Mon, Nov 18, 2002 page8

• Ma's Enron-like flair with figures

  • By Laurence Eyton
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  Two weeks ago I accused Taipei Mayor Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) of trying to steal credit that did not properly belong to him over the Asiaweek survey of Asia's best cities. In my article I thought I had gone into such watertight detail about this Asiaweek business and exactly how Ma was endeavoring to cheat voters in Taipei -- the No. 2 ranking is, after all, point 18 of the 20-something achievements listed in his election manifesto -- that I was shocked when, on Monday, Ma had the effrontery to still try and fight his corner. Come off it, I wanted to shout. You're a liar, I know you're a liar, I can prove you're a liar, why don't you drop it?

  Just for the record then, I thought we might take a quick look at what Ma said last Monday, what the truth really is, and marvel at the distance between them.

  Ma said that his administration had contributed more to the Asiaweek ranking than the previous one of Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁). Ma said that of the statistics cited by Asiaweek, six of them came from the Chen government and eight of them were provided by his administration in September of 1999 after he had been in power for almost year. One other statistic came from the media.

  As a result, the Great Jogger claimed that he was responsible for 53 percent of the Asiaweek's results with the Chen government being responsible for 40 percent.

  Now this claim contains a number of factual inaccuracies and one huge intellectual fraud. We'll take the factual inaccuracies first.

  There were 15 important elements on which figures were provided. Of these, 1998 figures accounted for eight items and Ma provided the remaining seven. So there's lie number one. Ma provided 47 percent of the statistics, not 53 percent.

  Then there is the claim that, by the time the data were provided, Ma had been in power for a almost a year. Ma took office in the last week of 1998, none of the data goes beyond August 1999. Is two-thirds of a year "almost a complete year?" I think not. Lie number two.

  What were these seven items provided by the city gov-ernment? They covered air pollution, traffic density, criminal cases per 10,000 population, inflation, GDP growth, the unemployment rate and phones per 1,000 people.

  Now in all fairness we cannot accuse Ma of outright lying here. What we can accuse him of is the selective manipulation of facts and an economy with truth verging on mendacity. For Ma gave the impression that all these categories showed positive improvement and that Taipei City was responsible for them all.

  Now any reader can see how little Taipei City is responsible for the national unemployment or inflation rates or GDP projec-tions. Movements in these national indices are simply not brought about alone by the Taipei City Government. Sure city policy makes some difference to the capital's viability as a commercial center, which in its turn affects things like GDP growth but the link is obscure. GDP growth will likely rise from 2 percent last year to around 3 percent this year.

  Surely Ma does not expect to take the credit for this -- probably US consumers should take whatever credit is available. Nor, I suppose, does he want to take credit for unemployment in Taipei now being at its highest in decades.

  What in these seven areas is legitimately the business of the city government? I think perhaps crime, pollution, and traffic, the amelioration of which all depends on local rather than central government efforts. In these three areas, the achievement Ma claims is very mixed.

  Comparing 1999's figures with those of the previous year, pollution is down 12 percent, a success, crime is at exactly its 1998 level, and traffic density has actually worsened by 2 percent. So we can see that if credit is due to Ma in those areas which are the legitimate concern of the city government, there isn't much, apart from pollution to give credit for.

  But for Ma to take credit in any area, he owes it to us to tell us exactly what he did and when he did it.

  I do not think that being mayor of Taipei is very much easier than being a British Cabinet minister, and that is a job of which several who have done it say that it takes a year to learn before one can really start making policy. After this, of course, it also takes time for policy to start having an effect. Perhaps Ma's much-touted youth gave him a head start in getting policy planned, budgeted and carried out.

  If so perhaps he would like to tell us exactly what measures he originated and implemented. We would like a list, please, of the date any new policy was approved by the city government, the date the city council approved a budget if one was needed and the date the policy went into effect. Because without a full and complete list of Ma's early triumphs we have to assume that such progress as was made in the first eight months of 1999 was given its impetus in the four years of the preceding Chen administration.

  But let us now address the huge intellectual fraud I talked of above. For on Monday Ma claimed 53 percent of the credit due for Taipei's improvement. That he could do so is because he is deliberately trying to confuse the issues of contributing statistics and contributing to statistics.

  Above, we established that Ma actually only supplied 47 percent of the statistics. But from this he tries to argue that he is responsible for this proportion of the improvement the statistics show.

  To show the stupidity of this let us look at that statistic supplied, he said, by the "media organization." The organization concerned was the United Daily News and the statistic was average commuting time. In 1998 this was 28 minutes. By 1999 (reported in 2000) it had dropped to 24 minutes.

  Does anyone think that the United Daily News was responsible, and could take credit, for this improvement? Of course not. The paper provided the statistics, it played no part in making the practical improvements -- the new or wider roads, the bus lanes, the new MRT lines -- behind them.

  In the same way Ma's claim to be responsible for 47 percent of the improvement shown by the 1999 statistics used by Asiaweek is nonsense. He provided 47 percent of the figures, but he has yet to show, until we see that itemized list of city government actions I talked about above, that he is responsible for anything at all.

  So there's Ma for you -- a cheat, a liar and a fraud. Last Sunday, as reported in this newspaper, DPP mayoral candidate Lee Ying yuan (李應元) suggested that a second debate between him and Ma should tackle the issue of moral integrity. Ma's response: "I am perplexed about why Lee wants to talk about moral integrity during the debate, a matter which I think has no relation to city governance."

  Well, he would say that, wouldn't he.

  Ma might be crooked, however, but he is not stupid. After all, while this debate rages about Asiaweek's 1999 findings, hardly anybody has talked about that magazine's 2000 findings in which Taipei slid to fourth place after a further 12 months of Ma's governance. I still want to see him explain that.

  Laurence Eyton is the managing editor of the Taipei Times. The views expressed in this article are his own.

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