As the election crescendo approaches, things are flying into my mailbox thick and fast: first, three more from the Hsieh Campaign:++++++++++++++
Taiwan’s Creative Shift For the KMT, the development of industry was all about information hardware at the expense of support for technological creativity. Factory owners were provided support when buying machinery, but in terms of software development and R&D for, say, integrated circuits (IC), there was little or no support. It is a situation that reveals a fundamental misunderstanding about the importance of knowledge-based R&D in order to establish high-tech industry, and the traditional industries supported by the KMT were precisely those that needed to be supplanted in order for Taiwan to take a leading role on the global stage.
The KMT have no pragmatic strategies for promoting high-tech industry, and while in power pursued a low-wage strategy that resulted in ever-lower added value. In 2000, for example, IT consumer electronics products achieved a value added of 18.2 per cent, lower than the garment industry’s 27 percent and the electronic components industry’s 29.9 percent. Furthermore, in the years leading up to 2000, the KMT presided over an exodus of Taiwanese industry to China, and it occurred at such a fast pace that it came to look like the only choice for Taiwan’s future development. For 10 years this did immeasurable damage to Taiwan’s aspirations to become an Asia-Pacific Operations Centre, and when the DPP came to power in 2000 it had to deal with the consequences.
Nevertheless, since that election, and in particular over the past two or three years, branding and creativity have become media buzzwords. When former Trend Micro CEO Steve Chang and KMT vice-presidential hopeful Vincent Siew discussed Taiwanese international brand names on a popular TV show last year, Siew had much to say on the subject. But Chang’s response revealed the true nature of the KMT’s previous policies. With a polite smile, Chang pointed out that the reason Trend Micro listed in Tokyo and subsequently become an international brand was because the KMT government had made it so difficult for him to list the company in Taiwan.
Chang’s point was that the KMT government of the 1990s only encouraged hardware manufacturers, and was not supportive of creativity and software development. The obstacles extended not only to software companies looking to list, but even made it difficult for software companies to rent space in science parks.
This amounts to a lost opportunity for Taiwan to show its creative flair. When foreign developers came to Taiwan looking to jointly develop the 2G CDMA mobile standard, the KMT government of the time sent them packing and the opportunity went to South Korea. It is only today, under the guidance of the Institute for Information Technology that Taiwan’s industrial R&D and design strengths have finally caught up with global standards.
In short, the KMTs policies and thinking run in the opposite direction to that of the
DPP. The DPP has long advocated a “knowledge economy” that encourages creativity, branding and R&D, and it is that encouragement that has transformed Taiwan into the increasingly dynamic place it is today.
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Yes, the KMT presided over a goddamn bubble in the 90s and they have yet to own up to it.
ReplyDeleteThe DPP drastically reduced the bad loan ratio (mostly left behind by KMT assholes now mainly in China and the US), presided over the transition of many companies from OEM to branded businesses, fixed the capital problems of the then already behind schedule and endangered Taiwan High Speed Rail project and got it completed (one of the big accomplishments of Hsieh BTW), and picked up in the aftermath of SARS and the worldwide tech bubble that burst in 2001.
Siew claims he is no politican, which is so laughable when he studied foreign relations, has experience in various top government posts including Premier, and ran as Lien Chan's VP. Then he claims he knows economics when he presided over the huge outflow from Taiwan to China and the bubble economy of Taiwan's 90s. Then he claims the Greens are trying to paint him as a China-lover with the term "one China market" when in several speeches from 2-4 years ago he is the one using the term "one China market" and concluding that economic unification will lead to/ promote political unification.
The Blues are so slimy this year it's making me sick. At least Lien Chan was clear about what direction he wanted to take the country in. Ma Ying-jeou at every step of Taiwan's democratization was on the wrong side of it, and today with a slick tongue and slick hair, thinks he has the cojones to be president of Taiwan. What in the fucking world...
Whenever Ma went abroad, he talked like a lobbyist hired by the government of china. If you look only at the words, you cannot imagine the statement came from a politician from Taiwan. This pattern is well-demonstrated in the well-known BBC interview. Too bad for Ma, old habits die hard.
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