Over a dinner table with heads of Taiwanese trade associations in Beijing last week, China’s Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait Chairman Chen Yunlin (陳雲林) said that China’s economic policy toward Taiwan is grounded in politics.
“Without [the two sides] opposing Taiwanese independence and recognizing the ‘1992 consensus,’ China might have to reconsider its cross-strait economic policy and measures,” Chen said, a statement that not only exposed the anti-democratic and despotic reality of Beijing’s stand, but also President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) lies.
Ma’s administration continually promoted the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) with China as a “purely economic issue” and this was the reason Ma cited in his repeated refusal to hold a referendum on the pact, emphasizing that negotiating a trade agreement with China “would not at all touch on politics and sovereignty issues.”
Chen’s latest remarks show otherwise.
“If the two sides had not recognized the ‘1992 consensus’ and upheld the anti-Taiwan independence stance, cross-strait relations would not have grown to the present stage,” Chen said, suggesting that the 15 agreements Taiwan has recently signed with China and the establishment of the Cross-Strait Economic Cooperation Committee were all realized because the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) administration has tacitly agreed with the political premises laid out by China.
If this is the case, then the government has lied to its own people about a matter of the grandest severity: the nation’s very political sovereignty.
The KMT could argue there is no contradiction, as the KMT has long upheld the so-called “1992 consensus” as the basis for Taiwan resuming cross-strait negotiations, but what about Ma’s pledge that Taiwan’s future is to be decided by Taiwan’s “23 million people?”
As recently as this month, Ma reiterated in his New Year’s Day address that “the nation’s prospects and Taiwan’s future are in the hands of our 23 million people.”
If Chen was not speaking the truth, why has Ma not stepped forward and rebutted Chen’s statement to show Taiwanese that his administration has not single-handedly and unilaterally ruled out the possibility that Taiwan’s “23 million people” might choose independence?
Not only has the Ma government not rebutted the comments, its response has been downright obsequious.
Aside from repeating the Mainland Affairs Council’s (MAC) press release stating that the “1992 consensus” remains “the foundation for negotiations between Taiwan and China that both sides should cherish,” MAC Minister Lai Shin-yuan (賴幸媛) at a press conference on Tuesday completely shunned a press query with regard to Chen’s comments on the political premise concerning Taiwanese independence.
In light of this, coupled with a recent incident in which Taiwan’s coast guard clashed with Chinese fishermen, Taiwanese are left to wonder whether the Ma administration has the backbone to stick up for Taiwan’s authority and dignity. Days have passed since the Chinese fishermen blatantly poached in Taiwan’s territorial waters on Friday and attacked Taiwanese coast guard officers with bamboo poles and stones, and yet not a single word has been uttered by the Ma government on the incident. No condemnation, no protests, not even rhetoric expressing regret; just pure silence.
In his New Year Day’s speech, Ma lauded how tension across the Strait has been “dramatically reduced, thereby contributing to regional stability and prosperity.” However, if this reduction in cross-strait tension is achieved purely through the suppression of the Taiwanese government’s will to stick up for its dignity and democratic values, what good is this fraudulent cross-strait “peace?”
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