A kid pouting over a snatched toy is how President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) came across in recent media interviews. The main thread of these interviews all reiterated the same point: Ma would like to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平). It was hard to miss his irritation over the way the Sunflower movement had “messed up” his otherwise feasible plan of meeting with Xi this year, should the cross-strait service trade pact have cleared the floor according to his wishes in the just-finished legislative session.
Ma is evidently still fuming over the Sunflower movement even though it has been almost two months since the three-week-long student-led protest concluded its occupation of the Legislative Yuan in protest against the government’s opaque and undemocratic handling of the pact.
In his interview with Global Views Monthly last month, he condemned the Sunflower movement’s opposition to the pact as “blind to reason and mushy-gushy.” He also cited a commentary in the Nelson Report, a Washington daily newsletter, to support his criticism of the student protesters’ occupation of the legislative chamber. In an interview with Japanese newspaper the Yomiuri Shimbun published on Sunday, Ma — really sounding like a stuck record — again criticized the occupation as illegal, repeating his belief that the APEC economic leaders’ meeting in Beijing in November would be a suitable occasion for a meeting between Xi and himself.
In both interviews, Ma showed high spirits and a seeming readiness to take on whatever is in his way. Yet sadly, it seems the target he has chosen is his own people, as he continues to shut out differing views, and listens only to those in agreement.
For instance, Ma mentioned the Nelson Report; he chose to ignore other reports such as a commentary in Japan’s weekly Nikkei Business, which praised the Sunflower movement as an “unprecedented mature student movement,” and a Bloomberg opinion piece which noted “Ma seems to have forgotten he’s running a democracy, not a Communist Party precinct” and that “his [Ma’s] argument that backing out would undermine Taiwan’s economy and international credibility pales in comparison to the need to preserve the island’s hard-won democracy.”
Meanwhile, a poll conducted by Taiwan Indicators Survey Research stated 63 percent of those polled said the Sunflower movement was “upholding the nation’s democratic values,” while 54.9 percent of respondents said the protest erupted because of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus’ violation of democratic principles. Opposition lawmakers were also recently delighted that an unreleased poll conducted by the Mainland Affairs Council indicated that 62.9 percent of respondents favored the government abrogating and renegotiating the trade agreement.
In a recent meeting with the General Chamber of Commerce’s board of directors and supervisors, Ma, pushing for the passage of the pact, repeated that “letting the agreement continue to stall in the legislature risks creating a psychological barrier for other countries when they want to sign a treaty with us,” adding the agreement would pave the way for Taiwan to participate in Trans-Pacific Partnership talks.
Those remarks again show he is oblivious to the obvious, as US officials such as US Department of State senior official for APEC affairs Robert Wang and American Institute in Taiwan spokesman Mark Zimmer have both said the US does not see any connection between the two issues.
In view of the public’s grievances over his administration’s performance, Ma, as a responsible head of state, ought to use occasions such as interviews to calm the public’s anxiety and respond to their concerns, rather than looking for others to blame — everyone is in the wrong but him.
He is only inviting the public’s dissatisfaction by repeating his rhetoric.
Ma is growing ever more distant from the public.
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