China’s desire to annex Taiwan is an inarguable fact and Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲), who participated in the Sunflower movement in 2014, must be fully aware of this, too.
However, whenever people express opposition to Beijing’s “united front” work, Ko often challenges them by saying things like: “Why don’t you call to abolish the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement [ECFA] signed between Taiwan and China in 2010?”
By saying that, the mayor is essentially helping China to emotionally blackmail Taiwan.
I would like to ask him: Most countries around the world have signed economic cooperation agreements with each other, but among the democratic nations, do they “use business to pressure politics” as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) does?
Take the annual Taipei-Shanghai twin-city forum for example. According to media reports, despite a Taipei City Council proviso to freeze the budget for the forum if CCP warplanes and warships continued to disturb Taiwan, Ko still held the event as usual in the face of the Chinese military threat.
During an interview not long ago, former minister of health and welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中), the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) Taipei mayoral candidate, challenged Ko for “having tea with a hoodlum who wanders around in front of his home.”
Ko responded by saying that, by Chen’s logic, President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) should perhaps take the initiative to abolish the ECFA and to demand that all Taiwanese businesspeople in China move back to Taiwan, or she might be suspected of “funding the communists.”
Using business to pressure politics has always been part of the CCP’s “united front” effort. The proposed cross-strait service trade agreement that would have allowed the Chinese service industry to operate in Taiwan under the ECFA led to the Sunflower movement, which not only changed Taiwan’s history, but also blocked collusion between the CCP and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT).
However, before the movement, many Taiwanese businesses were encouraged by the KMT to “go west” to China. They fell into the trap set by then-president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), who proposed “no unification, no independence, no war” on the surface, but did not completely exclude unification. To ask those opposing Chinese aggression to abolish the ECFA is simply a “misplacement of responsibility,” disregarding the rights of Taiwanese businesspeople in China.
Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, countries have relocated supply chains from China one after another. Taiwanese businesspeople must have sensed this trend by now. Meanwhile, the government has offered incentives to encourage Taiwanese businesspeople to return home.
Did Ko not watch the news? Obviously, his response was designed to shift the focus away from him. What people questioned was why he held the forum in the face of the CCP’s military threat.
Linking challenges to abolishment of the ECFA is to give an irrelevant answer to the question.
Due to China’s economic downturn and high unemployment, countless Chinese rely on Taiwanese factories to make a living, and the argument that “China needs Taiwan” is not groundless.
It is recommended that supporters of the pan-blue and white camps search for a Chinese news report — “Never, ever let [Taiwanese tycoon] Terry Gou (郭台銘) run away, because the significance of Taiwan is beyond your imagination” (絕對，不能讓郭台銘跑了！台灣的重要你無法想像).
Ko should stop helping the CCP emotionally blackmail Taiwan by threatening to abolish the ECFA.
Pan Kuan was a participant in the Sunflower movement.
Translated by Eddy Chang
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