President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) yesterday said the administration’s plan to sign an economic cooperation framework agreement (ECFA) with Beijing next month remained unchanged, but denied that the trade pact was a means to meet a political agenda.
Ma said he believed the agreement would help the two sides develop closer trade ties and thereby ease tensions across the Taiwan Strait.
“It is an economic accord after all ... I believe both sides see it from an economic perspective. My theory is that if our relationship with the mainland remains sound, the likelihood of war in the Taiwan Strait is small because the price we would have to pay would be high,” he said.
Ma said the proposed deal would be signed in a piecemeal fashion, with tariff reductions or exemptions and protection of intellectual property rights preceding investment guarantees.
“Signing the framework agreement is just the beginning ... It will take several years to complete,” he said.
Ma said that while the government’s cross-strait policy would proceed only gradually so that “inexplicable” public fear would be mitigated, the policy was the right way to go and he would not waver.
Ma made the remarks during a press conference at the Presidential Office yesterday morning, one day before the second anniversary of his inauguration.
Acknowledging widespread public concern about his policies, Ma said he did not rule out a dialogue with opposition parties about major government policies because he believed mutual tolerance was imperative to democratic politics.
Ma said his administration never overlooked the military threat posed by China.
“But we cannot shut them out and lose our competitiveness simply because they have missiles targeted at us,” he said.
Once Taipei and Beijing sign the trade deal, Ma said he would immediately establish a Cabinet-level task force to negotiate free-trade agreements (FTA) with other countries and take over as chairperson of the task force.
Negotiations would start with major trading partners, but targeted countries would be prioritized, starting with the easier and necessary ones, he said.
Ma said that since Washington requires the authorization of Congress for an FTA before it can become law, his administration would seek to sign a trade and investment framework agreement with it rather than an FTA.
Such an agreement would be signed in a modular manner, namely dealing with different trades issues through separate agreements.
On his leadership, Ma said that many people criticized him for being “too weak” or “incompetent,” but strong leadership is all about doing what can and must be done.
“Maybe it was because I did not advertise hard enough,” he said.
Responding to Taiwan’s fall in the annual Freedom House ranking of global press freedom, Ma said it had nothing to do with the administration but rather reflected the failings of the media industry itself.
He said the government never interfered or suppressed media operations and would never do so.
Ma attributed public displeasure with his performance and that of his administration to the lack of employment opportunities.
Looking at manners in which his administration could improve its performance, Ma said government agencies needed to work closer and make more effort to promote government policies because it is always more efficient to prevent a crisis from happening than struggling to manage it once it happens.
“We are fully confident about the future,” 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:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching