I posted some TVBS polls on the Feb By-elections a couple of posts below and a friend suggested I take a look at TVBS polls (poll center) from the Dec 5 county/city elections to get a sense of how accurate the TVBS polls are. Each number means the percent by which the KMT is ahead of the DPP in the poll (ex: +5 = KMT ahead by 5%). Outcomes are from CEC data (PDF). All the polls were of likely voters. The elections are all county elections.
Read the whole thing, but Jerome Cohen has done the island another service in publicizing the proposed Ministry of Justice curbs on defense lawyers. It compares Taiwan to the PRC, savage in its civility. Read closely and carefully.....By contrast, the Taiwan government’s new interest in curbing vigorous defense lawyers does constitute “news”. Although Taiwan’s president Ma Ying-Jeou recently took the occasion of the island’s Law Day to call for greater government efforts to promote judicial reform and human rights, his Ministry of Justice (MOJ) has been moving in the opposite direction.The Ministry of Justice's response in Chinese is here. Note how the Chen case is being used as leverage against defense lawyers, once again providing evidence that the Chen case is all about politics. But seriously Dr. Cohen, what did you guys expect when you helped lever Ma into power?
Last year, the Ministry, concerned about the conduct of ex-president Chen Shui-Bian’s defense lawyers in its ongoing corruption prosecutions against him, failed in its efforts to impose disciplinary sanctions against one of Chen’s lawyers for supposed ethical violations. Now it is trying to introduce legislation to punish “obstructions of justice” that will inevitably restrict defense lawyers’ activities.
The MOJ has proposed to amend the criminal code in several ways that threaten the modified adversarial legal system that Taiwan adopted a decade ago. Instead of supporting the equal contest between prosecutors and defense lawyers on which that system is based, the MOJ proposals, reflecting traditional Chinese distrust of defense lawyers, would subject Taiwan’s lawyers to some of the same dangers confronted by their counterparts in China, including significant prison time.
One amendment would punish anyone, including lawyers, for abetting defendants or others to “fabricate, alter, destroy or conceal” important evidence in criminal cases, even when their advice has been ignored and caused no harm! Further, it would punish anyone for abetting defendants to make false statements concerning important facts in trial or investigation. Thus, if a court rejects the defendant’s claim that his pre-trial confession was coerced by police, his lawyers might be prosecuted for having urged him to repudiate the confession. This “Sword of Damocles” hangs over Mainland lawyers, sometimes intimidating them from giving such advice, despite the prevalence of pre-trial torture.
Equally troublesome is the proposal to punish “illegitimate use” of important evidence outside of court. But what use is “illegitimate” and what evidence is “important”? The MOJ has stated that the provision is meant, among other things, to prevent documents from public trials being revealed at press conferences. Yet this would prevent freedom of speech and information essential to monitoring of the judicial process by the media and the people. Such restrictions, to the extent they exist in other democratic societies, are generally justified by the need to protect jury deliberations against media pressures, but Taiwan has no juries.
Even more problematic is the proposal to punish lawyers not only for contempt of court but also for contempt of prosecutors! Legal systems require effective and fair procedures for punishing refusal to heed reasonable court orders. But, in a system where lawyers and prosecutors are supposed to be equal competitors in their efforts to persuade a neutral judge, it is ludicrous to punish lawyers for failing to obey prosecutors.
An awful day as the Supreme Court decides to turn US politics over to corporations, delivering a devastating blow to US democracy. There's not much that you can say about the obvious insanity of such a decision. So how about some light news? This story out of Costa Rica:The Chinese government said Thursday that a Costa Rican presidential candidate’s pledge to name a Chinese-financed stadium in San Jose for the Dalai Lama “is not in line with the common desires of the two countries.”The candidate is trailing in the polls....
In a statement sent to Efe, the Foreign Ministry said the stadium, built with $83 million in Chinese investment, “represents the Chinese people’s friendship with Costa Ricans” and is a project that has been “well received by the people of Costa Rica.”
The ministry was responding to statements by Otton Solis, leader of the center-left Citizen Action Party, to the effect that he would name the stadium after the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader to show Costa Rica’s lack of dependence on “economic aid.”
From the Blue papers via KNN:The Legislative Yuan passed legislation yesterday on the government restructuring plan before the current period of sessions adjourned last night. According to the legislation, the existing thirty-seven ministries and cabinet-level commissions will be reduced to twenty-nine, including fourteen ministries, eight commissions, three independent agencies, and four other institutions, with a total of ten existing cabinet-level agencies being merged (see table below). The new structure of the Cabinet will be implemented on January 1, 2012. Likewise, the total number of personnel employed by the Central Government agencies would be reduced to below 173,000, from the current 220,000.Although it looks like there are going to be cuts in employment, a wise friend told me that it isn't actually going to work out that way. The KNN piece has a table that lists the new government structure.
