President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) has been slapped in the face so many times now that yet another slapping ceased to be news quite some time ago. It has got to the point where he will make the headlines when he does not get a good slap. And yet there he was the other day, slapping Deutsche Presse-Agentur (DPA) in the face, accusing it of making things up.
The DPA is the equivalent of the Central News Agency here in Taiwan. Does Ma really think it fabricates news? Just read the report resulting from the interviews Ma gave to German media outlets such as the DPA.
According to the Chinese language Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister newspaper), Ma did not need any help revealing details of his pro-China stance during interviews with the German press on Sept. 22. He did very well all by himself.
During the interview, Ma reaffirmed his commitment to his pro-China policies; expressed his wish to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) during the APEC summit in Beijing next month; asserted that getting closer to China was Taiwan’s only hope of survival, the alternative being having its options severely limited; mentioned that he would like to see Taiwan and China set up representative offices in each other’s territories in two years’ time; and reiterated his contention that cross-strait relations are not state-to-state relations, and neither were they internal matters, but were a form of relations “never before seen.”
Finally, on its Chinese-
language Web site, German state broadcaster Deutsche Welle (DW) pointed out that Ma had spoken of his intention to “study the experience of East and West Germany in how they dealt with bilateral relations at the time and how they eventually achieved reunification.”
It is certainly not anything new for something like this to come out of Ma’s mouth. Few people reading that report would have seen any reason to suppose it had been “fabricated,” and certainly not by the DPA.
The German press agency also interviewed Taiwanese student activist Lin Fei-fan (林飛帆) to ensure that its report was balanced. What possible reason would there have been for the DPA to fabricate news?
If anyone was guilty of fabrication, it would be the president himself, trying to fool people by saying that more than half of Taiwanese supported the idea of “one China, with each side having its own interpretation” (一中各表).
However, like a tortoise retracting into its shell at the merest sniff of danger, Ma, fearing a backlash, immediately instructed the Presidential Office to issue a denial of some of the things he had said and demand corrections of parts of the published interview.
Philipp Bilsky, DW’s head of Chinese news, confirmed that the report had not been taken down from the Web site, but that the sentence about Ma’s studying East and West Germany’s experience contained an error, and had been changed to simply say “[Ma] wants to study the experience of East and West Germany in how they dealt with bilateral relations at the time.”
This would make it seem that DW was guilty of making a little mistake, but the truth is it was not really a mistake at all. Ma may well have just said he wanted to study the experience of East and West Germany, but even if he had not explicitly said “and how they eventually achieved reunification,” does it really make any difference?
Is not the whole point of studying the experience of East and West Germany to understand how they approached the situation with a view to eventual reunification?
The so-called correction made by DW only goes to show that the report had not been mistaken at all, and that the correction proves that there was nothing wrong with the original version. More importantly, the fact that this small correction, such that it was, was accepted proves that what came before it was completely true.
By making such a fuss over a small point and accusing DW of fabrication, Ma has only succeeded in drawing attention to something he might not have wanted to highlight.
Not only that, but the interview elicited an immediate response — and not all of it positive — as soon as it was published.
Chinese communist head honcho Xi seized on the opportunity to harp on about “one country, two systems” (一國兩制) and “peaceful unification” (和平統一), reaching out to Ma from overseas in an expression of how he sees their relationship: That of master and disciple.
The response was equally as quick in Taiwan, too, with a university student hurling a copy of Formosa Betrayed at Ma’s head. Oh, dear. Poor, hapless Ma. Slapless perhaps, but that must surely have smarted all the same.
Ma would have it that closer ties with China are Taiwan’s only chance. The anti-China movement on the streets of Hong Kong at the moment is another slap in the face for hapless Ma.
Most tragic of all, however, was his talk of continuing to try to create the conditions for a meeting with Xi at the APEC summit, without pushing for it to happen. It is really quite pathetic.
Chin Heng-wei is a political commentator.
Translated by Paul Cooper
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