The mission of China’s Taiwan Affairs Office (TAO) is to push for unification with Taiwan, and the way it works can be summed up as “cheat, cheat and cheat again.”
If that is understood, people will not be misled by some of the things the TAO has said and done in the past or expect it to resolve cases in which Taiwanese businesspeople have been victimized.
Taiwanese businesspeople started investing in China after martial law was lifted in 1987.
In the early days, the only way to invest in China was by means of joint-venture investments with Chinese partners, with the Chinese side holding the majority share.
More often than not, Taiwanese partners would end up getting kicked out, after which the business would be quietly sold at a cut-price to Chinese. These sales would be approved by the courts, leaving Taiwanese victims without access to legal remedies.
In those days, the TAO’s excuse was that there was no law that specifically protected Taiwanese businesspeople’s interests.
In 1994, the Chinese authorities enacted the Law of the People’s Republic of China on Protection of Investment by Compatriots From Taiwan.
However, their purpose in doing so was not really protection, but propaganda. The law was designed to mislead Taiwanese businesspeople into thinking that the Chinese authorities were sincere about resolving their problems, so that they would invest their money with confidence.
Over the next five years, there were more incidents of victimization against Taiwanese businesspeople, and the TAO needed to come up with a new trick.
Saying that the investment protection law was not far-reaching enough to give Taiwanese businesspeople adequate protection, in 1999 the Chinese authorities enacted a set of rules for implementation of the protection law.
However, then TAO boss Chen Yunlin (陳雲林), knew full well that the problem was not a matter of how well-formulated the law was, but whether the authorities would enforce it.
Why were the authorities not enforcing the law?
It was beecause robbing Taiwanese businesspeople was Chinese Communist Party (CCP) policy. That is why no Taiwanese investor could ever get a just resolution, and the criminals and their accomplices in the police, prosecution offices and law courts never got punished.
The failure to enforce these laws only encouraged more Chinese to find various ways of stealing from Taiwanese businesspeople. As the thieves’ appetite continued to grow, even investors in major enterprises like the Shin Kong Place department store complex in Beijing and the huge Foxconn factory in Shenzhen found themselves on the receiving end.
The problem of victimized Taiwanese who could not get restitution was raised again when former premier Lien Chan (連戰) visited China in 2005.
This time there was a new excuse, which was that the department responsible for speaking on behalf of Taiwanese businesspeople lacked authority.
For this reason, the office of complaints and coordination, which had been a section of the TAO’s Department of Economy, was upgraded to become the Department of Complaints and Coordination. However, the problems of defrauded Taiwanese businesspeople were still not resolved, because the TAO does not sincerely intend to sort any disputes.
The proof is not hard to find. During the plenary sessions of the National People’s Congress and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference in 2011, Chen reported that Taiwanese businesspeople had lodged 28,215 complaints during the 10 years from 2000 to 2010, and that more than 24,000 of these disputes had been settled.
In claiming a settlement rate of 85.4 percent, Chen took cheating to a whole new level.
February this year marked one year since the Cross-Strait Bilateral Investment Protection and Promotion Agreement came into effect.
According to figures released by the Ministry of Economic Affairs’ joint service center for Taiwanese businesses operating in China, it had resolved 17 disputes.
Compared to the average 2,821 disputes that arise each year, that is a settlement rate of just 0.6 percent. To make matters worse, not one of these disputes was settled fairly.
The conclusion to be drawn is that the TAO exists to work toward unification with Taiwan and eventually annex it. The way it goes about this task is to cheat, cheat and cheat again, and this will be the same no matter who occupies the post of TAO minister.
William Kao is president of the Victims of Investment in China Association.
Translated by Julian Clegg
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