The government restructuring plan involves amendments to the Executive Yuan Organic Act and the Central Government Agencies Organic Act as well as the newly enacted Central Government Personnel Complement Act and the Temporary Statute Governing Adjustments of the Executive Yuan’s Organization, Functions and Services.
First, the TVBS poll (KNN):
From the land of I-Kid-You-Not comes this story of Kowtowing to Beijing on the part of our intelligence community. Sing to the tune of Kumbaya, please:The White House National Security Council recently directed U.S. spy agencies to lower the priority placed on intelligence collection for China, amid opposition to the policy change from senior intelligence leaders who feared it would hamper efforts to obtain secrets about Beijing's military and its cyber-attacks.And why are they doing this? Rational reasons like budget, resources, even more urgent needs? Nope:
The downgrading of intelligence gathering on China was challenged by Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair and CIA Director Leon E. Panetta after it was first proposed in interagency memorandums in October, current and former intelligence officials said.
The decision downgrades China from "Priority 1" status, alongside Iran and North Korea, to "Priority 2," which covers specific events such as the humanitarian crisis after the Haitian earthquake or tensions between India and Pakistan.
But administration officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the new policy is part of the Obama administration's larger effort to develop a more cooperative relationship with Beijing.Hahahahahahahahahahahaha! [sputter, choke]. Hahahahahahaha. [drinks water]. Hahahahahahaha!
This month in Foreign Affairs, put out by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), Bruce Gilley published an article entitled "Not So Dire Straits: How the Finlandization of Taiwan Benefits US Security". It adds to the sum total of our understanding about Taiwan's security position the way a deformed child increases population growth. As a friend of mine pithily commented:I just can't figure out why these presumably smart people have so much trouble wrapping their minds around something I easily figured out as a 24yo. teaching bum.That pretty much sums it up. This will be a long post, so brace yourselves.
However, once every so often an academic publishes an analysis that is so far removed from reality that it would be dismissed out of hand for its lack of understanding and its outright naivete. Bruce Gilley’s article, titled “Not So Dire Straits” — published in the latest edition of Foreign Affairs (January/February 2010) — is such a work.The one-sentence abstract of the piece at FA signals Gilley's entire approach:
As Taipei drifts further into Beijing’s sphere of influence, the United States must decide whether to continue arming Taiwan as a bulwark against a rising China or step back to allow the Taiwanese people to determine their own future.Note how this simple idea stands reality on its head: continued US support for Taiwan is what enables the islanders to determine their future. As soon as the US "steps back" Beijing will step in and terminate any ability of the Taiwanese to determine their own future. Thus, Gilley's essay succeeds not by logic, but by constructing a fantasy world from which he carefully removes anything that might threaten to shake the foundations of his alternate universe. Without further ado.....
Gilley begins by laying out his thesis:In many ways, the current thaw serves Taipei’s interests, but it also allows Beijing to assert increasing influence over Taiwan. As a consensus emerges in Taiwan on establishing closer relations with China, the thaw is calling into question the United States’ deeply ambiguous policy, which is supposed to serve both Taiwan’s interests (by allowing it to retain its autonomy) and the United States’ own (by guarding against an expansionist China). Washington now faces a stark choice: continue pursuing a militarized realist approach—using Taiwan to balance the power of a rising China— or follow an alternative liberal logic that seeks to promote long-term peace through closer economic, social, and political ties between Taiwan and China.I've bolded the more interesting parts of this. Note how Gilley ignores what the people of Taiwan actually want: by "closer ties with China" the people of Taiwan want economic ties, not political ties. Gilley then offers us a false dichotomy: our choice is between a "militarized realist approach" or "long-term peace" through closer links. A stark choice between militarism or peace! Given that, who would want militarized realism? Pure rhetoric of course -- there are many possible ways to engage China. One could think, for example, of the DPP's carefully limited approach, which emphasized Taiwan's sovereignty and pursued economic advantage, as an alternative. But that would take us far from the fantasy world that Gilley is busy constructing...
For nearly three decades, Chiang and Mao harbored rival claims to the whole territory of China. Gradually, most of the international community came to accept Beijing’s claims to territorial sovereignty over Taiwan and a special role in its foreign relations.As any informed individual knows, the international community has not accepted this. This is an error that the editor should have caught. In this reality, the Powers mostly acknowledge China's claim without accepting it, and the status of Taiwan remains undetermined under both law and practice. That is the position of the US and Japan, to name only two. But of course, the reader will search in vain for Japan in this piece; it occurs only once. More on that in a moment.
Gilley next presents a review of the history of the China-Taiwan relationship through the 1980s, and observes:This “first détente” ended abruptly in 1995, when the United States issued a visa for Lee to visit Cornell University. China, in the midst of a domestic leadership transition, was already hardening its position on Taiwan, and armchair generals in all three places were publishing books on the predicted order of battle to come. Beijing saw the visa as a betrayal of earlier U.S. promises to refrain from any o/cial relations with Taiwanese leaders. Taiwan’s democratization was also leading to domestic popular pressures for a more assertive stance on independence.This is a remarkable uninformed and slanted presentation. First, note its entire pro-Beijing positioning. The tensions in the Strait are not caused by Beijing's desire to annex Taiwan and snuff out its democratic government -- they are caused by (1) the US grant of a visa to Lee Teng-hui and (2) the election of Chen Shui-bian. Poor Beijing! So put upon -- its worst fears realized! No wonder it had to fire missiles into the Taiwan Strait.
Beijing reacted by hurling missiles into the Taiwan Strait in 1995 and 1996. Washington dispatched aircraft carriers and radar ships to the area. Beijing’s worst fears were then realized in 2000, when Taiwanese citizens elected Chen Shui-bian as their president. Chen, the leader of the Democratic Progressive Party (dpp), now the opposition, promised to seek formal recognition of Taiwan’s de facto independence from China. As a consequence, cross-strait relations deteriorated dramatically between 1995 and 2005, leading to a renewed emphasis on militarization by all three sides.
The “second détente” in cross-strait relations began with a 2005 speech by Chinese President Hu Jintao downplaying demands for reunification. Beijing was shifting its view as a result of an emerging grand strategy that stressed regional and global influence; accordingly, it came to see Taiwan less as an ideologically charged and urgent matter and more as a pragmatic and low-key management issue. Ma’s election in 2008 signaled the resurgence of a similar vision in Taiwan. He promised “no unification, no independence, no use of force.” Within months, in rapid and unprecedented fashion, the heads of the contact groups began holding semiannual meetings and signed more than two dozen previously unthinkable agreements. Although most of these involved economic matters, they had political implications, too. The number of Chinese tourists visiting Taiwan—including Taiwan’s long-militarized islands directly off the coast of China—surged by a factor of ten, to 3,000 per day. China sent students to Taiwan, and the two sides authorized 270 flights per week across the strait.An error-studded fantasy construction. Ma's promised during the campaign to pursue economic closeness and to protect Taiwan's sovereignty. The public mandate was for economic talks, which is why, even today, Ma -- knowing this -- regularly claims that the time is not right for political talks. "Two dozen previously unthinkable agreements"? As anyone who follows Taiwan knows, what the KMT did was ink deals in areas already laid out by the DPP, plucking the "low hanging fruit", as several commentators noted at the time (Shriver, for example). There are not 3,000 tourists a day here, the figure is about half that ("the actual volume of PRC travellers averaged only 1,307 from December 2008 through September 2009" -- Taiwan News). While Gilley says tourist arrivals in Kinmen "surged", Kinmen opened in 2003 (another example of the "deteriorating relations" under Chen) and as Reuters observed, were hitting 3,000 a month by 2007, the year before Ma was elected. Student exchanges were occurring years ago; there were students from Shanghai and Beijing in my PHD classes at NCKU during the Chen Administration. The 270 flights did not include something the DPP long struggled for: the so-called "fifth freedom." The KMT was able to ink these deals because it sold out the island's interests in exchange for quick agreements, something the DPP would never do. Gilley's fantasy world naturally elides all that; it would dent his thesis. Besides, everyone knows how hard it is to use Google to find out this stuff -- heck, it took me three or four minutes....
There isn't space to go over the slant in the remainder of this section of the presentation. It ends:Taiwan and China are now approaching their relationship using completely different assumptions than those that governed cross-strait relations for decades. Whereas they previously saw the relationship as a military dispute, today both sides have embraced a view of security that is premised on high-level contact, trust, and reduced threats of force. Their views of economic issues, meanwhile, have placed global integration and competitiveness ahead of nationalist protectionism. This represents a fundamental shift in the political relationship between Taiwan and China.Did the CCP and the KMT see the cross-strait dispute as a military issue? No, they saw it as a clash of competing sovereignties. Have both sides embraced a view that is premised on "reduced threats of force"? China has been constantly increasing the number of missiles facing Taiwan, and building up its navy and armed forces to attack the island, as Richard Bush noted with puzzlement in a recent piece. The threats of force may not be emanating from the top, but it would be easy to find underlings making threats or reiterating the PRC's hardline position. Gilley naturally ignores all that complexity. It should also be noted that the phrase "both sides" coupled with "reduced threat of force" creates a bizarre world in which Taipei, laughably, threatens Beijing.
