President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) recently held a press conference in Greater Kaohsiung in which he should have focused on reconstruction after the fatal, destructive gas pipeline explosions that occurred in the city on July 31 and Aug. 1, but instead chose to cite a Wall Street Journal editorial on Taiwan to disparage the Democratic Progressive Party.
The piece Ma cited was published on Aug. 5 under the headline “Taiwan Leaves Itself Behind” and he used it to accuse and criticize the Democratic Progressive Party for boycotting the review of the cross-strait service trade agreement in the legislature.
The main thrust of the article is that Taiwan has to ratify the service trade agreement with China, otherwise the nation will only become more isolated.
However, this article totally ignores one basic fact: China is hostile toward Taiwan. Not only does Beijing have 2,000 missiles aimed across the Taiwan Strait, it is also preventing Taipei from participating in the international community and continues to reserve the right to use military force to take Taiwan.
At present, 80 percent of Taiwan’s foreign investment and 40 percent of its exports go to China. The majority of Taiwanese are worried that being so strongly reliant on China will ultimately be hugely detrimental to national security.
Taiwan and China are both members of the WTO. However, Beijing is not only unwilling to treat Taipei as a member of equal standing, it also interferes with Taiwan signing regional cooperation agreements with other countries. This is why former president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) formulated his “no haste, be patient” policy to restrict investment in China.
However, after Ma came to power in 2008, he eased restrictions on cross-strait trade significantly and inked the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) with China.
This is why the majority of Taiwanese are against the Ma administration’s pro-China policies, which they feel leave Taiwan overly reliant on the Chinese market. This is also the motivation for the Sunflower movement earlier this year, which saw 500,000 people take to the streets of Taipei to protest an attempt to bulldoze the cross-strait service trade agreement through the legislature.
Unless China promises that it will not stop Taiwan from signing free-trade agreements with other major economic entities such as the US, Japan and the EU now that the ECFA has been signed, ratifying the service trade agreement will only make Taiwan more reliant on China in terms of trade, and place the nation in a very dangerous place in terms of national security.
Taiwan already has a considerably liberal economy, and ranks 17th in the world in terms of trade in imports and exports. According to information from the WTO, in 2001, Taiwan’s import-weighted average tariff rate was just 1.8 percent, which is 2.1 percent lower than that of the US at the time, 2.2 percent lower than Japan’s, 2.7 percent lower than the EU’s, 4.1 percent lower than that of China and 6.8 percent lower than in South Korea.
Despite this, the Taiwanese government should still carry out structural reforms to meet the conditions for joining regional trade pacts such as the under-negotiation Trans-Pacific Partnership, so as to diversify the risk that comes from being overly reliant on the Chinese market.
However, this should not be done with any precondition of signing the cross-strait service trade agreement with China first, and neither should China use this to stop Taiwan from signing free-trade pacts with other countries.
Wu Rong-i is a former vice premier and chairman of the Taiwan Braintrust.
Translated by Drew Cameron
“Si ambulat loquitur tetrissitatque sicut anas, anas est” is, in customary international law, the three-part test of anatine ambulation, articulation and tetrissitation. And it is essential to Taiwan’s existence. Apocryphally, it can be traced as far back as Suetonius (蘇埃托尼烏斯) in late first-century Rome. Alas, Suetonius was only talking about ducks (anas). But this self-evident principle was codified as a four-part test at the Montevideo Convention in 1934, to which the United States is a party. Article One: “The state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications: a) a permanent population; b) a defined territory; c) government;
The central bank and the US Department of the Treasury on Friday issued a joint statement that both sides agreed to avoid currency manipulation and the use of exchange rates to gain a competitive advantage, and would only intervene in foreign-exchange markets to combat excess volatility and disorderly movements. The central bank also agreed to disclose its foreign-exchange intervention amounts quarterly rather than every six months, starting from next month. It emphasized that the joint statement is unrelated to tariff negotiations between Taipei and Washington, and that the US never requested the appreciation of the New Taiwan dollar during the
Since leaving office last year, former president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) has been journeying across continents. Her ability to connect with international audiences and foster goodwill toward her country continues to enhance understanding of Taiwan. It is possible because she can now walk through doors in Europe that are closed to President William Lai (賴清德). Tsai last week gave a speech at the Berlin Freedom Conference, where, standing in front of civil society leaders, human rights advocates and political and business figures, she highlighted Taiwan’s indispensable global role and shared its experience as a model for democratic resilience against cognitive warfare and
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
RSS