Panelists attending a forum on cross-strait affairs yesterday said the recently signed Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) has advanced the timetable for cross-strait political negotiations.
Following the ECFA signing, Taiwan effectively left the economic orbit of the US and entered that of China. Strategically, Taiwan has been Finlandized, and its international status is now similar to that of Hong Kong and Macau, said Lai I-chung (賴怡忠), an executive board member of the pro-localization Taiwan Thinktank.
Lai told the think tank-hosted forum that 2012 would be a key year because that is when President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) four-year term comes to an end and Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) has said he would stand down. That will inevitably create pressure for the two sides to hold political talks and set a fixed course for their successors.
Although observers thought that holding cross-strait political talks would not help Ma’s chance of being re-elected, if the Chinese side felt that his chances of serving a second term were slim or if they started to lose confidence in him, they could use the period before and after Taiwan’s next presidential election to ramp up pressure for a political agreement, said Lai, formerly director of the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) International Affairs Department.
The most likely time for this would be within six months after the March 2012 election, at which time China would withdraw all the concessions it had made to Taiwan over the preceding four years, Lai said.
The theme of yesterday’s forum was “Can we maintain the status quo? How to approach political negotiations between the Chinese Nationalist and Chinese Communist parties.”
Former Government Information Office (GIO) minister Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍), chairing the forum, said it was now the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Chinese Communist Party who, between them, were trying to change the status quo in cross-strait relations.
Lin said the ECFA “has set a harmful precedent, and that a similar formula was now likely to be applied to political negotiations,” including a peace agreement and mechanism for mutual trust in military matters.
The major drawbacks of this formula include not seeking legislative approval before making cross-strait agreements and not subjecting them to legislative examination and oversight or public referendum once they have been signed, Lin said.
The ECFA was negotiated by bodies outside established structures of government that were given a completely free hand to conduct economic talks, and this put cross-strait relations beyond oversight by bodies representing public opinion, Lin said.
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