To understand the evolution of the Taipei-Beijing relationship, it is useful to consider the theory and practice of what has become known as “Finlandization” in the field of political science. The term derives its name from Finland’s 1948 agreement with the Soviet Union under which Helsinki agreed not to join alliances challenging Moscow or serve as a base for any country challenging Soviet interests. In return, the Kremlin agreed to uphold Finnish autonomy and respect Finland’s democratic system.After explaining some of the underlying theory, Gilley writes:
Taiwan shares many of the key features that characterized Finland in the late 1940s. It is a small but internally sovereign state that is geographically close to a superpower with which it shares cultural and historical ties. Its fierce sense of independence is balanced by a pragmatic sense of the need to accommodate that superpower’s vital interests. Most important, the evolving views of its leaders and its people today focus on seeking security through integration rather than confrontation. This approach could help defuse one of the most worrying trends in global politics: the emerging rivalry between China and the United States."The analogy is not perfect." Actually it is, as the opening abstract suggested, completely upside down. Finland Finlandized to preserve its sovereignty. Taiwan cannot preserve its sovereignty by moving closer to China; only by maintaining distance. My friend Feiren neatly laid out the problems:
The analogy is not perfect. U.S. security guarantees for Taiwan today are more explicit than they were for Finland during the Cold War, although few doubt that nato would have defended Finland against a Soviet invasion. And China’s 1,000-plus missiles targeted at Taiwan are a more direct threat than anything the Soviet military ever mustered across the Vuoksi River. But in general the thinking that has motivated the second détente on both sides parallels that which led to the Finnish-Soviet détente of the Cold War. Although it is still early, Taipei is moving in the direction of eventual Finlandization.
.....Gilley also doesn't seem to understand how deeply out of touch Ma is with mainstream Taiwanese views of identity and the possibility of unification with China.Gilley's understanding is upside down and backwards. In Gilley's view Finlandization is a stable end state, but in the real-world China-Taiwan relationship, it is simply another step into Beijing's maw. Sure, Taiwan can be Finlandized, but will it stay that way? Nope.
Anthony Chiang had a far better piece in the Apple Daily a few weeks ago. His first point was that Finland accommodated the Soviet Union for the purpose of keeping its sovereignty. Ma Ying-jiu however is accommodating China so that Taiwan will lose its sovereignty. Secondly, the Soviet Union always recognized Finland as country. Third, what is happening in Taiwan is not Finlandization, it's Hong Kong-ization.
When asked whether both sides across the Strait should move toward unification eventually, 15.7 percent of people said yes while 69 percent voiced opposition. Amid the pan-blue supporters, 27.5 percent were supportive of the eventual unification while 63.7 percent opposed it. Even among the people with ancestors from mainland China, 55.9 percent did not support the idea andonly 22.9 percent did. The poll implied people in Taiwan had reached an overwhelming and stable consensus on whether two sides across the Strait should march toward unification eventually.There is a consensus in Taiwan, and it is simple: nobody wants to be part of China. More to the point: support for joining the PRC version of "China" is nil.
The second half of the paper is where Gilley ruthlessly eliminates all consideration of Beijing's actual behavior to construct an alternate reality of geostrategic pragmatism:In recent years, many Western analysts have rejected this nationalist interpretation of Beijing’s Taiwan policy and opted instead for a geostrategic one. Unrecovered territories are legion in the history of the prc, and the ccp has found it easy to let go of others (including disputed regions bordering Russia, India, and the Spratly Islands, as well as control over Mongolia and Korea).Taiwan, however, by virtue of its geographic location, represents a potential strategic threat to China. It could serve as a base for foreign military operations against China and even in peacetime could constrain Beijing’s ability to develop and project naval power and ensure maritime security inEast Asia.There's so much to deconstruct here. Did the Chinese ships "trail" the US Impeccable? Reality says:
Beijing’s core goal from this perspective is the preservation of its dominance in its immediate offshore region, as became clear in 2009 when five Chinese vessels trailed a U.S. Navy ship sailing near a Chinese submarine base.Taiwan represents an obstacle to this goal if it remains a U.S. strategic ally armed with advanced U.S. weaponry, but not if it becomes a self-defending and neutral state with close economic and political ties to China. Beijing’s constantly changing position on Taiwan—which has incrementally moderated from “liberation” to “peaceful unification” to “one China” to “anti-independence” since Mao’s era—in fact reflects a concern with Taiwan’s geostrategic status, not with the precise nature of its political ties to China. According to this interpretation, Beijing has no interest in occupying or ruling Taiwan; it simply wants a sphere of influence that increases its global clout and in which Taiwan is a neutral state, not a client state. Seen through this lens, Taiwan is a means to an end and the second détente is a tactic intended to achieve this strategic objective through Taiwan’s Finlandization.
