Premier Jiang Yi-huah (江宜樺) and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Lee Chun-yi (李俊俋) yesterday accused each other of distorting facts during a heated debate in the legislature about the impact of the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) and the proposed service trade agreement.
During a 30-minute question-and-answer session, Lee said that President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) administration had exaggerated the positive impact of the ECFA and had misinterpreted the meaning of free trade by “putting all the eggs in China’s basket.”
While Ma had pledged before the ECFA was signed that it would boost the nation’s GDP, average wage and foreign investment, and that Taiwanese businesspeople would benefit from much lower tariffs, government statistics suggested otherwise, Lee said.
“Most importantly, Ma said the ECFA would pave the way for more free-trade agreements, but so far Taiwan was only able to ink an FTA with New Zealand. The [former] DPP administration was able to sign several FTAs without making concessions to Beijing,” Lee said.
Ma made the same mistakes in negotiating the service trade agreement, with the public questioning the opaqueness of the discussions and the imbalance in market access, the lawmaker said.
China did not offer a full opening of its retail, e-commerce and banking industries, while Taiwan has agreed to liberalize those sectors without restrictions, he said.
Jiang said Lee and the DPP had politicized the service trade pact and tried to make it a vote of confidence against the government, adding that the numbers the DPP had provided were mostly incorrect.
The positive impact of the ECFA has been limited because it was a framework agreement and follow-up deals, such as the service trade pact, have not been implemented, the premier said.
He denied that the government has only focused on China in its pursuit of free trade, saying “there will be more FTAs to be signed.”
Jiang said that trade ties with China are “neither state-to-state trade relations nor domestic trade relations... They are special relations as stipulated in the Constitution.”
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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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