What’s in an ECFA?
Dear Johnny,
After having read so much but learning so little about the economic cooperation framework agreement (ECFA) between Taiwan and China, I have deduced that the real answers to its mystery lie within its acronym.
So, without more ado, I set out to decipher this Da Vinci Code and came up with these gems — in no particular order.
ECFA:
1. Economically Challenged Fraud Artists
2. Extraordinarily Crafted False Advertising
3. Eunuch Council of Formosan Affairs
4. Emporium for China’s Free-for-All (read: Taiwan)
5. Egregious Chinese Flimflam Agreement
6. Enter China Fomenting Ague
7. Easily Caught Formosa Asleep
8. European Coalition of les Francais et les Anglais (read: beer)
Then there’s the Regular ECFA with three noes, two yesses, one maybe and a no-holds-barred let-me-get-back-to-you should Taiwan not sign the agreement. With this one, put on your sunglasses and say, in Hoklo, “I don’t like the feeling of being a loser.”
Yeah, right: My Google-eyed neighbor across the puddle is pointing all those guns at my productivity, and I’m going to sign a business deal?
Like a true Wind Talker, I changed the order of the acronym and came up with this: FACE — Forego All Chinese Effrontery.
Finally, I had an epiphany. The real answer lies within this abbreviation.
MPFC:
Monty Python’s Formosan (flying, swimming, crawling, swallowing, choking, begging) Circus.
Now I may sleep well.
Kevin Robert Larson
Chiayi
Johnny replies: Didn’t Samuel Beckett write a play called Waiting for ECFA?
I think I might have read this somewhere, but all this ECFA stuff is beginning to resemble a cargo cult, except with the white people and Austronesian natives replaced by the Chinese market/government complex and Taiwanese industry.
We can expect that the thousands and thousands of temples and altars around this fair island will be physically and scripturally modified to accommodate the Chinese FTA Facilitator God, the Suspension of Moral Universe God, the Sage of the Temporary Wealth Spike and the Belated and Ineffectual Nationalism Demon.
Religion is the opiate of the masses? I never thought this aphorism applied much to Taiwanese, because for so many of us, getting attached to the local temple was a stepping stone to something more powerful, something more meaningful, something more educational, or at least something more profitable.
That may now change. Pass the incense and the ECFA pipe, venerable master.
My real problem, however, is that your cheap jokes have upstaged my even cheaper ones that were destined for a future column.
So, to be honest, Kevin, this Expiring Columnist Feels Antipathy.
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