Five Chinese vessels in a possibly coordinated effort yesterday “shadowed and aggressively maneuvered in dangerously close proximity” to a U.S. Navy surveillance ship in international waters, the Pentagon said.The boats actually buzzed the US ship, creating the possibility of a dangerous incident (there were several such incidents in which Chinese vessels threatened US vessels). Further, the US boat was not "near" a submarine base on Hainan Island but was 75 miles away in international waters. This construction, trivial as it is, shows how Gilley simply makes actual Chinese behavior disappear.Two of the vessels closed to within 50 feet (15 meters) of the USNS Impeccable, waving Chinese flags and telling the U.S. ship to leave the area, according to a Defense Department statement issued today. The Impeccable sprayed water from its fire hoses at one of the boats to protect itself.
At present, a rising China threatens the world primarily because there has been little in the way of domestic political liberalization to keep Beijing’s increasing economic and military power in check. Taiwan could play a far greater role in China’s liberalization if it were to become a Finlandized part of the region and its officials were able to move across the strait even more freely than they do now.Actually, Taiwan officials are free to move across the Strait anytime. Many of them are and have. Further, hundreds of thousands of Taiwanese live in China, running businesses there. Hundreds of thousands of more have visited as tourists. Has China moved toward democratic liberalization as a result of Taiwanese engagement with that nation since the early 1990s?
But all this economic growth shows little sign of provoking the political changes anticipated by Bush and Clinton. If anything, the Chinese government seems to be getting more repressive. Liu Xiaobo, a leading Chinese dissident, was recently sentenced to 11 years in prison for his involvement in the Charter 08 movement that advocates democratic reforms.Quite. Twenty years of Taiwan engagement in China has failed to move China off its quest to annex Taiwan one iota. But apparently, Finlandization will.
In recent years, the U.S.-Taiwanese relationship has been increasingly dictated by the interests of narrow lobbies rather than grand strategy.The U.S. arms industry, the Taiwanese military, and Taiwanese independence activists together make a formidable force. Before the current détente, Taiwan’s staunch anticommunism and adversarial policy toward China aligned well with Washington’s own ideology and militarized approach to the Taiwan Strait. But the recent evolution of tactical and strategic thinking in Taipei and Beijing has created a disjuncture. The adversarial status quo that the United States has protected is no longer the status quo that the Taiwanese want protected.Hmm....the Taiwanese want and like the current status quo, one in which they have full sovereignty and can invest in China. Note how Gilley slams the independence activists as "narrow lobbies". Yes, we are lucky that Dr. Gilley is here to support the robust authoritarians in Beijing rather than the narrow lobbies of democracy activists!
....The tragic result of this policy, however, has been that it has played into Beijing’s fears of encirclement and naval inferiority, which in turn has prompted China’s own military buildup.This argument can make sense only because Gilley has removed all other nations from consideration by the simple expedient of not mentioning them. But Finlandizing Taiwan will not resolve the US involvement in Japan's security against China (codified by treaty!). It will not end the Chinese threat to India. It will not ameliorate the Chinese claims to numerous islands in the South China Sea and elsewhere. Instead, the obvious conclusion is that it will lead to calls from future Bruce Gilleys to Finlandize Japan, along with everywhere else that China claims. Indeed, I look forward to his upcoming article: Hawaii: the Case for Finlandization.
Finlandization will allow Taiwan to break this cycle by taking itself out of the game and moderating the security dilemma that haunts the Washington-Beijing relationship.
......
Even from a strictly realist perspective, there is no need for the United States to keep Taiwan within its strategic orbit, given that U.S. military security can be attained through other Asian bases and operations.Taiwan’s Finlandization should be seen not as a necessary sacrifice to a rising China but rather as an alternative strategy for pacifying China.
