Former president Lee Teng-hui (
"It worries me that President Chen's `active management' policy will not be sufficiently carried out," Lee said in a statement to a conference on national economic development, which was organized by the Taiwan Advocates, at the Grand Hotel yesterday morning.
Lee was the scheduled speaker for the opening speech of the conference. However, he did not show up, as he was sick with the flu. Taiwan Advocates Vice President Huang Kun-huei (黃昆輝) therefore read a written statement from Lee to the more than 500 participants at the event.
In the statement, Lee said that Chen's Lunar New Year's announcement that "active management, effective opening" would replace "active opening, effective man-agement" as the guiding principle for cross-strait ties was a positive change.
However, statistics showed that 90 percent of all approved foreign investment is going to China, the statement said.
"Among all of China's foreign investment, Taiwanese businesspeople give the most," Huang quoted Lee as saying.
Lee's statement mentioned a difference between South Korean businesspeople and Taiwanese businesspeople.
It said that South Korean businesspeople devoted their money to developing the domestic economy, while Taiwanese businesspeople relocated to China to take advantage of cheap labor. Today, the statement said, South Korea has a higher GDP than Taiwan.
During the conference, national policy adviser Huang Tien-lin (黃天麟) also criticized cross-strait investment, by providing statistics of Taiwan's GDP growth.
According to Huang, between 1945 and 1949, when Taiwan and China were both ruled by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) regime, Taiwan experienced the worst inflation in its history.
Meanwhile, when Taiwan was isolated from China and cross-strait investment was not allowed, average GDP growth was 8.2 percent in the 1950s, 9.1 percent in the 1960s, 10.2 percent in the 1970s and 8.1 percent in the 1980s.
Since the government lifted the ban against investing in China and allowed Taiwanese people to travel to China, Taiwan's average GDP growth dropped to 6.4 percent in the 1990s, he said.
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