Last week, for the fifth time in less than three years, President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) was “misquoted” by foreign media over matters pertaining to his cross-strait policy. Whether he gives his interviews in English or in Mandarin, the response from Ma’s office is always the same: Either the world doesn’t get it, or it is out to get Ma as part of some obscure multinational plot to discredit him.
Considering how much time he and his speechwriters have had to flesh out a comprehensive and intelligible cross-strait policy, it is hard to believe that Ma does not by now have clear formulations with which to explain his plan for dealing with Beijing. One would also assume, with a presidential election just around the corner, that Ma’s office would make every effort to ensure that reporters are able to reproduce their interviews with the president with clarity and accuracy. Besides, Japanese reporters, the latest victims in the streak of misquote accusations, have a reputation for being cautious about checking facts.
It could well be that our Janus-faced president has not one China policy, but two ever-shifting and occasionally overlapping policies. Anyone who has paid even passing attention to his comments over the years knows that Ma will choose his words to please his audience, saying one thing one day and the next opining, with seemingly equal conviction, on something downright contradictory. Ma is not exactly alone in this: A lot of politicians engage in such practices.
However, this causes problems when foreign media — perhaps not fully aware of all the minutiae, nuances and complexities of cross-strait policy — attempt to make sense of it all. Even for those Taiwan-based columnists who make it their profession to study the Taiwan Strait, Ma’s China policy remains a puzzle, an entity with no definite boundaries.
The real turnaround occurred a few years ago, when Ma re-emphasized all aspects of the Republic of China (ROC) and later referred to Taiwan as China with Taiwanese characteristics — or was it the other way around?
He is Taiwanese, Ma the presidential contender asserted recently, but a descendant of the Yellow Emperor. He is a defender of the ROC’s — and sometimes Taiwan’s — sovereignty, and yet as vice chairman of the Mainland Affairs Council Ma had a policy on the South China Sea whereby Taipei and Beijing were to work together, as one, to counter external claimants to disputed islets. There is only “one China” and it is the ROC, Ma the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) chairman says, leaving us scratching our heads over what that makes the People’s Republic of China, whose existence he does not deny, but also does not recognize.
Coming out of the interview room with heads spinning, the interviewers must then piece the puzzle together in a way that makes sense to readers. However, as some pieces of the puzzle are missing, reporters have no choice but to approximate and fill in the blanks. It is no fault of theirs: There simply isn’t one clear picture of Ma’s policy, and the only alternative — technologically unfeasible for the moment — would be to provide readers with holographic--like accounts whose contents shift as you tilt them.
Ma gets into trouble and will continue to get into trouble with interviews, not because of his language skills and not because the reporters he deals with are unprofessional or have ignoble motives, but because he is asked to explain complex policies of which he does not have a clear understanding, forced as he is to please both the Taiwanese polity and Beijing.
By seeking to ingratiate himself with everybody, our president has painted himself into a corner. It was easier for him to do so when he was not the elected head of the country, when the focus was directed elsewhere. However, since that position is now his, the walls of contradiction he has erected around his China policy are closing in.
The diplomatic dispute between China and Japan over Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s comments in the Japanese Diet continues to escalate. In a letter to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, China’s UN Ambassador Fu Cong (傅聰) wrote that, “if Japan dares to attempt an armed intervention in the cross-Strait situation, it would be an act of aggression.” There was no indication that Fu was aware of the irony implicit in the complaint. Until this point, Beijing had limited its remonstrations to diplomatic summonses and weaponization of economic levers, such as banning Japanese seafood imports, discouraging Chinese from traveling to Japan or issuing
The diplomatic spat between China and Japan over comments Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi made on Nov. 7 continues to worsen. Beijing is angry about Takaichi’s remarks that military force used against Taiwan by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) could constitute a “survival-threatening situation” necessitating the involvement of the Japanese Self-Defense Forces. Rather than trying to reduce tensions, Beijing is looking to leverage the situation to its advantage in action and rhetoric. On Saturday last week, four armed China Coast Guard vessels sailed around the Japanese-controlled Diaoyutai Islands (釣魚台), known to Japan as the Senkakus. On Friday, in what
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Nov. 5 recalled more than 150,000 eggs found to contain three times the legal limit of the pesticide metabolite fipronil-sulfone. Nearly half of the 1,169 affected egg cartons, which had been distributed across 10 districts, had already been sold. Using the new traceability system, officials quickly urged the public to avoid consuming eggs with the traceability code “I47045,” while the remainder were successfully recalled. Changhua County’s Wenya Farm — the source of the tainted eggs — was fined NT$120,000, and the Ministry of Agriculture instructed the county’s Animal Disease Control Center to require that
On Nov. 8, newly elected Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) and Vice Chairman Chi Lin-len (季麟連) attended a memorial for White Terror era victims, during which convicted Chinese Communist Party (CCP) spies such as Wu Shi (吳石) were also honored. Cheng’s participation in the ceremony, which she said was part of her efforts to promote cross-strait reconciliation, has trapped herself and her party into the KMT’s dark past, and risks putting the party back on its old disastrous road. Wu, a lieutenant general who was the Ministry of National Defense’s deputy chief of the general staff, was recruited
RSS