Has anyone noticed the most important peace breakthrough on the planet in the last two years? It’s right here: the new calm in the Strait of Taiwan. For decades, this was considered the most dangerous place on earth, with Taiwan and China pointing missiles at each other on hair triggers. Well, over the past two years, China and Taiwan have reached a quiet rapprochement — on their own. No special envoys or shuttling secretaries of state. Yes, our Navy was a critical stabilizer. But they worked it out. They realized their own interdependence. The result: a new web of economic ties, direct flights and student exchanges.Everything in here is wrong, from Friedman's claim that peace prevails in the Strait (hello, 1,500 missiles) to his bizarre construction of Taiwan's development history (massive US aid, for starters). It's so obviously stupid that there is no need to even discuss it. But his main point, that the national direction, our insane obsession with the Middle East, is an unproductive dead end and we should be focusing on China and the future of our people, is correct. Of course, Friedman's point would have had actual impact if he had not been a major cheerleader of that obsession (Greenwald's rip of this with Friedman's 2003 remarks). A few years ago I might have been amazed that a vapid, ignorant, hypocrite like Friedman has a national audience, but now it merely induces a kind of grim, knowing, amusement.
A key reason is that Taiwan has no oil, no natural resources. It’s a barren rock with 23 million people who, through hard work, have amassed the fourth-largest foreign currency reserves in the world. They got rich digging inside themselves, unlocking their entrepreneurs, not digging for oil. They took responsibility. They got rich by asking: “How do I improve myself?” Not by declaring: “It’s all somebody else’s fault. Give me a handout.”
As my loyal readers know, pundits both here in Taiwan and abroad have been saying that with ECFA Taiwan will be able to sign FTAs with other nations. ECFA must come first, they all claim, and then everything will be alright -- despite the fact that China has consistently refused to promise to permit Taiwan to have Free Trade Agreements (FTA) with other nations once the ECFA agreements are signed.Taiwan should not demand that mainland China allow it to enter into free trade agreement talks with other nations as a precondition for discussions on an economic cooperation framework agreement, said Chiang Pin-kung, chairman of the Straits Exchange Foundation.The paper adds:
The idea, first put forward by the opposition Democratic Progressive Party, is “excellent—but inappropriate,” said Chiang, adding that making such a demand publicly could cause additional difficulties.
The SEF Chairman made his remarks Jan. 11 during an interview with “Formosa Weekly,” an online newspaper founded by former Vice President Annette Lu. His interlocutor was Hsu Hsin-liang, former chairman of the DPP.
In related news, President Ma Ying-jeou noted though cross-strait economic development has been growing rapidly, there has not been a systemic trade mechanism between the two sides.Read it -- from Ma's lips to your ears: first Beijing signs the FTA, and then Taiwan follows, but only with those countries. In other words, Taiwan has no independent policy of its own.
“We must seek a breakthrough, or Taiwan will be marginalized in the wake of East Asian regional economic integration,” he said.
Asked whether Taiwan will sign FTAs with other countries after signing an ECFA with the mainland, President Ma answered, “It most certainly will.”
“As long as other nations have already signed FTAs with the mainland, Beijing will have no objections if these countries wish to discuss similar deals with Taiwan,” the president said.
The FTA, which was first announced at the Asean-China Summit in 2001, is the third largest in the world and covers a combined population of 1.9 billion with a gross domestic product of US$6.6 trillion and a trade volume of US$4.3 trillion.This opinion piece gives the propaganda vs reality on the China-ASEAN FTA. Grim....
Under the FTA, more than 9,000 products imported from China to Malaysia are duty-free while China will reduce tariffs on more than 7,000 products from Asean. Besides manufactured goods, the agreement also covers services and investment.
Unlike the Asean-India FTA, which was concluded last August at the 7th Asean Economic Ministers-India meeting, and also came into force on Jan 1, the FTA with China faces opposition.
While governments in the region have welcomed the agreement with China, whose economy is the fastest growing in the region, thousands of workers from across west Java staged a rally in Bandung against the FTA last week.
The Jakarta Post on Tuesday carried a commentary by an Indonesian academic on how the FTA could slow down the fulfilment of human rights in Indonesia, including rights to health, decent wages and access to natural resources.
Associated Chinese Chambers of Commerce and Industry of Malaysia president Tan Sri William Cheng had in an earlier interview with a Chinese-language newspaper called for a delay in the full liberalisation of trade with China.
However, sections of the business community were more cautious on the impact, with Federation of Malaysian Manufacturers (FMM) president Tan Sri Mustafa Mansur saying that it was still early to assess the impact on local businesses.
“We’re organising a special panel discussion with Chinese officials together with officials from the International Trade and Industry Ministry next month as we’ll be able to better assess the impact after one month,” he told StarBiz over the phone.
