foundation and Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait with a “cross-strait relations committee.” This committee would discuss, on an official level, topics such as peace talks, political issues, international space and the definition of the Republic of China.
This talk of a “Taiwan Law” should come as a wake-up call to Ma, who has to this point been fooling both himself and the public by saying that he has everything under control.
The most worrying thing is the way that Ma has gambled Taiwan’s economic future on how things progress with China, while at the same time choosing to ignore China’s increasing military threat to Taiwan. He has been blinded by what he sees as the promise of China’s economy and stubbornly insisted on signing the ECFA with Beijing. His myopia in the face of China’s military threat and its professed intention of annexing Taiwan led him to declare during a CNN interview that he would “never” call on the US to come to Taiwan’s military assistance should trouble break out in the Taiwan Strait.
This unquestioning belief in the goodwill of the rulers of another nation betrays a complacency rarely seen among world leaders. It is a complacency that is particularly inadvisable when the rulers in question have openly stated their intention to take over your country, by force if necessary.
It might be worthwhile to reflect for a moment on how people in other countries view China. The Pew Research Center in the US is known for its international opinion surveys. According to its annual Global Attitudes report, published in the middle of last month, a majority of people in the US, France, Germany, Spain, India and South Korea see China’s rise as a negative development. Only in Japan and some developing countries in southern Africa did the majority of respondents welcome it. People in the UK were pretty much divided down the middle.
Barring a few exceptions, the vast majority of people in the world are concerned about the steady increase in China’s military might. According to the report, 88 percent of Japanese and 86 percent of South Koreans believe that the rise in China’s military strength is cause for concern. The people of India, a country that has had tense relations with China and fought a brief border war with it in 1962, view Chinese military expansion as a bad thing by a factor of two-to-one.
Even in some of the major Western nations, countries that are not quite so close to China’s border, people are intimidated by the notion of a strong Chinese military. In terms of individual countries, 79 percent of Americans, 74 percent of Britons, 87 percent of French, 72 percent of Germans and 71 percent of Russians hold negative attitudes about the prospect of a militarily stronger China.
In this context, given the general suspicion of China voiced by a significant number of people around the world, the path down which Ma seems to be taking Taiwan seems precarious in the extreme. It is quite clear from the results of the Pew survey that huge numbers of people are intimidated by China’s growing economic power and there is almost universal concern about its military ambitions.
The point is that concerns over China’s growing strength, whether economic or military, is felt in countries that manifestly do not face the immediate threat of annexation. China has not explicitly claimed their territory as its own.
By comparison, Taiwanese have been bulldozed by the current Ma administration into believing that the ECFA is a way into the China market, the largest in the world, from which we can only benefit. Any dissenting voices are quickly suppressed.
China’s growing military strength, meanwhile, in which the populations of many countries in the world find cause for concern, doesn’t seem to bother Ma in the slightest, despite the fact that China has close to 1,500 missiles pointing at us and is trying to engineer a way to keep the US from intervening to protect Taiwan in the event that hostilities break out.
The China market is already accessible to local businesses. What is more concerning is the way the Ma government holds secretive meetings with China behind closed doors as the two sides deliberate how to further develop their relationship.
The government keeps telling us that the ECFA is a purely economic agreement and that it is possible to keep politics and economics separate. It may even believe its own propaganda but its efforts to hoodwink the public are sure to run into problems sometime in the not too distant future.
Naturally, China finds this difficult to grasp. What Beijing is trying to do, after giving concessions such as the “early harvest” list, guaranteeing that certain agricultural goods and Chinese farm laborers will be prohibited from entring for the time being, is to follow up with political pressure. The so-called “Taiwan Law” is clearly an attempt by Beijing to define Taiwan according to its own priorities and then change the name to “Chinese Taipei” or something similar, thereby putting an end to the Republic of China on Taiwan.
Taiwan is selling its soul to the devil for its economic aspirations. When the time comes, China is going to come banging on our door for its prize, the political part of the bargain, flanked by its military henchmen.
We must take responsibility for our own fate and not allow ourselves to be pushed around by the government. The recent case of the farmers in Dapu (大埔), Miaoli County, who refused to be trampled on should provide much needed food for thought.
TRANSLATED BY PAUL COOPER
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