A Wall Street Journal (WSJ) editorial last week suggesting that Taiwan may suffer economically if it does not further lift trade barriers to China by ratifying the cross-strait service trade agreement has triggered a debate among political analysts that is being played out in media, including this newspaper.
The WSJ editorial, titled “Taiwan Leaves Itself Behind,” said that if ratification of the service trade pact signed last year with China continues to be delayed, Taiwan may lose its competitiveness in the Chinese market, especially after South Korea finalizes a free-trade agreement with Beijing later this year. It also warned that China might boycott Taiwan’s participation in regional economic blocs, leaving Taiwan further isolated.
President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) drew renewed attention to the editorial when he referred to it during a press conference on Monday as he called for ratification of the agreement.
In a letter to the editor published by the WSJ on Tuesday, Taiwan Brain Trust chairman Wu Rong-i (吳榮義) said the WSJ editorial overlooked a key fact: China is a country with hostile intent toward Taiwan.
“Not only does it threaten Taiwan with 2,000 missiles, it also blocks Taiwan’s participation in the international community and asserts that it would not hesitate to use force to annex it,” Wu wrote.
Taiwan has concentrated 80 percent of its foreign investment and 40 percent of its exports in the Chinese market, and the great majority of Taiwanese are concerned that this high level of dependence on China could trigger a national security crisis, he wrote.
Wu said that 500,000 people protested in Taipei during the Sunflower movement’s occupation of the Legislative Yuan’s main chamber in March and April because Ma has substantially eased restrictions on trade with China and signed the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) with Beijing.
Taiwan and China are both members of the WTO, yet not only is China unwilling to treat Taiwan as an equal member of that organization, it also obstructs the signing of regional trade agreements between Taiwan and other member states, Wu said.
Unless China promises post-ECFA not to block Taiwan’s free-trade agreements with its major trading partners, Taiwan signing the service trade agreement will only deepen its dependence on trade with China and risk plunging Taiwan into an abyss, he added.
Wu rebutted the arguments made in the WSJ editorial that Taiwan has refused to open up its economy.
“Taiwan is a highly open economy and ranks 17th in the world in terms of trade volume. According to the WTO, Taiwan’s trade-weighted average tariff rate in 2011 was a mere 1.8%, compared with Japan’s 2.2%, the United States’ 2.1%, the European Union’s 2.7%, China’s 4.1% and South Korea’s 6.8%,” he wrote.
Meanwhile, an article published yesterday in the online current affairs magazine The Diplomat, titled “Don’t Let Taiwan Fall Behind, but At What Cost” by J. Michael Cole, editor-in chief of the Thinking Taiwan Web site (and former deputy news editor of the Taipei Times), pointed out a problem with the WSJ editorial was that “it treats relations between Taiwan and China as if those were between two equals that recognize each other’s existence.”
The service trade agreement and other cross-strait agreements have been stalled not because of opposition to free trade, “but rather because of the political ramifications of deals agreed upon between asymmetrical powers, the larger of which does not recognize the existence of Taiwan and is keen to use all the tools at its disposal to undermine a political system that it regards as anathema to the Chinese paradigm,” Cole said.
Gerrit van der Wees, editor of Washington-based Taiwan Communique, in an opinion piece in this newspaper on Monday, said that the WSJ editorial overlooks the fact that China “sees the pact as a step in the direction of ‘unification,’” and warned that “the pact would pull the nation closer into an unwelcome embrace with China, as well as restrict the country’s international space even further” (“China is only holding Taiwan back,” page 8).
Van der Wees’ article prompted a letter to the editor from Executive Yuan spokesperson Sun Lih-chyun (孫立群) that was published yesterday, in which he wrote that the “steady development of cross-strait trade relations is the key to preserving — rather than undermining — Taiwan’s economic and political autonomy” (Letter, page 8).
The service trade agreement is only part of Taiwan’s strategy in regional integration, Sun said.
Additional reporting by staff writer
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