Earlier this week, it came to light that pressure from China, and a serious dereliction of duty on the part of certain officials, had allowed the official titles of members of Taiwan's Permanent Mission to the WTO, with the exception of the representative and his deputy, to be excluded from this year's WTO directory published in June by the WTO secretariat. This was a serious slight to Taiwan's national dignity, and sparked angry calls for the officials responsible to be punished.
Of course, this is not the first time in recent years that Taiwan has suffered embarrassment as a result of China's efforts. When APEC was formed in 1989, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government made a promise behind closed doors to the APEC secretariat that Taiwan would not send its national leader to attend the annual summits, but delegate a special envoy instead. The KMT also promised that the high-level Taiwanese officials that did attend would be economic officials, and the Minister of Foreign Affairs, whose status would imply Taiwan's national sovereignty, would stay away.
Faced with such demeaning conditions, Taiwanese officials at the time did not present arguments to defend Taiwan's interests, and instead bowed before international pressure and compromised for all they were worth. Afterwards, they did all they could to hoodwink the government, media and the general public by saying that seeking an opportunity to "participate" is all that matters.
Thus, the status of our representative at the annual APEC summit is always lower than that of other participants, inferior even to that of the Palestine Liberation Organization and other groups. In the end, Taiwan will never be given the opportunity to host an APEC summit. What is perplexing is that not only were the officials involved in making this shameful compromise not punished, but one of them even rose to become premier. It seems that little has changed since the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) came to power. The DPP has not taken issue with past foreign affairs policies, nor taken action to improve matters. Instead, muddleheaded officials maintain the old, erroneous diplomatic policy and continue to dupe the public. Their attitude has resulted in the recent scandal over the WTO directory.
Chang Jung-feng (
If the DPP administration takes such a lax attitude toward negligent officials, then who knows how many more incidents in which Taiwan's national dignity is sacrificed there will be? It is therefore imperative that those who shied away from doing their duty regarding the WTO directory be held accountable and sacked.
The DPP has always proved very able at criticizing the incompetence of the former KMT administration, but having been in government for five years now, it has proved unable to learn from the mistakes of the former regime, and has allowed the "diplomatic virus" to infect the foreign-affairs decisionmaking mechanism. The stupidity of such negligence cannot but cause disappointment. Those able to win elections are not always able to govern; let us hope that this isn't the situation with the DPP administration.
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