Throughout his political career, President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) has been able to effortlessly sweep away his enemies and gain quick promotions. After 100 days as president, however, Ma the media darling unexpectedly fell from grace, and his arrogance was replaced by embarrassment. There are more reasons for his dramatic rise and fall than simply public criticism.
As soon as the confident Ma took the helm, he announced a “diplomatic truce” with Beijing, laying diplomatic relations — which require active long-term management — to rest. Promoting diplomacy is like moving against the current; if one doesn’t move forward, one slips back. The cancellation of several proposed plans to connect Taiwan internationally, such as the pro-Taiwan African association and the Austronesian Forum, demonstrate how Taiwan’s diplomacy is being undermined. Ma’s diplomatic truce is clearly becoming another isolationist policy.
In terms of national security, Taiwan has also adopted a passive attitude. It is halting development of the Hsiungfeng 2-E missiles designed to counter China’s missile threat, and is planning to spend tens of billions of NT dollars on a bridge connecting Kinmen and China’s Xiamen, thus opening the nation wide to Beijing and abandoning national security.
Ma has also belittled Taiwan’s position in the cross-strait relationship, replacing former presidents Lee Teng-hui’s (李登輝) “special state-to-state” theory of cross-strait relations and Chen Shui-bian’s (陳水扁) “one country on each side” formulas with his “Chinese Taipei” formula. The international response has been to interpret this as meaning “Taipei, China” and other countries are now viewing Taiwan as part of China, all but stripping Taiwan of national dignity.
Ma plans to spend NT$114.4 billion (US$3.6 billion) on boosting domestic demand. But the rashly passed budget is bloated and wasteful and does not improve social justice and care for disadvantaged groups.
Taiwan’s stock market is bleeding and the real estate market has come to a standstill. Companies are closing, and empty business premises are for rent everywhere. The export monitoring indicator even flashed blue in July for the first time since the SARS outbreak in 2003.
Both international and domestic news is negative. No wonder public confidence in Ma is plummeting. Still, Ma shamelessly calls on the public to follow him faithfully, and if they follow him until 2016, they will see his failed “6-3-3” promise realized.
Perhaps Ma’s plan is to highlight all the bad news as soon as he can, because he still has three-plus years to climb out of the hole. Adding the forgetfulness of Taiwanese voters, credibility becomes less important. Even a “living conscienceless commodity” like Ma can cloud voters’ memory with another round of campaign propaganda, and preposterous slogans such as “Let’s cast our ballots carefully this time” and “Even Martians will vote for him as long as he can fix the economy.” After all, wasn’t that how he covered up his eight years of mediocrity as Taipei mayor?
Still, public patience is limited. As each myth in the Ma pantheon is exposed as fake and his godlike status is exposed to the cruel realities of everyday life, beautiful metaphors or tempting promises will remain empty words unless they are backed up by concrete action.
In his book, Eyewitness to Power: The Essence of Leadership, Nixon to Clinton, which Ma’s team has held up as a model, David Gergen writes that although these former US presidents’ statements are inspiring, they had to be implemented before they were worth anything.
Maybe the members of Ma’s team should reread the book.
Steve Wang is a director of the European Union Study Association.
TRANSLATED BY EDDY CHANG
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