In a rush to sign the bitterly controversial "Cross-strait Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement" with China by the end of June, President Ma Ying-jeou and leading officials of his Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang) government have launched an intensive campaign to persuade the public about the benefits of the pact with our authoritarian neighbor and downplay its risks.
KMT Premier Wu Den-yih stated yesterday that the opposition Democratic Progressive Party and Taiwan Solidarity Union have been trying to "frighten" the Taiwan people.
The DPP and TSU have indeed warned that the ECFA would accelerate the outflow of Taiwan manufacturing and jobs to the People's Republic of China, affect the jobs of millions of Taiwan citizens, worsen inequalities of wealth and income and of a loss of economic autonomy and even political sovereignty if the pact is signed.
But Wu's charge that such warnings constitute unacceptable "scare" tactics is overwrought.
After all, it should be the responsibility of the government or the ruling party to engage in dialogue with the citizenry the risks as well as the benefits and what the government intends to do to avoid or at least reduce such risks.
Instead, Ma or other senior KMT officials have yet to offer serious replies to fundamental criticisms raised about the ECFA by the opposition, including most of the questions raised by DPP Chairwoman Tsai Ing-wen in her April 25 debate with Ma.
By continuing to insist that the ECFA is "purely economic," Ma and other KMT officials have avoided addressing troubling questions on the impact of the Taiwan-PRC pact on the strategic balance in East Asia, notably the possibility that Beijing may be using the ECFA with Taiwan to force Japan and South Korea to sign FTAs with the PRC.
Moreover, Ma, Wu and other KMT officials and spokespersons have continually engaged in their own form of "scare tactics" and "intimidation" with far greater resources and irresponsibility than the DPP or TSU.
Taiwan is not North Korea
Besides the KMT's own threats that unemployment could soar if the ECFA is not signed, worthy of special mention is Ma's refrain that since Taiwan and North Korea have not signed FTAs with other Asian nations, Taiwan and North Korea therefore "are on the same plane." This comparison is both senseless and demagogic.
Besides being the world's 20th largest trading nation and a major capital exporter, Taiwan's trade relations with the vast majority of the world's nations are absolutely not "marginalized" because Taiwan is a full member of the WTO under the moniker of "Separate Customs Territory of Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen and Matsu" and a party to WTO related accords such as the International Telecommunications Agreement.
As a result, nearly 60 percent of our exports receive tariff free treatment in other WTO member nations, including the PRC.
Moreover, there is simply no basis for a comparison of Taiwan's regional or global trade position or clout with North Korea, which has a wrecked command economy and is not even a WTO member.
Ma's comparison also ignores the political or "soft power" dimension as Taiwan, despite backtracking under the restored rule of the "formerly authoritarian" KMT, is ranked by Freedom House as a "Free" nation, while North Korea, along with the PRC, is at the bottom of the "Not Free" category in civic and political rights.
Nevertheless, it is revealing that Ma has shown little interest in the one arena in which North Korea is decidedly less "marginalized" than Taiwan, namely Pyongyang's status as a full member of the United Nations while Taiwan is completely excluded due to opposition by none other than the PRC itself.
Ma's KMT government has entirely dropped the effort to raise the question of the lack of representation of Taiwan's 23 million people in the U.N. and has failed to make any progress in participating in the activities of U.N. functional organizations on climate change and aeronautics in the face of the PRC's continued boycott.
The touted attendance of "Chinese Taipei" as an observer at the World Health Assembly in May 2009 and May 2010 has been in the humiliating status of a non-governmental organization and at the pleasure of Beijing with no institutional guarantees whatsoever.
In addition, Ma seems blind to the fact that Taiwan's greatest risk of returning to the status of an international pariah lies precisely in the KMT's backtracking on key human rights issues, notably the ending of the five-year tacit moratorium on the implementation of capital punishment.
Ma has also notably failed to respond to concerns that the ECFA will accelerate Taiwan's substantive "peripherialization" by exacerbating our dependence on the China market and by turning Taiwan into a "spoke" in the PRC's economic "hub."
Instead using the spectre of North Korea to stampede the Taiwan people, Ma and the KMT government should act like a responsible government and let the people decide whether we want to gamble our future on the ECFA.
Source: Taiwan News Online - Editorial 2010/06/16
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