In his State of the Union address last week, US President Barack Obama called for a “Sputnik moment” to keep the US globally competitive through investment in education and science. He called on Republicans and Democrats to work together to create new jobs and share the responsibility of governing. If the parties can work together, he said, the 21st century will be remembered as another American century.
As rallying cries go, Obama’s “Sputnik moment” has many virtues. Chief among them is that it invokes a time in US history in the late 1950s when the Soviet Union’s success in putting a satellite into space before them spurred Americans to rise above divided domestic politics to address an outside threat that was not just military, but economic, technological and political. The military threat has waned but the others have grown, challenging US prosperity, and these, Obama suggested, can only be vanquished through the same unity and determination prompted by the Sputnik launch.
President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) is also fond of inspirational slogans, although his are very different. In his debate with Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) last year, Ma used the term “Golden Decade” to refer to Taiwan’s prospects for the near future. At the heart of Ma’s dream are plans to make Taiwan a global innovation center, regional trade hub, operational headquarters for Taiwanese trade and regional headquarters for foreign companies. No mere pipedream, the “Golden Decade” was given to the Council for Economic Planning and Development to realize, with details due by the end of last year and a launch scheduled for the start of this year. So far neither has materialized.
Clearly, Ma faces none of the immediate problems Obama does in the US: budget deficits, high unemployment, unpopular wars, widening social inequity and government institutions that seem increasingly unable to address the problems before them.
Who can blame Ma for emphasizing the positive, notably his administration’s success in managing the global economic downturn and in improving relations with China?
As worrying as Ma’s inflated, and some might say unrealistic, promises is the want of urgency in his metaphor. Compared with Obama’s call to arms, charging Americans to do again what they have always done best — build, innovate and compete — a “Golden Decade” is meaningless to Taiwanese whose jobs have moved abroad and who, like many Americans, see little “gold” in their futures.
It may be that nonsense like a “Golden Decade” is intended to be just that, meaningless, and along with the glitter of the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) signed in June, a distraction from problems that are urgent, but for which Ma has no stomach at the moment.
What are the political implications of the ECFA? What is the current deterrent capability of the armed forces? What is causing the widening gap between rich and poor? Why are fewer Taiwanese choosing to marry and have children?
To deal with such problems, Taiwan needs the unity and determination of a “Sputnik moment.” Where will one come from? Surely not from the self-serving promises of a “Golden Decade.” Nor, sadly, will it come from the political establishment, opposition or a press obsessed with Chinese philanthropists splashing their cash or the latest US beef scandal.
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) trip to China provides a pertinent reminder of why Taiwanese protested so vociferously against attempts to force through the cross-strait service trade agreement in 2014 and why, since Ma’s presidential election win in 2012, they have not voted in another Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate. While the nation narrowly avoided tragedy — the treaty would have put Taiwan on the path toward the demobilization of its democracy, which Courtney Donovan Smith wrote about in the Taipei Times in “With the Sunflower movement Taiwan dodged a bullet” — Ma’s political swansong in China, which included fawning dithyrambs