Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

It is two years into the reign of Ma the Incompetent and it appears that the one-trick pony is getting desperate to defend his ECFA efforts and drag Taiwan into economic dependency on the People's Republic of China (PRC). The latest effort of Ma and his combination hired gun/snake oil salesman King Pu-tsung are expensive TV ads saying how the country will totally lose its competitiveness if it does not give the government a blank check to sign ECFA. Allegedly if the people don't sign this blank check by June, it is all over for Taiwan. Can you believe such absurdities?

Although widely seen as leaning strongly toward President Ma Ying-jeou's rightist Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang) government, the vernacular "China Times" tossed a spanner into Ma's push to secure rapid signing of a bitterly controversial "Cross-Strait Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement" with the authoritarian People's Republic of China.

An opinion poll of 802 persons on March 22 published in the China Times Tuesday showed that while nearly 74 percent of those polled knew about the ECFA talks, nearly 70 percent still said they do not feel familiar with its contents after nearly two years of high-profile government propaganda and social debate and a similar poll of 1,105 Taiwan citiznes surveyed by the DPP's Public Survey Center showed that 78 percent said the KMT government has not clearly explained the content and influence of the proposed ECFA.