During a speech on Saturday last week at a discussion forum titled “Resume cross-strait air travel: post-pandemic opportunity,” former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) said that the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) had criticized him for being pro-China and “selling out” Taiwan.
Paradoxically, instead of reducing reliance on China, the government had increased Taiwan’s dependence on it, Ma said, adding that Taiwanese exports to China last year reached a historic high. This shows that President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) administration is more pro-China and has “sold out” Taiwan to a greater degree than he had, Ma said.
However, according to a report published last year, relying on trade volume alone is insufficient to demonstrate an increased dependence on China’s economy.
In a Jan. 4 article in the Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister paper), I showed that Taiwan’s record exports to China was a side effect of US restrictions on the export of technology to China and supply chains relocating as a result of the trade dispute. China has been forced to purchase large quantities of semiconductor and electronic components from Taiwan.
In other words, far from demonstrating Taiwan’s increased reliance on China, last year’s record exports showed that China needs Taiwan. Data released by the Ministry of Economic Affairs has also poured cold water on Ma’s claim, pointing out that the whole world relies on Taiwanese chips.
Ma also said that the US and European countries are increasingly concerned that a conflict between China and Taiwan could break out within the next six years. Ma sought to pin the blame for this entirely on the shoulders of Tsai, and called on her to return to the so-called “1992 consensus” so that dialogue between Taipei and Beijing could resume.
Ma appears to have forgotten that during his tenure as Mainland Affairs Council deputy minister, he wrote an article for the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) official newspaper Central Daily News, published on Nov. 6, 1992, which contained the following frank admission: “China’s Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits (ARATS) is well aware that both sides have different formulations for ‘one China’ and that there is no convergence. Despite this, Beijing constantly puts it about that both sides have reached a consensus.”
Ma’s “one China, each side with its own interpretation” formula, which enjoys a sacred status within the KMT, was dashed by former ARATS vice chairman Tang Shubei (唐樹備) when he in 1998 said that the “Taiwan side’s so-called one China formula is unconnected to reality.”
If that were not conclusive enough, Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) hammered the final nail in the coffin in a speech on Jan. 2 last year to mark the 40th anniversary of China’s “Message to Compatriots in Taiwan.”
Xi in his “five points” proposed to create a “Taiwanese version of the one country, two systems framework.”
This included a redefinition of the “1992 consensus” to mean that “both sides of the Strait belong to one China and will work jointly to seek national unification on the ‘one China’ principle.”
Not only is there no consensus over the “consensus,” Xi has redefined the mythical meeting of minds as a manifesto for unification with China.
It is utterly baffling why Ma continues to parrot China’s Taiwan Affairs Office propaganda, cherry-pick economic data and distort the truth about the “1992 consensus.”
Why does a former president persist in coordinating with Beijing to sow confusion among the public?
Liou Je-wei is a student at National Taiwan University’s Graduate Institute of Political Science.
Translated by Edward Jones
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