President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) pro-China policy is doing considerable damage to Taiwan. While criticism of his policies generally concentrates on economic and sovereignty issues, less attention is paid to the degree to which China is interfering in Taiwan’s elections. Beijing is the unseen hand, prompting the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) from stage left. It keeps bailing out the KMT and its pan-blue allies, nominally in the interests of greasing the wheels of cross-strait relations, when the blue camp’s own resources are found wanting.
China has recently stepped in to assist Taiwan’s technology industry and to buy up surplus agricultural products — and it does have deep pockets. Given the prodigious resources Beijing has at its disposal, there is seemingly no limit to the help it can provide. China often succeeds in making its point loud and clear, even if the results of its interventions fall short of their professed objectives. By such means — and by engineering an uneven playing field — Beijing might successfully mislead the Taiwanese public and perhaps even influence the outcome of January’s elections.
There is, unfortunately, nothing in existing legislation to prevent Beijing from behaving in this way. As a result, Taiwanese are slowly but surely losing control over their own destiny. Beijing has essentially maneuvered itself into the position of primary mover and shaker, operating in the background of Taiwanese politics.
Vote buying undeniably still features in Taiwanese elections, but the judiciary has made strenuous efforts to stamp it out and bribery does not have as much influence on election results as it once did. In these respects, things have improved, but a new kind of electoral interference is gradually beginning to rear its ugly head.
China has been trying to influence Taiwan by acting as a supposed benefactor — buying up surplus products, for example, ostensibly out of altruism. It offers incentives to Taiwanese businesspeople who invest there, and it is now allowing independent Chinese tourists to visit Taiwan. Beijing provides these chips to the Ma administration, knowing it will cash them in when it is up against the wall. Time and again, Ma’s administration has done so, hoping to boost its flagging support.
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) got it right when she criticized the government for relying on China to cover up its inadequacies.
Looking to China for assistance seems, on the surface, a move that would help Taiwan economically. A recent example is the banana glut which led to the fruit’s plummeting price. All the government did in response was take out advertising space to criticize its detractors.
Then-vice chairman of China’s Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits (ARATS) Zheng Lizhong (鄭立中) came to tour farming communities in central and southern Taiwan, accompanied by elected KMT officials. Although farmers in China’s southern island province of Hainan, like their Taiwanese counterparts, are finding it difficult to sell bananas, that did not prevent another visiting Chinese official, the governor of Shandong Province, from offering to purchase 5,000 tonnes of bananas from Taiwan.
This was meant as a helping hand for Ma, but is this not, to all practical purposes, a form of vote buying? The sad thing is that it is probably just hot air anyway, for once the gesture has had the desired effect of helping Ma out, China will just let it drop. The farmers will not get anything out of it, but Beijing will gain a reputation for being a grand benefactor — and with very little effort on its part.
In the same way, China’s announcement that it will open its market to Taiwanese agricultural products appears, on the surface, to be giving Taiwanese farmers access to a huge market of 1.3 billion consumers. In reality, however, this is not the case. Average incomes in China are far lower than in Taiwan, so fruit prices there are correspondingly lower. Moreover, any competitive edge that Taiwan might have had in terms of quality of produce has been severely eroded because some of Taiwan’s retired agricultural officials and horticulturalists have set up shop in China, taking with them improved crop varieties that were developed in Taiwan.
Taiwan’s trade deficit with China, at least as far as farming produce is concerned, is getting worse by the day. It is truer to say, then, that it is Taiwanese consumers who are bailing out Chinese agriculture, not the Chinese government saving Taiwanese farmers.
There is nothing new about the Ma administration turning to Beijing for help when it is in trouble. Almost as soon as Ma took office, the world was rocked by a global financial crisis.
While one could say that this was bad luck, it could also be seen as a good opportunity for Ma to demonstrate his competence in governing the nation and demonstrate the preparedness of his team. Let’s not forget how former president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) managed to steer Taiwan safely through the 1997 Asian financial crisis, at a time when cross-strait relations were at their rockiest for some time.
Ma’s government claims to have stabilized cross-strait relations, but it was powerless in the face of the global financial crisis and had to turn to China for help. Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) should bear this in mind as he tries to drag Lee’s name through the mud, accusing him of corruption.
The aces wielded by the Ma government when the financial crisis struck were introducing direct flights between Taiwan and China and opening Taiwan to Chinese tourists.
However, after these initial successes, the government went one step too far by -signing the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA), regardless of what that meant for Taiwan.
Let’s remember that one of the first passenger ships to bring Chinese tourists to Taiwan was draped with a banner: “Boost Taiwan’s economy.” The tourists stepped onto Taiwanese soil with an air of the “savior” about them, boasting to the press about their supposedly unlimited spending power. From that time on, we have had all kinds of municipal and provincial heads and industrialists coming from China to perform an almost ritual show of purported benevolence, where billions of dollars are whipped out and plonked on the table.
Thus we have the preposterous situation in which people from a low-income country are throwing money at a high-income country. It’s demeaning, it’s inglorious, it shakes our confidence as a nation, and it is all courtesy of the Ma administration.
The firm foundations of Taiwan’s economy have been laid over several decades, and even though we do, on occasion, get buffeted by financial storms, we have always got through it by relying on our strengths. The 1997 Asian financial crisis is a perfect example.
Why, then, does this government risk ruining our national confidence by running to China at the first sign of trouble? One suspects that, by playing the sentimental card of common blood and shared heritage, Ma is trying to brush aside any obstacles to his China-leaning policies and deregulation, paving the way for “eventual unification.”
This also enables him to enlist Beijing’s help when an election looms — and he is worried that it’s too close to call. It is all part and parcel of a distinctly symbiotic arrangement. Ma has a problem, Beijing intervenes, he gets his second term, the symbiosis is intact. It remains to be seen whether this new form of vote buying by China will cause Taiwan to move away from its previous course of independent development, and go down the road of no return toward future annexation.
If voters have their wits about them and wake up to the threat, this gloomy fate could yet be averted.
TRANSLATED BY PAUL COOPER
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