Cheng had voiced objections over the removal of tariffs for 90% of the goods traded under the FTA as local businesses might not be fully prepared. The more restricted agreement with India carries with it many exemptions, especially for agricultural products, while negotiations are still ongoing under the FTA for services and investment.
Cheng added that industries in Thailand and Indonesia had also called for a delay in the implementation of the agreement.
The trend of Asean losing ground to China accelerated after the financial crisis of 1997.But wait, there's more. There's the smuggling -- not just Taiwan, it's everywhere:
In 2000, foreign direct investment in Asean shrank to 10 per cent of all foreign direct investment in developing Asia, down from 30 per cent in the mid-nineties.
The decline continued in the rest of the decade, with the United Nations World Investment Report attributing the trend partly to "increased competition from China."
Since the Japanese have been the most dynamic foreign investors in the region, much apprehension in the Asean capitals greeted a Japanese government survey that revealed that 57 per cent of Japanese manufacturing TNCs found China to be more attractive than the Asean-4 (Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines).
Massive smuggling of goods from has disrupted practically all Asean economies.Then there was the Thai "early harvest" which, as the writer notes, is now well documented.
For instance, with some 70-80 per cent of shoe shops in Vietnam selling smuggled Chinese shoes, the Vietnamese shoe industry has suffered badly.
In the case of the Philippines, a recent paper by Joseph Francia and Errol Ramos of the Free Trade Alliance claims that the local shoe industry, along with the vegetable industry, has also been hit badly by smuggling of Chinese goods.
Indeed the range of goods negatively affected is broad, including steel, paper, cement, petrochemicals, plastics, and ceramic tiles.
“Many Philippine companies, even those that are competitive globally, had to close shop or reduce production and employment, due to smuggling,” they write.
It is owing to massive smuggling that few analysts take seriously official trade figures with China released by the Chinese Embassy in Manila that show the Philippines enjoying a positive trade balance.
The whole piece, written by a member of the House of Representatives in the Philippines, is a ringing condemnation of the China-ASEAN FTA Cargo Cult, well worth reading and contemplating.Local vegetable producers complain that they have already been badly hit by Cafta’s experimental “early harvest agreement” that went into effect in December 2005. A similar result has apparently emerged in Thailand, where the impact of the early harvest agreement with China has been better documented.
Under the agreement, Thailand and China agreed that tariffs on more than 200 items of vegetables and fruits would be immediately eliminated. Thailand would export tropical fruits to China while winter fruits from China would be eligible for the zero-tariff deal.
The expectations of mutual benefit evaporated after a few months, however, with most Thai commentaries admitting that Thailand got a bad deal.
As one assessment put it, "despite the limited scope of the Thailand-China early harvest agreement, it has had an appreciable impact in the sectors covered.
The "appreciable impact" has been to wipe out northern Thai producers of garlic and red onions and to cripple the sale of temperate fruit and vegetables from the Royal projects."
Thai newspapers pointed to officials in Southern China refusing to bring down tariffs as stipulated in the agreement while the Thai government brought down the barriers to Chinese products.
Resentment at the results of the China-Thai "early harvest" agreement among Thai fruit and vegetable growers was, in fact, one of the factors that contributed to widespread disillusionment with the broader free trade agenda of the Thaksin government; and opposition to free trade was a prominent feature of the popular mobilizations that culminated in the ouster of that regime in September 2006 by a military coup.
An avalanche of opinion and reporting on Google -- great work there, Google people, shaming Beijing by publicizing its thuggish, criminal ways -- starting with the Wall Street Journal. Rebecca Mackinnon:China's treatment of Google, folks, is exactly what they will do to Taiwan -- no matter what cooperation is offered, China will not deal, will insist on what it wants and only what it wants, and will attack you no matter how well you cooperate. A lesson for Taiwan, and for the KMT.By announcing it will no longer censor its Chinese search engine and will reconsider its presence in China, Google has taken a bold step onto the right side of history.
Four years ago when Google entered the Chinese market and launched Google.cn, Chinese bloggers called it the "neutered Google." At the time, Google executives said the decision to bow to the Chinese government's censorship demands had been made after heated internal debates. They said they had weighed the positives and negatives and concluded Chinese Internet users were better off with the neutered Google than with no Google. They drew a red line under search and said they would not bring any other Google products containing users' personal information—including email and blogging—into China. They held to that line.
Over the past four years I tested Google.cn from time to time and compared its search results with the Chinese market leader, Baidu. I found that Google.cn tended to censor search results somewhat less than Baidu. This supported Google's argument that it at least gave Chinese Internet users more information than the domestic alternatives.
