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
From the Iran war and nuclear weapons to tariffs and artificial intelligence, the agenda for this week’s Beijing summit between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is packed. Xi would almost certainly bring up Taiwan, if only to demonstrate his inflexibility on the matter. However, no one needs to meet with Xi face-to-face to understand his stance. A visit to the National Museum of China in Beijing — in particular, the “Road to Rejuvenation” exhibition, which chronicles the rise and rule of the Chinese Communist Party — might be even more revealing. Xi took the members
Taiwan’s higher education system is facing an existential crisis. As the demographic drop-off continues to empty classrooms, universities across the island are locked in a desperate battle for survival, international student recruitment and crucial Ministry of Education funding. To win this battle, institutions have turned to what seems like an objective measure of quality: global university rankings. Unfortunately, this chase is a costly illusion, and taxpayers are footing the bill. In the past few years, the goalposts have shifted from pure research output to “sustainability” and “societal impact,” largely driven by commercial metrics such as the UK-based Times Higher Education (THE) Impact
The inter-Korean relationship, long defined by national division, offers the clearest mirror within East Asia for cross-strait relations. Yet even there, reunification language is breaking down. The South Korean government disclosed on Wednesday last week that North Korea’s constitutional revision in March had deleted references to reunification and added a territorial clause defining its border with South Korea. South Korea is also seriously debating whether national reunification with North Korea is still necessary. On April 27, South Korean President Lee Jae-myung marked the eighth anniversary of the Panmunjom Declaration, the 2018 inter-Korean agreement in which the two Koreas pledged to
I wrote this before US President Donald Trump embarked on his uneventful state visit to China on Thursday. So, I shall confine my observations to the joint US-Philippine military exercise of April 20 through May 8, known collectively as “Balikatan 2026.” This year’s Balikatan was notable for its “firsts.” First, it was conducted primarily with Taiwan in mind, not the Philippines or even the South China Sea. It also showed that in the Pacific, America’s alliance network is still robust. Allies are enthusiastic about America’s renewed leadership in the region. Nine decades ago, in 1936, America had neither military strength
RSS