China’s spreading milk scandal is threatening support for President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) policy of closer ties with China.
Taipei homemaker Wu Chun-fang, 42, voted for Ma in the presidential election last March but now has her doubts about his China policy.
“I am worried that his promise for closer ties with China will bring in more tainted Chinese products to Taiwan,” she said.
China’s toxic milk crisis is worrying consumers around the world, rekindling doubts from Britain to New Zealand about the safety of Chinese products. In Taiwan, the stakes are also political.
Ma cruised to victory in March by convincing a large majority of voters that his predecessor’s policy of distancing Taiwan from its communist rival was bad for business and a threat to regional peace. Now many Taiwanese are questioning whether Ma was right, amid nonstop media coverage of Chinese products being recalled from store shelves and of anxious parents monitoring their children’s health.
There have been no confirmed melamine-related cases in Taiwan, though Taiwanese media reported that a two-year-old girl who recently returned from China is being checked for kidney damage.
The Ma government has tried to allay public concerns by banning the import of Chinese dairy products, but criticism intensified this week after health officials said they would raise the acceptable levels of melamine in food products, apparently to mollify retailers.
China policy expert Andrew Yang (楊念祖) of Taipei's Council of Advanced Political Studies said that further wavering by the government could undermine popular support for Ma's wide-ranging China initiative.
"If Ma fails to impose strict controls on the import of Chinese goods, people will lose confidence in his cross-strait policy,'' he said.
Local merchants have been forced to remove an estimated NT$1 billion (US$31.3 million) worth of Chinese milk products from store shelves in the past few days.
In a bustling business district in Taipei, many shops have put up signs saying they do not stock Chinese products. Tea bar owner Huang Chi-bin, 34, said his business had taken a big hit.
"Fewer people are buying milk tea from me now, even though I told my customers we don't use Chinese milk,'' he said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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