President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) administration and its counterparts in Beijing accomplished the nearly impossible this year by signing a complex trade agreement between two entities that are technically at war — and one of which does not recognize the other’s existence — in a matter of months.
While free-trade and free-trade-like agreements signed between two states on an equal footing (at least in terms of two-way recognition) usually require years of negotiations, the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) signed between Taiwan and China on June 29 took a little more than five months.
Now, either officials from the Straits Exchange Foundation and the Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait, the two semi-official bodies that were charged with negotiating the trade pact, were incredibly talented and managed to resolve the immense hurdles that have haunted any type of relation between the two entities, or the two sides were too impatient and couldn’t wait to sign the agreement, which offered “proof” that Ma’s cross-strait policies were bearing fruit.
I leave it to the reader to decide which is likeliest, though I would strongly urge that we bear in mind William of Ockham’s sagacious case for parsimony when seeking to explain the cause of a phenomenon amid a plurality of hypotheses.
However, what is more immediately apparent is that the individuals behind this hasty achievement have been far less efficient in submitting the ECFA documents to the WTO, which two entities signing trade pacts are expected to do — and which Ma promised would be done. The ECFA came into effect on Sept. 12, while the “early harvest” list of items that will receive preferential tariff treatment is set to come into force on Jan. 1. In other words, more time has elapsed since the ECFA was signed than it took to negotiate the pact and still the WTO has not been notified.
Ironically, it was the US government — the very same government with which Ma had said he would “mend” relations after eight years of supposedly strained relations — that complained recently about the apparent foot-dragging on the matter. Those worries, passed on to the nation’s envoy to the US, Jason Yuan (袁健生), also come on the heels of comments by Bonnie Glaser, a long-time commentator on cross-strait affairs, that US officials felt the Ma administration was not being entirely forthcoming in keeping Washington informed of Taipei’s engagement with Beijing. US officials, many of whom have gone out of their way to praise Ma’s policies (including the ECFA) over the past two-and-a-half years, are feeling left out and appear to be getting annoyed by the smoke that’s being blown in their faces.
The ECFA, an important development though it may be in its own right, could also be the tip of the iceberg. The more the Ma administration keeps its dealings with Beijing away from public scrutiny and the more it dodges transparency with global institutions, the greater the level of mistrust will become, not only among US officials and WTO units eager to ensure the ECFA meets the spirit of global trade, but more importantly Taiwanese, whose future is in the hands of seemingly unaccountable parties.
Taipei and Beijing still have a little more than two weeks to make good on their promise to notify the global trade body on the content of the ECFA. Surely, in light of the tremendous talent that ostensibly made negotiations successful in record-breaking time, things cannot have become bogged down over the simple task of translating the document into English?
Washington wants answers, and so do we.
J. Michael Cole is deputy news editor at the Taipei Times.
Two sets of economic data released last week by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) have drawn mixed reactions from the public: One on the nation’s economic performance in the first quarter of the year and the other on Taiwan’s household wealth distribution in 2021. GDP growth for the first quarter was faster than expected, at 6.51 percent year-on-year, an acceleration from the previous quarter’s 4.93 percent and higher than the agency’s February estimate of 5.92 percent. It was also the highest growth since the second quarter of 2021, when the economy expanded 8.07 percent, DGBAS data showed. The growth
In the intricate ballet of geopolitics, names signify more than mere identification: They embody history, culture and sovereignty. The recent decision by China to refer to Arunachal Pradesh as “Tsang Nan” or South Tibet, and to rename Tibet as “Xizang,” is a strategic move that extends beyond cartography into the realm of diplomatic signaling. This op-ed explores the implications of these actions and India’s potential response. Names are potent symbols in international relations, encapsulating the essence of a nation’s stance on territorial disputes. China’s choice to rename regions within Indian territory is not merely a linguistic exercise, but a symbolic assertion
More than seven months into the armed conflict in Gaza, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to take “immediate and effective measures” to protect Palestinians in Gaza from the risk of genocide following a case brought by South Africa regarding Israel’s breaches of the 1948 Genocide Convention. The international community, including Amnesty International, called for an immediate ceasefire by all parties to prevent further loss of civilian lives and to ensure access to life-saving aid. Several protests have been organized around the world, including at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and many other universities in the US.
Every day since Oct. 7 last year, the world has watched an unprecedented wave of violence rain down on Israel and the occupied Palestinian Territories — more than 200 days of constant suffering and death in Gaza with just a seven-day pause. Many of us in the American expatriate community in Taiwan have been watching this tragedy unfold in horror. We know we are implicated with every US-made “dumb” bomb dropped on a civilian target and by the diplomatic cover our government gives to the Israeli government, which has only gotten more extreme with such impunity. Meantime, multicultural coalitions of US