Achieving economic freedom
Further to Nathan Novak’s identification of the Chinese political economy as fascist due to the heavy involvement of the Chinese Communist Party within firms in strategically important industries (“Who won China’s war on fascism?” Sept. 8, page 8), it is understandable that President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) signing of the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) was widely seen among supporters of Taiwanese sovereignty as a mistaken, if not disingenuous, attempt to diffuse the very real threat to Taiwanese freedom posed by that very salient aspect of Chinese fascism — Chinese nationalism.
Yet I would suggest that Novak’s point about the economic and financial aspect of fascism, and on which I myself have written before, may itself be one on which any successful defense of Taiwanese freedom will pivot.
Allow me to delineate the context for this hypothesis. The looming sovereign debt crises in the US and the EU together with worries about the continuing viability of the US dollar mean that the greater part of serious economic activity in China is more, not less, vulnerable to economic shocks such as that experienced in 2008.
In addition, large Taiwanese electronics firms, in spite of their wealth of engineering assets, continue to strain their eyes in the hope they can maintain their tight profit margins with the flogging of high-end electronic goods such as televisions and smartphones. A further problem in both China and Taiwan is that of natural disasters — a problem which is compounded by government incompetence at satisfying the immediate and urgent spike in demand for utilities.
Should a group of Taiwanese entrepreneurs put themselves in a position to tap some of those engineering assets from the larger firms in order to produce small and network-independent solutions to the universal problems of procuring clean water and acquiring reliable electricity, then they may find themselves in a position of much greater strategic importance than simply offering relief to poor people hit by disaster.
It takes only a little vision to see how the commercial development of nano-scale water filters or of radioisotope thermoelectric batteries, for example, could render obsolete the old idea of centralized utility networks under effective state control. And it takes only a little more vision to see very much further than that.
Not only might the potential market demand for such products far exceed that of luxuries like smartphones and TV and computer monitors, but alongside an even more severe global economic meltdown, such enterprises could help the Chinese people themselves to begin to put the government in Beijing and many of its despicable corporate hang-ons out of business for good.
Perhaps in considering a fresh perspective such as this, the opponents of ECFA may yet find it a help to the defense of Taiwanese sovereignty rather than a hindrance — and this quite irrespective of the intentions of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). If only they could remove those anti-capitalist cataracts from their eyes.
Michael Fagan
Tainan
A response to my article (“Invite ‘will-bes,’ not has-beens,” Aug. 12, page 8) mischaracterizes my arguments, as well as a speech by former British prime minister Boris Johnson at the Ketagalan Forum in Taipei early last month. Tseng Yueh-ying (曾月英) in the response (“A misreading of Johnson’s speech,” Aug. 24, page 8) does not dispute that Johnson referred repeatedly to Taiwan as “a segment of the Chinese population,” but asserts that the phrase challenged Beijing by questioning whether parts of “the Chinese population” could be “differently Chinese.” This is essentially a confirmation of Beijing’s “one country, two systems” formulation, which says that
Media said that several pan-blue figures — among them former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) chairwoman Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱), former KMT legislator Lee De-wei (李德維), former KMT Central Committee member Vincent Hsu (徐正文), New Party Chairman Wu Cheng-tien (吳成典), former New Party legislator Chou chuan (周荃) and New Party Deputy Secretary-General You Chih-pin (游智彬) — yesterday attended the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) military parade commemorating the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II. China’s Xinhua news agency reported that foreign leaders were present alongside Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), such as Russian President Vladimir Putin, North Korean leader Kim
Taiwan stands at the epicenter of a seismic shift that will determine the Indo-Pacific’s future security architecture. Whether deterrence prevails or collapses will reverberate far beyond the Taiwan Strait, fundamentally reshaping global power dynamics. The stakes could not be higher. Today, Taipei confronts an unprecedented convergence of threats from an increasingly muscular China that has intensified its multidimensional pressure campaign. Beijing’s strategy is comprehensive: military intimidation, diplomatic isolation, economic coercion, and sophisticated influence operations designed to fracture Taiwan’s democratic society from within. This challenge is magnified by Taiwan’s internal political divisions, which extend to fundamental questions about the island’s identity and future
Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) Chairman Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) is expected to be summoned by the Taipei City Police Department after a rally in Taipei on Saturday last week resulted in injuries to eight police officers. The Ministry of the Interior on Sunday said that police had collected evidence of obstruction of public officials and coercion by an estimated 1,000 “disorderly” demonstrators. The rally — led by Huang to mark one year since a raid by Taipei prosecutors on then-TPP chairman and former Taipei mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) — might have contravened the Assembly and Parade Act (集會遊行法), as the organizers had
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