President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) once criticized former president Chen Shui-bian’s (陳水扁) push for a national name change, saying Chen ruined the issue by causing a sensation. He was right: Some Taiwanese organizations in the US, such as the Taiwan External Trade Development Council, had already changed their names, but after Chen’s move, Washington blocked any further changes.
Some independence fundamentalists feel that the name change/sovereignty issues are of overriding importance. Focused on politics, they are too impatient to make detailed plans, instead proposing rash, rough-hewn policies. Rather than speeding things up, this slows everything down. Similarly, the pan-blue camp is inflexible in pushing its own economic interests in cross-strait relations: Once again, “haste makes waste.”
Last Friday, Ma said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal that Taiwan should speed up negotiations for fly-beyond rights via China to Europe — a suggestion that was criticized by airlines as rash. The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government pushed something similar in the 1990s, when then-premier Vincent Siew’s (蕭萬長) Cabinet wanted to make Taiwan an offshore transshipment center. However, the half-baked approach resulted in China agreeing to only open smaller ports like Xiamen and Wenzhou for indirect links with Keelung and Kaohsiung, while the five biggest ports remained closed to Taiwan.
In his book Governing by Expertise, Siew describes Kaohsiung harbor’s superior geographical location as an Asia-Pacific transshipment center and how Chinese harbors could ship cargo on small and medium-sized ships to Kaohsiung for transshipment, turning them into Kaohsiung satellite ports.
Siew also said that direct flights would mean Chinese electronics components would be shipped to Taiwan for value-added assembly prior to export. The reality is after the completion of Shanghai’s Yangshan port, cargo that used to be transshipped in Busan, South Korea, is returning to Shanghai, proving how ridiculous it is to view Chinese ports as satellites.
The Asia-Pacific transshipment center idea shows that contrary to popular opinion, the KMT is not always willing to be taken advantage of by China. Instead, it is drafting unrealistic plans on how Taiwan can unilaterally take advantage of China economically while giving in politically. The result is the KMT loses political capital, while the establishment of cross-strait economic order cannot be established.
Ma is right to demand that Taiwanese airlines obtain fly-beyond rights to Europe. He forgets, however, that Taiwan should allow China the same rights to serve the US from Taiwan. Business must be a win-win proposition to succeed.
Sea transportation talks with China are another example of diving into talks without thorough planning. Some politicians and businesses believe that Taiwan should designate cross-strait transportation as a domestic matter to be able to monopolize business and bar foreign carriers. The result would be that Taiwan loses big business to gain a small advantage.
For cross-strait sea and air transportation to benefit both sides of the Taiwan Strait, there must be a global strategy. Ma’s administration thinks that Taiwan’s global interests lie in China alone, and it wants to monopolize cross-strait benefits without trying to understand where China’s interests lie. If the government doesn’t change this approach, cross-strait misunderstandings will only proliferate and nothing will be achieved.
Lin Cho-shui is a former Democratic Progressive Party legislator.
TRANSLATED BY EDDY CHANG AND PERRY SVENSSON
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