Viagra: A truly wonderful invention. Men think it’s great, but in the US at least it comes with a health warning. It’s not for those, apparently, with a dodgy ticker. The warning is a prudent idea and is supported statistically. Nevertheless, it is good of the pharmaceutical firms in the US to point this out, even if the warning is actually a legal, and not purely a moral, requirement. It’s certainly a lot more up front than the advert you get in Taiwan that makes the drug out to be some kind of pharmaceutical panacea.
President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) administration is not particularly well-known for being up front about things. Ma has been doing his best to push the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA), like any good peddler should. There was that crazy reference to it being some kind of “elaborately designed vitamin” and the promise of entering a “golden decade” if Taiwan swallowed it. “Guaranteed,” Vice President Vincent Siew (蕭萬長) was quoted as saying.
They have really tried to focus on China’s rapid economic growth and the fact that Taiwan will be exempt from tariffs on certain products. While you expect drug dealers to try anything to seal a deal, this kind of behavior is unbecoming of a government trying to convince its citizens to come round to their point of view.
That Ma brought in Japanese business guru Kenichi Ohmae to lend credibility to his case just goes to show how low he can go. And Ohmae does know how to sell. Armed with a superficial grasp of the facts and a wonderfully creative use of statistics, he wowed the crowd by bigging up China’s economic growth record. He certainly didn’t do it with the accuracy of his predictions.
Both the host pushing the ECFA and his sidekick were gushing about how well China’s economy is doing right now, even as China itself is anxious about the sustainability of its growth. The export-trade model is starting to show its limitations and Beijing is now having to look to domestic demand. Furthermore, wages are going up. No wonder some Chinese academics are warning the Taiwanese not to have too high an expectation from the ECFA.
Before, Ohmae had encouraged people from other countries to invest in China and see it as the world’s factory, but he is already aware that the days of Taiwan relying on cheap Chinese labor to manufacture goods for export are all but gone. Now he sings a tune much like that of the government, that Taiwan must now compete in the service sector with places like Hong Kong and Singapore. He is not taking into account, though, that Hong Kong’s manufacturing base is not in dire straits nor that Taiwan has a population of 23 million.
Ma and Ohmae are trying to convince us that Taiwan has nothing to worry about in terms of economic reliance on China, as this is something countries all over the world are dealing with in the new economic reality. We’ve heard this line before. The counter-argument remains the same, which is this: No other country in the world has to deal with the fact that China wants to take it over, and has consistently voiced this intention. The other point is that Taiwan relies on China to a far greater degree than any other country. Ma will have you believe that this is nothing to be concerned about, but this is just more proof that he is quite happy to see China swallow Taiwan up.
So let’s go with Ohmae’s vitamin metaphor for a bit: Vitamins are not a substitute for food, they are just supplements. Siew was quoted in the press as saying, quite astonishingly, that the ECFA will rejuvenate Taiwan’s economy. The journalist must have misheard him.
James Wang is a media commentator.
TRANSLATED BY PAUL COOPER
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