President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) finally revealed his real plans to the public when he recently said that he would be willing to sign a peace agreement with China.
On Sept. 12, Ma’s “Siamese twin” King Pu-tsung (金溥聰), executive director of Ma’s re-election campaign office, said during an international press conference in the US that after winning re-election, Ma might visit China.
He also said that he did not rule out Taiwan and China signing a peace agreement. Because his remarks drew a strong reaction in Taiwan, the next day Presidential Office spokesman Fan Chiang Tai-chi (范姜泰基) backed away from the comments and quoted a statement from Ma saying he did not have any plans to visit China, that “there is no urgent need for political negotiations” and that there is “no timetable for holding political negotiations with China.”
The question is, how can so much have changed in just one month? Judging from the relationship between Ma and King, Ma listens to everything King says, which is why People First Party (PFP) Chairman James Soong (宋楚瑜) talks of a “King and Ma system,” implying that King controls Ma.
On Monday, Ma changed his tune again when he said that a failure to include a peace agreement in his planned “golden decade” would make it seem as though Taiwan was not interested in addressing the matter for the next decade and that would be bad.
Here, we really have to ask who it is that would dislike such a situation.
Many people have heard rumors that China is displeased with Ma for not returning the favor China did for Taiwan when it made concessions on products to be included in the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement “early harvest” list and after helping Ma in the five special municipality elections.
These rumors have since been confirmed. An editorial in the Global Times, a daily Chinese tabloid newspaper affiliated to the official Chinese Communist Party newspaper, the People’s Daily, on Sept. 17 criticized Ma for making more than 20 requests for arms sales from the US.
The editorial said that whenever the US has sold arms to Taiwan in the past, Beijing had focused its retaliation on Washington, but in the future it should redirect some of its ire to Taiwan because China now has more ways to impose sanctions on Taipei than on Washington.
When talking about sanctions, they are of course targeting the Taiwanese economy, which is increasingly reliant on China. It is hard to imagine how Beijing could send out any stronger warnings than it did in 1996 when it shot missiles into Taiwanese waters.
While these comments were made in reference to arms deals, we need to pay attention to the date they were made, because they were published before the US had made any official decision on arms sales to Taiwan. More significantly, they came three days after Ma denied that he would be signing a peace agreement with China, which strongly suggests that China was using the issue to let off some steam.
Because China “feels bad” about Ma, all he could really do in response was to include the peace agreement in his “golden decade” policy.
It is clear that Ma is not only getting ready to serve up Taiwan to China on a platter, he is also taking away the right of future generations to make a choice for themselves.
All this talk of 10 years is a ruse. If Ma is re-elected, he will have surrendered in less than four years.
Paul Lin is a political commentator.
Translated by Drew Cameron
Taiwan stands at the epicenter of a seismic shift that will determine the Indo-Pacific’s future security architecture. Whether deterrence prevails or collapses will reverberate far beyond the Taiwan Strait, fundamentally reshaping global power dynamics. The stakes could not be higher. Today, Taipei confronts an unprecedented convergence of threats from an increasingly muscular China that has intensified its multidimensional pressure campaign. Beijing’s strategy is comprehensive: military intimidation, diplomatic isolation, economic coercion, and sophisticated influence operations designed to fracture Taiwan’s democratic society from within. This challenge is magnified by Taiwan’s internal political divisions, which extend to fundamental questions about the island’s identity and future
The narrative surrounding Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s attendance at last week’s Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit — where he held hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin and chatted amiably with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) — was widely framed as a signal of Modi distancing himself from the US and edging closer to regional autocrats. It was depicted as Modi reacting to the levying of high US tariffs, burying the hatchet over border disputes with China, and heralding less engagement with the Quadrilateral Security dialogue (Quad) composed of the US, India, Japan and Australia. With Modi in China for the
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) has postponed its chairperson candidate registration for two weeks, and so far, nine people have announced their intention to run for chairperson, the most on record, with more expected to announce their campaign in the final days. On the evening of Aug. 23, shortly after seven KMT lawmakers survived recall votes, KMT Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) announced he would step down and urged Taichung Mayor Lu Shiow-yen (盧秀燕) to step in and lead the party back to power. Lu immediately ruled herself out the following day, leaving the subject in question. In the days that followed, several
The Jamestown Foundation last week published an article exposing Beijing’s oil rigs and other potential dual-use platforms in waters near Pratas Island (Dongsha Island, 東沙島). China’s activities there resembled what they did in the East China Sea, inside the exclusive economic zones of Japan and South Korea, as well as with other South China Sea claimants. However, the most surprising element of the report was that the authors’ government contacts and Jamestown’s own evinced little awareness of China’s activities. That Beijing’s testing of Taiwanese (and its allies) situational awareness seemingly went unnoticed strongly suggests the need for more intelligence. Taiwan’s naval
RSS