President Ma Ying-jeou displayed to a national television audience yesterday his inability to grasp the fundamentals of democratic politics when he blamed Taiwan's 23 million people for the flap on the question of liberalization of risky beef products from the United States.
Based on a bilateral consensus reached after two months of a filibuster by the DPP caucus, the Legislative Yuan approved without dissent a revision to Article 11 of the Food Sanitation Act that will ban the importation of ground beef, beef offals and other beef parts such as brains, eyes and intestines from any country in which any cases of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (also known as "mad cow disease") have been documented during the previous 10 years.
The revised law would ban such U.S. beef products from access to Taiwan`s market, in apparent contravention of a bilateral beef trade protocol signed last October after months of secret negotiations, that lifted a partial ban on risky U.S. beef goods imports imposed by the previous Democratic Progressive Party government in the wake of documented BSE cases in the United States in 2003.
In a televised news conference held at the Office of the President Tuesday evening, Ma placed responsibility for the reversal on the response by legislators to "the public will" in the wake of the government's inability to relieve concerns among a vast number of Taiwan citizens over the safety of such U.S. beef goods despite "scientific evidence" that all U.S. beef products were "safe."
Ma also stonewalled all questions regarding whom in his administration should take political responsibility for the subsequent damage to U.S.-Taiwan relations.
Instead, the president's list of items that his KMT government needed to "re-examine" was limited to its failure to "dialogue" with the Legislative Yuan and citizens "early enough, transparently enough and well enough."
Propaganda is not dialogue
The president's announcement that his government will formulate a "comprehensive standard operating procedure" for dialogue with the Legislative Yuan and society at large on major policies, bills or international agreements is welcome.
After all, the reason behind the series of policy disputes from U.S. beef to swine influenza vaccinations and the controversial cross-strait economic cooperation framework agreement (ECFA) and Ma's plunging approval and public confidence ratings below 30 percent lies less in the lack of effectiveness of government propaganda but deepening mistrust and intensifying anxiety over the Ma government's habitual "black box" method of decision-making and operation.
However, Ma's concession is unlikely to generate any real improvements if he and other senior KMT officials remain blind to the fact that the problem does not only lie in the lack of effective and early "dialogue" so that the people can be brought to "understand" the reasons for the government's "decisions."
Ma's use of the term "guidance" (宣導) familiar to Taiwan citizens from the authoritarian KMT era shows that he and senior KMT leaders operationally define "dialogue" as top-down propaganda and aim to continue "black box" decision making.
The yawning confidence gap between the Ma administration and the Taiwan citizenry lies precisely in the former's refusal to recognize that citizens in our democratic and pluralist society expect genuine democratic discussion and debate about public policies that is based on mutual respect and equality and that with opposition parties and includes the possibility of the adoption of alternatives.
Instead, Ma's definition of dialogue as "guidance" implicitly declares that the KMT is always right and the people need "earlier and better" guidance to better "appreciate" its paternal will.
Not surprisingly, Ma also failed to appreciate the reason why, backed by public opinion, the DPP insisted that relying on administrative controls on U.S. beef imports was not enough and that a revision in the legal code was necessary.
The reason is quite simply the pervasive lack of trust in the KMT government to maintain such controls unless it is forced to do so by law.
Ironically, the validity of such concerns was confirmed by Ma's order to immediately open Taiwan's market to imports of U.S. "beef in bone" of calves less than 30 months old in defiance of the spirit of the legislative action.
Ma's refusal to even respond to repeated direct questions about whether National Security Council Secretary-General Su Chi should resign to take responsibility for the beef flap signalled that the president has no intention of genuinely changing the secretive method of operation of his government under Su's stewardship.
In light of Ma's evident belief that the Taiwan people bear responsibility, we urge Taiwan voters to take corrective action in early 2012 to reverse the mistake they made in early 2008 in electing him and giving the KMT a three-fourths majority in the Legislative Yuan.
Voters in Taichung, Taitung and Taoyuan Counties have an opportunity to begin this corrective action in legislative by-elections Saturday.
Finally, we urge Taiwan citizens to protest the Ma administration's arrogant decision to "blame the people" and protect their own health by declining to purchase U.S. "beef in bone."
Source: Taiwan News Online - Editorial 2010/01/06
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