Google executives also pointed out that a notice appeared at the bottom of every page of censored results on Google.cn, informing users that some information was being hidden from them at the behest of Chinese authorities. In this way, the logic went, they were at least being honest with the Chinese public about the fact that Google was helping their government put blinkers on them.
The company's effort to walk a fine line between Chinese regulators and free speech critics ended up being unsustainable. Anticensorship activists still viewed its compromise as contributing to the spread of censorship around the world. On the other hand, the compromise was also unacceptable to Chinese authorities, who were unhappy that Google wasn't censoring as heavily as Baidu. Last year Google came under a series of attacks in the state-run media for failing to censor porn adequately when users—horror of horrors—typed smutty phrases into the search box.
A smaller example of the same phenomenon is Cybersitter. The Santa Barbara, Calif.-based producer of antipornography filter software is suing the Chinese government, claiming that the government's own filtration software, Green Dam Youth Escort, illegally copied nearly 3,000 lines of Cybersitter's own computer coding. The company is asking for $2.2 billion in damages stemming from the infringement.WSJ offers in another piece, very balanced and informative:The legal merits of the case are a matter of debate. But merely by filing suit Cybersitter is taking a bold step that could prove so embarrassing to Beijing that Cybersitter's own product could end up banned from China in retaliation. The family-owned U.S. company is willing to take that risk. "We're not at all concerned about whether we'll lose China as a customer," Jenna DiPasquale, Cybersitter's marketing director, says. In the past dozen years, Cybersitter has sold at most 15,000 copies of its software in China, compared to world-wide sales of four to five million. The company says the costs of not defending its code are much greater than the benefits of a presence in China.
This is clearly an ongoing program by China. A friend related the tale of China's attempt to grab Seagate, which makes the Maxtor portable hard drives. First a Chinese firm attempted to buy the company. Then when Seagate refused to sell, the Chinese subcontractor for the drives infected one type of drive with a trojan horse that collected passwords, etc. Seagate was forced to recall the hard drives.Google has faced its share of business obstacles in China, some of which may be traced to government action. Its main search competitor, Baidu, has received government support to control 58% of the market, compared to Google's 36%. No doubt the fact that Google's revenues in China are what it calls "insignificant" make it easier to pull the plug.
But the problems go beyond Google. A company spokesman tells us that the decision to abandon the China market was the result of the hacking attack and a broad crackdown on the Internet in China. In the last year Chinese authorities have blocked YouTube, attempted to force computer retailers to pre-install the Green Dam filtering software, pressured Google and other search providers to further filter racy content, and allegedly launched a "DNS poisoning" attack on Google that led to the company's services crashing world-wide.
Straits Times says that Taiwan's ambassador to Haiti was hurt in the quake. Haiti is one of the 23 countries that recognize the ROC.TAIWAN'S ambassador to Haiti has been injured in the powerful earthquake in the impoverished Caribbean nation where hundreds of people are feared dead, the foreign ministry said on Wednesday.The Rumpus has a collection of links for giving to Haiti.
'The initial information we obtained showed that ambassador Hsu Mien-sheng was injured in the earthquake,' a ministry official told AFP. 'He suffered a fracture and has been treated in hospital.'
The official gave no further details, but added that other embassy staff had escaped unhurt when the embassy building was damaged in the capital Port-au-Prince after Tuesday's earthquake.
Taiwan pledged US$200,000 (S$277,539) in humanitarian aid and President Ma Ying-jeou sent condolences to his Haitian counterpart, the foreign ministry said in a statement. 'The government may provide further assistance to Haiti depending on its needs,' it added.
Google Blog says, in its entirety:Note again the abuse of Taiwan -- the attacks originated from here, just as China used Taiwan firms to send nuke tech to Iran. It's obvious that at least one payoff China is hoping for is western ire at Taiwan.Google did not publicly link the Chinese government to the cyber attack, but people with knowledge of Google’s investigation said they had enough evidence to justify its actions.
A United States expert on cyber warfare said that 34 companies were targeted, most of them high-technology companies in Silicon Valley. The attacks came from Taiwanese Internet addresses, according to James Mulvenon, an expert on Chinese cyberwarfare capabilities.
Mr. Mulvenon said that the stolen documents were sent electronically to a server controlled by Rackspace, based in San Antonio.
“For Google to pull up stakes and basically pull out China, the attack must have been large in scope and very penetrating,” Mr. Mulvenon said. “This attack highlights the fact that cyberwarfare has basically gone to the next level.”
