ECFA and Independence

The market was an absolute madhouse today as the New Year holiday closes in.

The Taipei Times reported on an American Enterprise Institute discussion of Taiwan and ECFA, the speaker being Council for Economic Planning and Development Minister Christina Liu...

Liu said that if the ECFA was the right policy and the markets showed economic benefits, there would be no pulling back.

Asked if the ECFA could continue if Taiwan moved toward independence, Liu said that if the majority in Taiwan were to pursue independence “then the whole thing will be totally different.”

If independence became a central theme and central belief for Taiwanese, then “everything would change,” she said.

“I don’t think that is the consensus for Taiwan. We have done many surveys and the majority of people in Taiwan are hoping to keep the ‘status quo.’ I don’t think that independence will be an issue,” Liu said.

Note how she says "everything would change" if Taiwan became independence-oriented. The politics of ECFA are interesting in this context -- it is possible to read this as her saying that ECFA would be rejected if the populace wanted an independent Taiwan, but she might also mean that China would withdraw ECFA's benfits in that case. Her speech is very ambiguous. It seems like ECFA is something that once in, you can't get out, at least in the government planning view.

Another facet of this speech is the way that KMT officials treat "the status quo." The KMT is careful to separate "the status quo" from independence, as if the status quo itself, overwhelmingly supported, were not a form of independence. This helps create a vagueness that lends support to the idea that advocates of independence are a minority, whereas as poll after poll indicates, no one wants to be part of China and if China did not threaten to maim and kill Taiwanese, everyone would opt for independence. Those Chinese missiles help keep the KMT in power.....

She also mentioned that the government is planning to further transition the economy to services and to promote domestic consumption. Their answer to the problem of diversification is not to diversify to other countries, but to reduce dependence on exports by ramping up domestic consumption -- as if Taiwan were not an export dependent economy! Liu did call for wage hikes in 2011. The government expects growth of 5% in 2011 as TIER said that manufacturing indicators showed the economy might be slowing down.
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Daily Links:

• US Ambassador to China, John Huntsman, resigns. May consider Presidential run
• Australian citizen of Chinese extraction jailed in China five years ago for spying for Taiwan; case is only now making media appearance.
• Philippines deports 14 Taiwanese to China for fraud against Chinese nationals.
  
• China developing counterstealth weapons.
• Taiwanese dispatch charity in silence.
  

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