Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) eponymous Ma Ying-jeou Foundation spent NT$5 million (US$159,990) to bring 31 Chinese Communist Party (CCP) students and six accompanying CCP personnel to Taiwan for a nine-day exchange visit, arriving on July 15 and leaving on Sunday.
The delegation can fairly be called a CCP group because the 37 participants were selected by China, with Peking University CCP party secretary Hao Ping (郝平) leading the group and all the student participants being members of the Communist Youth League. This trip was not something that ordinary Chinese students had a fair chance of joining.
It was Ma himself who revealed the main purpose of hosting such a visit to Taiwan. He said that when he led a delegation to China in March and April, his initiative was enthusiastically received by several Chinese universities, so he decided to promote similar exchanges. The return visit was therefore a matter of reciprocal courtesy on Ma’s part, rather than the foundation’s lofty claims that it could improve cross-strait relations and further the cause of peace.
Chinese People’s Liberation Army warplanes and ships did not desist from their usual incursions and harassment around Taiwan while the group was visiting. Meanwhile, the delegation spent most of their time on sightseeing tours, with little time devoted to actual exchanges between students from the two sides.
Ma said the visit was the best possible present for his 73rd birthday. If it made Ma happy, good for him, but the meager results gained from an outlay of NT$5 million might not be so pleasing for the foundation’s donors.
There are many examples of this kind of behavior by the CCP, where it takes it upon itself to approve or reject various kinds of cross-strait arrangements. If the normal exchange of students across the Taiwan Strait is what really matters, the Chinese government should reinstate the practice of allowing ordinary Chinese students to study in Taiwan.
In 2011, Taiwan began allowing mainland Chinese students to apply and take entry tests for national research institutes and private universities in Taiwan (the measures did not include students from Hong Kong and Macau, as they could already do so). In 2014, Taiwan further permitted its national universities to enroll up to five Chinese students each, after which it continued to discuss relaxing relevant regulations.
These measures, which were adopted when Ma was president, did not change when President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) took office in 2016. However, the following year, the authorities of China’s Fujian Province instructed high schools to handle applications to study in Taiwan with caution, on the grounds that cross-strait relations had deteriorated.
Then, in 2020, the Chinese Ministry of Education formally announced that it was suspending applications for Chinese high-school graduates to study in Taiwan. This policy was presented as a control measure against COVID-19, but it has not been reviewed since then.
Instead, the Chinese authorities shifted their focus to recruiting Taiwanese to pursue further studies in China, which continued even during the three years of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this sense, student “exchanges” have all been in one direction.
If Ma thinks the policy of promoting cross-strait student exchanges is his baby, he could have said more about this more substantial aspect. That way, no one would accuse him of doing it for his own satisfaction.
However, it is a different matter to spend NT$5 million of donors’ money to treat a few privileged model students from the Communist Youth League to enjoy a free trip to Taiwan, while the CCP regime excludes the vast majority of Chinese students from visiting the “forbidden zone” that is Taiwan.
Surely, such an exclusive junket does not comply with the Ma Ying-jeou Foundation’s stated aims.
This kind of manipulation is not only true of the education sector, but also of cross-strait tourism in general. The CCP views cross-straits relations as an extension of its autocratic interests, while Taiwanese pursue them for the sake of culture and civilization.
If cross-strait exchanges cannot serve Taiwan’s interests, at least they should not serve those of the CCP.
Tzou Jiing-wen is editor-in-chief of the Chinese-language Liberty Times, the sister paper of the Taipei Times.
Translated by Julian Clegg
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