The government has “underestimated” the concerns the public has over the possible negative impacts the cross-strait service trade agreement might have on the country, Executive Yuan spokesperson Sun Lih-chyun (孫立群) said yesterday.
Sun said the government had failed to see “the nature of the issues” behind the opposition to the pact that culminated in the student-led Sunflower movement.
The main factor that drove students to join the protest was “a sense of fear,” Sun said at a briefing with foreign correspondents about the issue yesterday.
Photo: Liu Hsin-de, Taipei Times
“Up to the present, we thought that the students might be afraid of mainland China or they might be worried about their own future. There was a sense of fear at play here and we didn’t anticipate from the outset,” he said.
Sun said the students have already developed “preconceived ideas” about the pact from research findings conducted by some academics.
However, Sun said that the government found that a lot of academic analysis presented in a variety of simplified “service trade agreement for dummies,” or “lazybone’s packs” (懶人包)” was “terribly wrong.”
Sun accused certain media outlets of conveying “fallacies” to the public, singling out the Chinese-language Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister paper).
“When the fallacies have been ingrained in people’s minds as fact, it’s difficult to turn them around by telling them that the agreement is not what they think,” he said.
Not only did the government fail to make the public understand the agreement clearly and timely, its efforts to get its information about the pact widely available on the Internet in a way that would be attractive to young audiences have proved ineffectual, he said.
The government turned mostly to traditional media outlets and seminars to explain its stance on issues surrounding the pact, but those had limited effect, Sun said.
“In terms of communication with people about the cross-strait service trade agreement, we needed to conduct a thorough review,” he said.
Sun said the government must develop its ability to effectively communicate with people because it proved incapable of accessing a platform where it can engage with young people when they misunderstand the government’s policy.
“This was not the last time. We will encounter the same situation in the future if faulty communication with the public remains a problem,” Sun 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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