“Looming anxiety” about the future of cross-strait relations is having a huge impact on Taiwan’s presidential election campaign, US academic Shelley Rigger told a Washington conference on Wednesday.
“It’s not so much a debate about the details of policy; it’s more a debate about who can handle this,” she said. “President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) policies do better than the candidate himself. It’s not that people don’t like what he is doing, it’s that people are not entirely confident in his leadership.”
The conference entitled “Taiwan’s Upcoming Presidential and Legislative Elections,” organized by the Brookings Institution, was the latest in a series of US events reflecting a growing interest in Taiwanese politics driven by unease over the bigger picture of US-China relations.
Moderator Richard Bush, a senior fellow at Brookings, asked Rigger how the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) could have come back so strongly after being “consigned to the graveyard” just three and a half years ago.
“One thing that has helped the DPP a lot is disillusionment with Ma,” Rigger said. “The expectations that Taiwanese voters had for President Ma were incredibly high. People were excited and thought that he was going to do great things. It’s not so much that he hasn’t delivered on his promises; it’s that as a leader the expectation was that he would be more charismatic and more inspiring.”
Instead, she said, he had been inward looking and aloof.
At the same time, Rigger said, the DPP had benefited from the perception that in a democracy there is a need for a multi-party environment.
However, while the DPP has revived remarkably well, its success is problematic, she said.
“I don’t think the DPP has really dealt with the problems that caused its downfall in 2008. The recovery has been too quick and the same people are back again, and that makes Beijing very uncomfortable,” she said.
Hsu Szu-chien (徐斯儉), an assistant research fellow at the Institute of Political Science at Academia Sinica in Taipei, said he had heard that there was some deep dissatisfaction with Ma in Beijing.
He said Ma had not been doing what hardliners in Beijing expected politically and that Ma had not given as much as he received.
Hsu said that if Ma is re-elected, the pressure on him from Beijing might increase.
Rigger said she was in Shanghai last weekend meeting academics and officials, and their message was crystal clear: “They do not want to see Tsai elected.”
“The focus of their anxiety is her unwillingness to endorse the [so-called] ‘1992 consensus.’ That is going to be a real sticking point if she wins,” Rigger said. “They are going to put pressure on the US to keep this situation under control if she wins and they were very explicit in threatening various kinds of repercussions for Taiwan.”
Among the likely repercussions are that direct quasi-official talks on cross-strait affairs could end; “economic assistance” — ostensibly from China to Taiwan — would be hard to continue; agreements already signed might not be implemented, including the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA); and the international space that Taiwan has been given could be pulled back.
“What the US government genuinely desires is another free and fair election,” Rigger said.
However, it is also true that the last three years of “peace” in the Taiwan Strait had provided the US with the opportunity to focus its attention on other pressing issues.
If Tsai is elected, Rigger added, there is a possibility that the People’s Republic of China would no longer continue that pattern and that “would be unfortunate from the US point of view.”
Bush said that if Tsai won the election, the US would not prejudge her and that any anxieties that might exist could be calmed, based on her performance.
“We would want to see what she did, rather than making a judgement in advance,” he said.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods