Tseng Case Round Up

A turn on my favorite cycling route, from the 130 onto the Miaoli 49 to the Lungtung Broken RR Viaduct. Show up with a bike, I'll take you there.

Well, updated articles on the Tseng influence peddling case hitting the news cycle. The Taipei Times reports briefly....

Politicians in the pan-blue camp yesterday expressed concern about the incident and urged the Ma administration to handle it carefully.

Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) said the incident involves administrative, legislative and judicial issues, and such a constitutional matter should be addressed carefully.

Former Taipei EasyCard Corp (悠遊卡公司) chairman Sean Lien (連勝文) expressed concern about the Special Investigation Division’s (SID) eavesdropping on Ker and Wang, but refrained from commenting further on the case.

Lien’s father, former KMT chairman Lien Chan (連戰), also showed up at the Taipei City Council to cast his vote, but declined to comment on the incident.

Meanwhile, conspiracy theories have been fueling the rumor mill, with KMT Legislator Liao Cheng-ching (廖正井) saying that he saw the incident as “sheer infighting” in the government’s judiciary system between Tseng and Prosecutor-General Huang Shih-ming (黃世銘), who led the SID, while others said it was an internal struggle in the Ma administration — infighting between Ma and Wang.

Couple of issues. As the media notes, the wiretapping of sitting legislators raised hackles in the legislature. I'd sure like some details on that -- it seems almost too good to be true that SID stumbled upon these conversations while investigating Ker for something else. Another aspect of the case that I have heard dark mutterings about is that the KMT politicians who have recently been knocked out for corruption (Lin Yi-shih, Wang Jin-pyng, Tseng Yung-fu) are all Taiwanese, not mainlanders. Meanwhile the DPP decided to go full-on conspiratorial:

The Democratic Progressive Party's (DPP) legislative caucus yesterday said that the Special Investigation Division's (SID) accusations against Justice Minister Tseng Yung-fu (曾勇夫) were designed to instigate infighting within the ruling party and the judicial system.

Meanwhile the DPP Chairman Su Tseng-chang came out charging, saying that the wiretapping was illegal and that the whole affair was a dark day for Taiwan's justice system. Su contended that SID chief Huang's reporting of all this Ma Ying-jeou prior to the case breaking -- some media have said that Ma knew a week before it broke -- was an illegal breach of confidentiality in the case, and Ma should not have listened -- that too was illegal, said Su. The whole thing was simply Ma acting as judge in the case. Su was parodying Ma....

...who held a press conference at 4:00 to hack on his rival Wang Jin-pyng. Apple Daily reported:

馬英九表示，經過三天思考，決定發表沉痛聲明；馬英九強調，王金平涉及在野黨司法案件關說，侵犯司法獨立，這是最嚴重的一件事情，也是台灣民主政治、法治發展最恥辱的一天！若不能嚴正面對，台灣將走向無限沉淪。

Ma Ying-jeou said that after three days of consideration, he decided to publish this bitter statement. Ma stressed that Wang Jin-pyng's involvement in influence peddling cases with opposition politicians is a violation of judicial independence, which is a most serious thing, and is the most shameful day for the development of Taiwan's democracy and rule of law! If this is not seriously dealt with, Taiwan will sink into an infinite abyss.

It's hard not to laugh at Ma saying things like this about Taiwan democracy. Essentially, the primary talent of politicians is strenuously denying that salt is salty one day and then indignantly affirming that it is the next. In that respect Ma is greatly skilled.

The case offered another comical moment when the prosecutor in the Ker case, Lin Hsiou-tao, said that she had never said the words attributed to her, it was all the SID's doing, and she would never lie, because she is a Christian. LOL. On the serious side, she specifically said that her superior, Chen Shou-huang, who is supposed to have carried Minister Tseng's order to her not to appeal the not guilty verdict, told her to just do what the law says.

For the conspiratorially minded, one of the FocusTaiwan editorials complains that the SID should not have immediately referred the Tseng case to the Control Yuan for administrative investigation, since the SID handles criminal cases. If you were paranoid, you might conclude that Tseng was getting off with an administrative punishment since he was just collateral damage because the real focus of the case was Wang. Keep in mind that SID has no tapes of Tseng asking anyone to do anything, they only have Ker and Wang talking. Ma said that Wang had told him that he had only been comforting Ker. Tseng basically resigned under protest....

Another Wang issue: stories are circulating that Ma wants to punish Wang Jin-pyng for insisting that the cross-strait services agreement be subjected to a review in the legislature, and because Wang has publicly criticized the Fourth Nuclear Plant, both pet projects of Ma. I seriously doubt this. Wang is always making noises that sound kinda mavericky. On ECFA he positioned himself as if he were resisting the President. Wang has consistently criticized the stupid legislative reform that handed control of the Legislature to the KMT. This is faux maverick behavior: Wang stakes out harmless "opposition" to things that are bound to occur, a favorite trick of "mavericky" politicians, giving them room to look independent while still safely remaining within the System. Wang also has an extensive network of connections to DPP legislators (as the Ker case makes plain) and they are always doing favors for each other. Ma must know that Wang has links in the opposition he must placate. Hence, it is more likely that if it is really true that Ma Ying-jeou is going after Wang Jin-pyng, it is because they are longtime rivals within the KMT and not because of Wang's stand on this or that piece of legislation.

You had to love AP's report, which, in a six paragraph piece on the Tseng case, devoted three paragraphs to "analysis". One paragraph discussed how it would hurt the Ma government, and two paragraphs focused on the DPP -- one on how Ker's involvement would hurt the DPP and the other -- yes! -- recapitulating the really really really important fact that Chen Shui-bian was packed off to jail for corruption, which has absolutely nothing to do with the Tseng case. Wouldn't it have made more sense, if AP wanted to engage in actual reporting, that it would spend a paragraph reporting that local media were speculating that the case is the result of infighting within the KMT? After all these years watching the international media trying to report on affairs here, why am I still asking questions like that?

SUPERPARANOIA: It's all a setup, see, to make Wang look like a victim of Ma to prime him for a presidential run in 2016.
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Daily Links:

• Taiwan's vapid, jingoistic response in the case of the Phils coast guard killing of a Taiwan fisherman is now reaping its first bitter fruit: Taiwan fisherman may be charged with illegal fishing in Phils waters.
• Rabies in Taiwan since 2010
• Steven Yates, one of the most intelligent commentators on Taiwan affairs (really should write more stuff, Steve!), argues for closer cooperation between Taiwan and Japan.
• Ha! HTC is stock exchange's biggest loser so far for 2013. It's not surprising, when you consider that my HTC cellphone is so full of bloatware that I cannot uninstall that it no longer can upgrade. Needless to say, my next smartphone won't be HTC.
• Taiwan spends $400 million on grain, soybeans.
• Women in Taiwan are far more willing to donate their organs than men. But... you know how men feel about their organs....

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[Taiwan] Don't miss the comments below! And check out my blog and its sidebars for events, links to previous posts and picture posts, and scores of links to other Taiwan blogs and forums!

AP on the WantWant Media Monster

AP's Peter Enav in Taiwan occasionally finds the time to produce longer review articles; last week he came out with a really good piece on the WantWant media monopoly campaign. A taste:

The controversy over Tsai and his expansive Taiwanese media holdings goes right to the heart of the dominant issue in Taiwanese politics: Whether the island should attempt to maintain the separate political identity from the mainland it has maintained since splitting apart from it amid civil war in 1949, or whether it should bow to China's increasing political and economic might and accept its sovereign sway. Taiwanese media, particularly the island's four national newspapers and its seven major 24-hour cable news stations, play a crucial role in the debate, using their columns and broadcasts to promote the competing pro-China and independence agendas of the two main political parties.

The strength of Tsai's pro-China views were underlined in January 2012 when he told the Washington Post newspaper that he unreservedly backed Taiwan's unification with the mainland. "I really hope that I can see that," he said. In the same article he also attacked the widely held belief that Chinese security forces killed hundreds if not thousands of demonstrators during pro-democracy protests around Beijing's Tiananmen Square in June 1989, citing the refusal of a phalanx of Chinese tanks to run over a famously bold protester as evidence of the forces' restraint.

Want Want's own internal newsletter reported in its December 2008 edition that during a meeting in Beijing, Tsai told Wang Yi, head of the Chinese government's Taiwan Affairs Office, that Tsai had acquired the China Times Group "in order to use the power of the press to advance relations between China and Taiwan." The newsletter quoted Wang as saying that if Tsai's company had any future needs "the Taiwan Affairs Office will do its best to help it, including giving support to its food business."

If you didn't read that last paragraph, read it. There's plenty of personal data on Tsai and views of Tsai from other sources, so read the whole article too. Really good work, Peter.

AP's treatment focuses on what outsiders are interested in -- the China's relentless drive to annex Taiwan and Taiwan's resistance to it. But there is another aspect that needs to be remembered: Next Media did plenty of investigative reporting of local politicians and corporations, and Tsai will likely hamstring that.

The day before the AP article, the National Communications Commission (NCC) ruled that WantWant had not satisfied the conditions laid down by the NCC months ago. The Taipei Times reported:

The National Communications Commission (NCC) yesterday ruled that Want Want China Times Group (旺旺中時集團) has not met the three conditions it set last year for the group’s acquisition of the cable TV services operated by China Network Systems (CNS, 中嘉網路), adding that another administrative hearing would not be necessary.

For the acquisition to be valid, group chairman Tsai Eng-meng (蔡衍明) and his family members or associates must completely dissociate themselves from CtiTV’s (中天電視) news channel. China Television Co’s (CTV, 中視) digital news channel, which also belongs to the group, must be changed to a non-news channel and CTV must have an independent editorial system.

The commission said that each condition must be met for the Want Want-CNS deal to take effect.

I haven't heard what WantWant intends to do about it. But last July when they were first promulgated, the food giant rejected them out of hand. It's hard for me to imagine that in a society where big companies routinely get whatever they want, this deal won't go through. It will be interesting to whether and how the NCC will either retreat or be bypassed or simply... ignored.
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Daily Links:

• Brian Benedictus' interview with Gordon Chang
• The little pangolin, one of the most threatened animals due to the illegal trade in their meat and scales.
• Taiwan Communique #140 out!
• Government accepts referendum on nuclear power.
• Last month, we learned that the rice noodles aren't made from rice. This month we learn that sodium levels in the instant noodles are much higher than stated on the package.

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[Taiwan] Don't miss the comments below! And check out my blog and its sidebars for events, links to previous posts and picture posts, and scores of links to other Taiwan blogs and forums! Delenda est, baby.

DPP 'Fury' March Success

Morning traffic hurries past motorcycles parked by the train station in Tanzi.

LOL. Lots of different numbers out there for the DPP protest on Sunday. AP reports in an article that gives an excellent view of the situation, hitting on Ma's many failures:

Organizers from the main opposition Democratic Progressive Party estimated the crowd at 150,000, though Associated Press journalists on the scene put the number at no more than 50,000. There was no immediate estimate from police.

Since Ma’s re-election, his popularity has plummeted amid the failure of his China-oriented economic program to show results and nagging unease over Taiwan’s increasing orientation toward the mainland. Ma — whose approval rating now stands at around 15 percent — insists that tying the island’s high-tech industries ever closer to China’s lucrative markets is the best way for Taiwan to avoid economic marginalization.

Estimates: in any case this Tokyo paper claimed the police had announced 90,000 as did the China Post. VOA news also said 50,000 like AP. Taipei Times pegged it at over 100,000. Obviously the Taipei Times is a lot closer to the truth than the international media. Lowball crowd estimates are a problem with the international media, see this old post from 2008 (at bottom) as well as this one which gives a detailed discussion of why crowd counting is so hard.

The last sentence there in the AP piece is especially delicious, pointing out how ridiculous Ma's claim is that globalization = marginalization without ever saying so directly. Good work. Unfortunately AP is still writing the pro-Beijing claim "Taiwan separated from the mainland (in 1949)" hogwash. Not much point in pounding on that dead equine any further.

Jenny Hsu turned in another of her uniformly top-notch pieces on the rally, though with no crowd estimate, in WSJ:

Playing a clip from a speech by Mr. Ma during a 2006 rally to depose the former DPP leader Chen Shui-bian, Mr. Su said the Hong Kong-born president should “take his own advice” and remove himself from the office when the public is no longer behind him, referring to his current 13% support rate.

....

The island’s export-reliant market has been in doldrums since the onset of the euro-zone crisis in 2010. The slower-than-expected recovery in the U.S., along with weakening China demand and stiff competition from South Korea’s booming tech industry, have stunted Taiwan’s exports, which contracted 2.3% in 2012 from the previous year.

But supporters of the KMT say Taiwan’s sputtering growth is an inevitable result of the global downturn. The government has rolled out policies, such as offering foreign-based Taiwanese businesses tax breaks to move part of their operations back to the island to boost local employment, in attempt to pull itself out of the mire.

Frozen Garlic has an excellent post on the DPP's campaign to get Ma recalled, noting:

First, the video they showed of President Ma calling on his supporters to recall President Chen in 2006 was extraordinary. Ma systematically destroyed all the arguments he might make today to delegitimize the DPP’s actions. If I were the DPP, I would buy TV commercials and play that clip over and over. I’m sure Ma never dreamed that speech would come back to haunt him. Politicians never expect that they will someday be in the same position as that incompetent, immoral jerk they are attacking.

The recall is certain to be a failure, and is dividing the party (predictably). Perhaps somehow all that energy could be directed into developing the party's local networks and ensuring that each and every elected position in Taiwan's local governments has a DPP candidate running for it.

There's a certain irony in contemplating how the general agreement that Ma sucks has actually hamstrung the opposition's ability to fight him. Not only that, the focus on Ma is wrong. The DPP needs to make a general case that Ma is symptomatic of the KMT as an incompetent, out of date, do-nothing, party.

I'm sure you're curious, on a day in which the DPP packed around 100,000 souls into Taipei to protest the President, what Ma himself was doing that day. As protesters exercised democracy in the streets, the President visited the tomb of former dictator Chiang Ching-kuo to commemorate the anniversary of his death. Almost as if he was sending a message of wistful regret that he couldn't clap all the protesters in irons or send gangsters in to beat them up as was done in Chiang's day.
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Daily Links:

• Frozen Garlic has an excellent post on the DPP's campaign to get Ma recalled, which has no chance of succeeding.
• Video: Two Maori trace their ancestry across the Pacific to Taiwan in this documentary.
• Drew on training on the awesome 136
• Media Deal Sparks Concern in Taiwan by the awesome Chen and Famularo.
• China to publish map showing its full territory. Rumor has it the map will include the Andromeda galaxy, Ringworld, and areas to be named south of Gondor. 
• J Michael Cole's review of Bruce Jacob's new book.
• Geopolitical stakes of Taiwan's gay marriage law.
• Global warming research in Taiwan shifts focus

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[Taiwan] Don't miss the comments below! And check out my blog and its sidebars for events, links to previous posts and picture posts, and scores of links to other Taiwan blogs and forums! Delenda est, baby.

When is AP going to stop?

AP published a short report on President Ma's cancellation of a portion of his African trip...it contained AP's inaccurate and indefensible rendering of The Formula:

Taiwan and China split amid civil war in 1949. Twenty-three nations, including Sao Tome and Principe, formally recognize Taiwan.

I can't understand why it is so difficult for AP to accurately represent these relationships. Why the obstinate refusal to describe the actual situation instead of constantly and repeatedly lying about it?

Once more, with feeling...

The ROC/KMT and the PRC/Chinese Communist Party split in 1949. Taiwan could not split from China because Taiwan was part of Japan in 1949, not part of China, a fact which is easily available in any good history and which AP of course knows, since it has been publicly and privately informed of this fact on many occasions. Taiwan would remain part of Japan until April of 1952 at which point the San Francisco Peace Treaty took effect, Japan gave up its sovereignty over Taiwan, and Taiwan's status is now undetermined. That is official US policy, and the policy of all the other major powers save Beijing and Paris. Taiwan and China were not having a civil war nor was Taiwan part of China, as the first sentence appears to say. Nothing in this statement is factually accurate.

The second sentence is even worse. 23 countries recognize the ROC government on Taiwan as the government of China under the One China rubric in which Taiwan is part of China. No power on earth recognizes "Taiwan" -- there is no "Taiwan" as an independent nation. No one can recognize Taiwan!

No wonder Americans have trouble with foreign policy; their media reporting is awful. AP has been corrected on this nonsense dozens of times. It remains obdurate.

It is not difficult to frame accurate representations:

"Both the PRC and the ROC government on Taiwan claim to be the government of China, and claim Taiwan is a part of China. This latter position is rejected by most of the major powers, including the US, and by the majority of the people of Taiwan, who do not want to be part of China."

Or

"The position that the ROC on Taiwan is the sole government of China is recognized by 23 nations. The US and most major powers do not take the position that Taiwan is part of China. Most people on Taiwan do not want to be part of China."

Or... write your own.
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[Taiwan] Don't miss the comments below! And check out my blog and its sidebars for events, links to previous posts and picture posts, and scores of links to other Taiwan blogs and forums! Delenda est, baby.

Happy New Years! 13 days to go...

Love the Powershot S95s color accent function... it produces such interesting shots.

Remember when Ma promised to establish a Ministry of Ocean Affairs? -- no doubt the public's disappointment with that failure is behind is low satisfaction ratings.

The mother of former President Chen's wife has passed away. Chen is petitioning to be let out Jan 10, four days before the election. Hopefully the KMT will block this move. Hopefully someone from the DPP will take him aside and explain how he can negatively affect the elections if he opens his mouth. Hopefully some bright boy will solve all the problems by advising the family to move the funeral back five days....

Announce plans to privatize the Grand Hotel right before the election? Totally not political, says the ruling party. The opposition candidate accusing the ruling party of smears? The opposition candidate accused of benefiting from insider knowledge in a business deal? The president visiting the Spratlys with a month to go in the election denying that the visit had anything to do with the election? Those are all from 2008.... Yes, it's deja vu all over again here in 2012. And of course, like 2008, the US favoring Ma Ying-jeou (AP):

Washington has been lavishing attention on Taiwan, stepping up official visits and saying it will likely allow visa-free travel to the U.S. The moves are raising suspicions that America is trying to influence a tight presidential election here in January.

President Ma Ying-jeou has seized on Washington's favors, touting them as reasons voters should re-elect him. The Taipei Times, which supports his main opponent, Tsai Ing-wen, said in an editorial: "Foolhardy or malicious, inadvertent or by design, the U.S. has taken sides in next month's elections."

The reporter cites two longtime scholars and analysts of things Taiwan, June Teufel Dreyer and Arthur Waldron. It also contains the usual tiresome pro-Beijing slant:

By contrast, Tsai's Democratic Progressive Party supports formal independence from China, as opposed to the de facto independence Taiwan has now. Her predecessor as party leader, Chen Shui-bian, frequently angered Beijing — and gave America fits — when he was president from 2000-2008. Though Tsai has backed away from his brinksmanship with China, she has never publicly renounced independence.

"....she has never publicly renounced independence." Readers can understand how completely biased this is if you imagine some universe where in the mid-1980s AP writes of Vaclev Havel: "Though Havel has not angered Moscow and its Czech puppet rulers as much as his fellow travelers, he has never publicly renounced his support of democracy." Resistance to Soviet expansion? Huge approval for that. Resistance to Chinese expansion? Not so much, thank you. There's just no need at all for the last sentence of that paragraph..... AP could have put Tsai in context and neatly explained part of her appeal: "Like an increasing majority of Taiwanese, Tsai supports eventual independence for Taiwan." Or injected balance: "Tsai is known to support eventual independence for Taiwan, just as Ma has publicly stated on many occasions that he supports eventual unification." Or....

It must be said that the western media coverage this time around is not nearly as ugly as it was last time.

The Ma government made some interesting moves recently to shore up its election hopes. One was to announce that males born after 1994 will need to serve only four months of military service. This was immediately criticized as pandering to voters, which no doubt it was. Every government does this, the DPP did it in 2008. No doubt whoever wins will do it again in 2016.

Locally roads seem to be undergoing repairs all over the nation, and a section of the new expressway in eastern Taichung was opened on the 31st. The money taps are opening....

My man Drew remarked yesterday that now that Ma has stopped trying to win, he's doing much better. Let's hope this descent into the negative maelstrom two weeks before the election won't hurt the DPP too much.

Oh yeah, Happy 2012, everyone!
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Daily Links:

• Droll article on Nobody Keen to Answer the Big Taiwan Question down in Oz.
• Frozen Garlic with excellent post on Taitung county legislative politics.
• China pressures Chinese magazine on Taiwan election jaunt.
• Crowd-funded investigative journalism to begin in Taiwan

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[Taiwan] Don't miss the comments below! And check out my blog and its sidebars for events, links to previous posts and picture posts, and scores of links to other Taiwan blogs and forums! Delenda est, baby.

Robin Hood, Registration, Porcine Power

Robin Hood piggy banks.

It was registration week this week. Tsai formally registered her candidacy on Wednesday. "I believe we will win and we will win because we have you," she said to her followers. Ma registered a couple of days earlier, with he and Wu sporting white t-shirts with the KMT's ridiculous red Taiwan amulet that looks like something worn to ward off demons in a Hong Kong B-movie. Soong registered last. I find it hard to credit that he'll remain in an election he can't win merely to support his fading party and spite Ma; on the other hand, I can't see him leaving the election either. If the KMT had a lick of sense they'd have lived with a Soong presidency in 2000 and 2004, but they ran the unpopular and offputting Lien Chan both times. Thankfully.....

Last week when I stopped by the opening of the joint Lin Chia-lung/Tsai Ing-wen DPP HQ on the south side of The Chung, I was appalled to hear Tsai refer to an international media report that had framed Tsai as a "Robin Hood." This had fired up both her and the crowd. The DPP has now gone on, just as it had with the original donation case, to use this in its campaign materials. Above is a nifty pic from a sharp observer of local politics of Robin Hood Piggies. The little piggy is now an unstoppable symbol of the Tsai campaign. The report in question appears to be an AP piece by Annie Huang, and it makes it clear what a powerful challenge Tsai is offering to Ma:

The piggy campaign is a salient reminder that not all Taiwanese politics revolves around the issue of the island's complex relations with China, from which it split amid civil war in 1949. While that issue tends to garner the most interest abroad, Taiwanese themselves are usually more concerned with bread and butter questions such as wages, inflation and jobs.

Taiwan's economy has fared relatively well in recent years, avoiding the slow growth syndrome that has afflicted most of the West. But complaints over rising income inequality have been mounting, fueled by a residential building boom that seems largely reserved for high-wage earners and a shift in the labor market that appears to punish relatively unskilled or undereducated workers.

That has provided a big political opening for Tsai Ing-wen, the 54-year-old DPP presidential candidate, and the star of the suddenly trendy piggy bank campaign.

Unusual for the international media, it actual mentions that domestic concerns drive the campaign. Kudos to AP for making that clear. Moreover, the piece leaves the definite impression that Tsai is looking strong. I'd just like to thank AP for providing that little Robin Hood stimulus for the good guys.

Of course AP still uses the asinine and erroneous "split in 1949" formula. This is sheer pig-headed obstinancy for the sake of being obstinate, as AP has been informed of reality many times and it would cost them nothing to write accurate representations of history. Sad, isn't it?

The piece also uses weasel words "supposed" "perceived" whenever it refers to Ma's weakenesses. For example, "incumbent Ma Ying-jeou and his supposedly capitalist cronies" is used. Huang has been reporting from Taipei for many years, presumably she must know that Ma is the favorite of Big Business and has Wall Street's support. You'd have to be living in a cave not to know that.

Moreover, the comparison of the two candidates' respective family origins as "privileged" is misleading -- Tsai's father was a businessman who made his money by working hard and investing smart, Ma owes his position to the fact that KMT murdered and imprisoned and exiled thousands of people in the 50s, 60s, and 70s to create and maintain the privileges of individuals like Ma. Yeah, I'm not going to let you forget what Ma comes from, since the international media has declared discussion of Taiwan's authoritarian past off limits in relation to Ma.

Still, it's good to see AP out there reporting, however reluctantly, that Tsai is running a powerful campaign.

TIME interviewed both candidates. Ma is totally on message, speaking to the foreign audience from its own perspective, China policy, weapons sales, etc. I like the way that Tsai mentions Taiwan is one of many nations facing the China problem (end of the interview). Ma seldom speaks as if he thought of Taiwan were a nation in the family of nations; for Tsai this is automatic.

Lots can happen in the next six weeks, but Tsai has positioned herself well. Ballots and Bullets has a nice piece by Dr Jon Sullivan on the ineptitude currently governing the KMT campaign that is partly responsible for her growing success.

Lately many of us have been privately discussing what sort of dirty tricks the KMT will pull in the last few weeks of the election. Frozen Garlic openly wondered if this election was going to get really nasty. As if in response, Dr Sullivan also wrote about one of them most common and important KMT smear tactics -- accusing the DPP of dirty tricks. However, Sullivan has actually written a paper on the topic, which he references:

Using empirical data derived from seven presidential and subnational campaigns between 1996 and 2008, our models provide a robust picture of campaign behaviour in Taiwan. Our findings simply do not support Ma’s (or many of his predecessors’) concerns about DPP skulduggery. In fact, our models show that after controlling for a range of covariates (incumbency, closeness of the race, time to election etc), there are no statistically significant differences between the two main parties in terms of their proclivity to ‘go negative’ or to engage in a certain type of negative campaigning.

There is, however, a statistically significant difference between the parties in terms of what we (euphemistically) call in the paper ‘negative strategic appeals’. This includes the type of claim that Ma made yesterday, and our models suggest this is true to form. Indeed, it is so spot on that I will simply excerpt the relevent paragraph from the paper’s conclusion:

Go forth and read! J Michael Cole pointed to what he sees as a crucial story -- if Tsai is elected, there will be a four month interregnum before she takes over in which the KMT can do all sorts of dirty tricks. I don't know how ugly things will get in that event -- remember this is the party that has staged riots after election losses, so they don't take losing well -- but you can be certain that this period will be filled with massive giveaways of government assets to favored corporate backers, as usual -- but on a much accelerated basis....
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Daily Links

• Russell Hsiao calls for recognition of Taiwan
• Frozen Garlic on the 34 party list seats for the legislature. And looks at the fairness of the legislative districting which I think inherently favors the KMT but which he argues is still biased toward the KMT but not too strongly.
• Pinyin Info with a look at Google's weird Chinese in its Taipei maps.
• Internet Meme hilarity: customer reviews of Lt Pike's pepper spray: ‎"Don't be sucked in by the 1.3% pepper spray -- this is all you need to stop democracy in its tracks before it infects an entire society."

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[Taiwan] Don't miss the comments below! And check out my blog and its sidebars for events, links to previous posts and picture posts, and scores of links to other Taiwan blogs and forums! Delenda est, baby.

AP: Second term, Ma may go for political talks. Also: sky blue, earth round

I remain both fascinated and amused by the way both journalists and the public seem to regard Wikileaks trove of US diplomatic cables as a kind of glimpse of the sordid but real truth that the shiny surfaces of diplomacy is hiding, a sort of modern version of Procopius' Secret History but without all the juicy sexual allegations. Sadly. It would probably be much more entertaining to see who Ma was sleeping with, than what pap his people are feeding the Americans. AIT, get on it!

The latest version of this reliance on the truthiness of Wikileaks is AP's stentorian piece on the Wikileaks reports that Ma's vice president Vincent Siew told then AIT head Stephen Young that Ma might go for political talks in Ma's second term. AP says:

The WikiLeaks cable, dated June 30, 2009, quoted Siew as saying that political talks during a possible Ma second term would address key issues including "a peace treaty, a formal end to hostilities, and development of bilateral military confidence mechanisms" with China.

In the past, Ma has conditioned the opening of political discussions with Beijing on China's removal of the estimated 1,300 missiles it has aimed at Taiwanese targets. However, there was no mention of this condition in the cable

If you read the entire cable (here) you'll find that it is full of the standard bullshit the KMT always feeds its US listeners. I'm sure Stephen Young, a veteran of several years here, knew perfectly well what he was reporting. For example, Siew says that the beef issue would be resolved soon (hahahhaha -- if only). The Veep also promised to dialogue with the DPP (hahahahahaha). What does the Wikileaks report actually say?

If Ma is re-elected in 2012, observed the Vice President, the administration will confront the more difficult challenge of resolving outstanding cross-Strait political issues, including a peace treaty, a formal end to hostilities, and development of bilateral military confidence mechanisms. These "highly political" issues will be controversial in Taiwan, said Siew, but should be able to build on four years of cooperative engagement on economic issues.

This is about as vague as vague can be. Make up your own mind -- did Siew actually say it as AP says he did? Then look at what it is sandwiched between -- BS about beef above, BS about the DPP below. Siew is just talking; he probably didn't mention the missile condition because, as Young notes, he was fresh out of surgery and not at his best. Not because of some secret nefarious plot -- anyone following events knows that Ma doesn't give a fig for Chinese missiles one way or another; the "condition" is purely for public consumption.

I have two other objections to the AP report. First, any fool could have seen that if political talks were to be held, they were going to held in Ma's second term since if public talks began in the first term Ma would never get re-elected. Pure logic, no Wikileaks needed. Indeed, Ma's KMT underlings still will need to be elected in his second term, and public displeasure at open political talks would definitely hurt their changes.  Political talks will no doubt be held out of public sight, as.....

....as they are now. Second, and more importantly, political talks are already being held, privately and constantly. Does anyone believe that when Lien Chan visited in 2005, the discussion wasn't about politics? Don't the KMT and CCP communicate regularly to update each other about what's going on? When Washington, Taipei, and Beijing coordinated their approach to the F-16 sale, d'ya think the talks weren't political?

Indeed, the extent to which the KMT and CCP cooperate is largely kept out of the foreign media, enabling foreign journalists to pretend that a Chinese Wall separates them, bridged only by salvos of businessmen and tourists -- and thus, any bid to cross that wall is Real News. But it is a media construct, not reality.

Think AP will report on any of that truly important story?
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Congress lurches toward F-16s as DoD reports

AP reports that Congress might actually bestir itself and sell the F-16s to Taiwan; it seems that this has strong support on both sides of the aisle.

In May, nearly half of the Democrat-led Senate sent a letter urging Obama to authorize the deal. There is likely even broader support in the Republican-controlled House.

Giving the green light would set back Obama's efforts to cultivate a stable, cooperative relationship with China, which has reacted to previous arms sales to Taiwan by cutting military ties with the U.S.

This paragraph really bothered me. The rest of the piece is just boilerplate Establishment reporting terminating in AP's "split in '49" nonsense. But I don't like the way it turns Congress into the villain and Obama into the hero; the situation is quite different.

I'm very curious to see how the sale is handled in Taiwan if Congress ever actually does manage to sell the F-16s to Taiwan. I imagine that the Obama Administration will use all its powers to prevent the sale and then to delay its realization. But what will the Ma Administration do? The money simply isn't there to purchase the aircraft at the moment. It might be opportune for the Ma Administration to be able to announce a big arms sale just prior to the election, though. And then drag it out for another few years.....

Meanwhile, the DoD gave its annual 2011 report to Congress this week. The big news was that China remains focused on Taiwan, is rapidly expanding its edge over Taiwan, and appears to be conducting cyberwarfare. As one wag I know remarked, the report appears to be a lagging indicator.
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[Taiwan] Don't miss the comments below! And check out my blog and its sidebars for events, links to previous posts and picture posts, and scores of links to other Taiwan blogs and forums! Delenda est, baby.

Ma and the Senkakus in AP

The controversy over Ma's "political talks" remarks, discussed in the post below this one, obscured some other remarks that Ma made in the AP interview. Let's look at the pro-China Want China Times transcript of his remarks about the Senkakus:

++++++++++++

President Ma: Well, on the East China Sea, for instance, the Diaoyutai or Senkaku [Islands], they were actually discovered and named by the Chinese more than 600 years ago, and during the process, they were used as navigation aids and that included the sea defense of Ming and Ching dynasties, ironically, against the Japanese. There are many historical records, particularly when the kings of the Ryukyus [acceded to the throne], they actually paid tribute to mainland China, to the Ming and Ching dynasties, for almost 500 years. So during the process, there were dozens of special envoys sent by the Ming and Ching courts to officiate their inauguration, so there were [many] historical records on using those islands.[MT: note how in Ma's mind Okinawa is connected to the Senkaku claim -- the Okinawans paid tribute so the Senkakus are part of China. What does that tell you about the views of Ma and similar Chinese nationalists about Okinawa's status? And where they will go next? I hope in the next interview someone will ask his opinion of Okinawa's status? ]

The Japanese actually annexed those islands in 1895 after they had already defeated the armies and the navy of the Ching court at the end of 1894. So when the islands, including Taiwan, were ceded to Japan under the Treaty of Shimonoseki in 1895, these islands were also turned over. That is why after the war, those islands were returned to the Republic of China under not only the Instrument of Surrender but also the Sino-Japanese Peace Treaty of 1952.[MT: check these documents yourself. Think Ma is interpreting them correctly? No one but China claims this. Ma also knows that Japan annexed the islands in Jan of 1895 prior to the Treaty of Shimonoseki in April of 1895. At no time until 1969 did either Chinese government claim the Senkakus were part of China, as I have covered elsewhere and Ampotan also notes in a great post. ]

But the Japanese say that they discovered those islands in 1895 as terra nullius, so we have historical records [that are] quite clear. But, you see, these islands have been in a state of dispute for over 40 years. And for all this historical, uh, territorial dispute, which is associated with natural resources, I think the best way is to shelf the issue and then try to jointly develop resources and to have some kind of sharing. This is probably the best way to settle our disputes.[MT: "state of dispute for forty years". Ma tacitly admits that the dispute is of recent origin -- actually it is related to the announcement of oil there by Japanese scientists. ]

AP: It sounded, to me, though, like you were making a pretty good argument that there is a rightful territorial claim to those islands, and it’s not Japan’s.

President Ma: We believe these islands belong to us. Not only for historical reasons but also for geographical and geological reasons. They are geologically connected with Taiwan. They are separate from the continental shelf of Taiwan and the mainland, away from the Ryukyu Islands [Okinawa]. There is an Okinawa Trough, which could be as deep as 2,717 meters.[MT: Ma's thesis was on the Senkakus.]

On the other hand, geographically they are also closer to Taiwan than to the Ryukyu Islands. If you look at the historical records of Ryukyu, they have only 36 islands, not including the Diaoyutai Islands. Actually, the Japanese name Senkaku means, “pinnacle,” like a church pinnacle. These were actually named by the British sailors in the 16th, 17th century, when they sailed through those islands. The island has a mountain of 383 meters, which is rare in a volcanic island. And that has been used for centuries by sailors as a navigational aid. So we know that island very well; it has been visited many times by Taiwanese fishermen. Near the island there are great fishing grounds.[MT: Geographically the islands are closer to Japanese territory than Chinese, even if you count Taiwan as part of China.]

[41:49]

AP: So does the geological continuity between Taiwan and these islands mean that the Republic of China’s claim to these islands is superior to the claim of the People’s Republic of China to these islands?

President Ma: Yes. These are islands geographically, geologically belonging to the island of Taiwan. Even historical records as early as the 16th century have had records of that. But the problem is, all these historical records were actually used by mainland China and Taiwan together because it’s part of history. [MT: I think he means to say that China and Taiwan together are using the historical fancies records to advance a claim to the Senkakus.]

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GIO to AP: 'Sup, Press?

Huge week for press freedom in Taiwan... in a three-steps backward kind of way...

First, Reporters without Borders actually moved Taiwan up in the rankings this year, to 48th. Reporters without Borders had expressed concern over the apparent takeover of Public Television last month, but this did not stop them from moving Taiwan up. Note that under Ma press freedom has tumbled -- we were generally ranked in the 30s under the Chen Administration, and third in Asia (we are now seventh). UPDATE: Klaus corrects me:

2004: 60
2005: 51
2006: 43
2007: 32
2008: 36
2009: 59
2010: 48

The big media news, however, was the controversy over AP's reporting of an interview of President Ma Ying-jeou by veteran reporter Peter Enav. The Taipei Times has complete coverage in its excellent article today:

A controversy surrounding an Associated Press (AP) interview with President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) took a new turn yesterday after Government Information Office (GIO) Minister Johnny Chiang (江啟臣) sent a letter to John Daniszewski, the international editor at AP, requesting that the news agency “investigate the causes of distortions in the interview piece” and make corrections as soon as possible.

At the heart of the controversy is a section of the interview published by AP on Tuesday where Ma’s remarks are portrayed as suggesting that sensitive political talks with Beijing, including security issues, could start as early as his second four-year term, provided he is re-elected in 2012.

Ma denies providing a timeline or tying such talks to his re-election.

In a press statement, the GIO said AP did not “correctly reflect” the views expressed by Ma during the interview and “misled” readers by printing remarks that Ma did not make, which “runs against the code of ethics universally adopted in international journalism.”

The Taipei Times has a transcript from the Presidential office, which it compares to the AP interview.

I've had my differences with AP as an organization, most notably over the ridiculously inaccurate and remarkably pro-Beijing "split in 1949" formula. But AP's local reporting is generally sound and sober and Enav is, more importantly, a total professional. The GIO accusations are, in my view, groundless, which should lead the observer to ask why they are being made. The Taipei Times notes in an editorial:

A closer look at the transcript, however, clearly shows Ma responding to an AP question — “if economic issues are resolved during your second term, during that term, you might move on to political questions?” — by saying: “As I said, it depends on how fast we move, whether these issues are satisfactorily resolved.”

It is therefore reasonable for the AP to quote Ma as having “suggested that those political talks could start as early as a second four-year term if he wins re-election in 2012.”

On Tuesday night, Ma stressed that what he said was that “the government would not start political talks with China before it completed negotiations on economic issues.”

However, that very statement rings a horrifying tune to the ears of many. After all, at what point will the Ma government determine that economic issues have been resolved? Has the cross-strait Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) signed in June borne fruit for Taiwan or improved Taiwan’s economy? What about the trade imbalance between China and Taiwan?

This is really the key point of the whole "controversy" over Ma's remarks: who decides when economic affairs are "satisfactory"? Ma and the KMT. Who decides what constitutes political talks? Ma and the KMT. "Neither the legislature nor Taiwanese voters have authorized Ma to represent the country in moving on to political talks should economic issues be taken care of in his first term," concludes the Taipei Times. Yup.

Note further that the "controversy" obscures these points. By debating the when of political talks we normalize them. It has slowly become perfectly normal in the discourse to speak of a future when we have political talks with China, rather than debating whether we should have surrender negotiations political talks at all. Ma's constant invocation of political talks? not at this time! has subtly shifted the center of gravity of the discourse. Not to mention that the term political talks is itself a euphemism for unification negotiations.

Ma deploys the claim that the voters prefer the status quo in the same way. Ma is careful never to interpret the wishes of the voters as a permanent state, despite the fact that, as poll after poll shows, only something like 8-12% of the electorate wants to become part of China, and only a tiny handful of loons wants to join the PRC immediately. The status quo in Ma's discourse functions to shut off independence as a viable option -- by invoking some unspecified and perhaps democratic future in which Taiwan joins China whenever he mentions the preferences of locals for the status quo, Ma aligns the status quo with a weakly pro-unification position, rather than describing it as it actually is: a powerful signal of the preference of the majority of voters for independence in some form.

It doesn't really matter what Ma says to AP because the KMT will do whatever it wants in Ma's second term, assuming there is one (Ma has in any case said that political talks cannot be ruled out in the Chinese language press) and ignore the public, as they did with ECFA. The KMT is merely concerned that with three weeks to go in an election campaign when the KMT is taking a beating at home for its pro-China positions, the ruling party does not need another indication of Ma's pro-China views. Hence, this bit of political theatre -- a "controversy" -- to blow smoke in front of the local electorate. Note the red meat for the indignant masses: Oh noes! foreignersforeignersforeigners screwing the President.

Of course, the chilling effect of this incident on the potential future toughness of interviewers is an important side benefit. If you thought Ma's interviewers weren't fawning enough..... notable also were the claims from the pro-KMT press that Ma's English wasn't up to snuff. Helpfully, they suggested that he prepare answers beforehand if he is going to speak in English. Meaning that interviewers will have even less ability to get Ma to speak.

The real issue here is that by creating a faux "controversy" over what AP reported, the GIO has managed to divert attention from what President of the ROC and Chairman of the KMT Ma Ying-jeou actually thinks.

Which is what we should really be discussing.

REF: The pro-China Want China Times transcript is here.

UPDATE: I am bringing up Don's comment from below:

One of Ma's tics is talking about "the people of Taiwan" like an external entity that he's not a part of. Like they are children or foreigners. Quite unusual for a modern democratic leader. I also recall him after Morakot and on some other occasion using "them" and "they" to describe Taiwan's people. Very off-putting. I wonder why more voters aren't repelled by this.

In the AP interview Ma once again avoids the obvious conclusion that since the public don't want unification (which he freely acknowledges) then it's not his job to promote the diametrically opposite position. It shouldn't be a matter of "when the time is ripe" when the situation you are referring to is one that no-one apart from a sleazy parasitical minority want to see realized.

I think AP are right to stick to their guns and hope they don't backtrack. Ma tried at least twice to waffle away from Mr Enav's question but nevertheless he let the cat out of the bag: political talks with the PRC are coming as soon as he thinks it is possible, maybe even before a "2nd term".

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Daily Links

• Dangerous toys out of China make eunuchs out of curious boys.
• China's heir apparent leader has a brother in law in Taiwan.
• Changhua County Chief on junket to India.
• Spanish legacies in Taiwan
• Bill Clinton to visit Taiwan -- in mid-November. Wanna bet some private interest got him here to say something nice about ECFA just before the elections and thus intervene on behalf of the KMT? Let's hope he keeps out of local politics and just praises Taiwan for its great food and good biking. UPDATE: Don't miss J Michael's post explaining what it is all about.

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Why the International Media Sucks: Case #7961

Argh. AP's report on the upcoming frigate sale.... (Taipei Times, FOX entertainment) has an offensive, outrageous pro-China slant. Let's take a look. The opening paragraph:

A Taiwanese newspaper reported Thursday that the U.S. will sell the democratic island two warships, a move that would almost certainly anger China and further undermine Beijing's already tense relations with Washington.

1. The report says that Beijing will be angered, though this has not occurred yet. In fact that sale is not slated for approval until some time from now, and the systems involved are old and minor. Note that we are told only Beijing's projected response, not the US nor Taiwan positions on this sale. From the beginning Beijing's perspective dominates.

2. The sale "undermines" relations, a viciously negative word that again adopts a pro-Beijing viewpoint. Neutral words for effect abound in English: alter, affect, impact.... Further note that undermine normalizes Beijing's anger as a response. One could have written with equal fairness and greater respect for the truth that Beijing's policy of "being angry" undermines relations between Beijing and Washington.

After describing the proposed sale, the article continues:

Any new sale of U.S. military hardware to Taiwan could be expected to incense China. The mainland and the island split amid civil war in 1949, and Beijing sees third country involvement in the island's defense as interference in its internal affairs.

1. The bullshit "split in 1949 amid civil war" formulation again. No need to reiterate.

2. Of course we are told Beijing's perspective again. No perspective from Taiwan on how it might see Beijing. Nor are we ever told in this article why the US might want to sell weapons to Taiwan or why Taiwan might want them. The premise of the article is that the weapons sale occurs in a political and military vacuum which it disturbs.

3. Again we are told Beijing will be incensed. The article does not convey that "being incensed" is a policy decision, not a visceral reaction. The article does not provide any support for this claim, such as a quote from an expert:

A political scientist at National Taiwan University, Professor A. Frank Quisling, argues that Beijing....

Nor why Beijing will be "incensed" over the sale of two 40 year old subhunting ships, except for further down it mentions Beijing's "anger" over the last arms sale. The article also nowhere suggests that it might be inappropriate to become angered over such a puny arms sale.

Finally, wouldn't it be a good idea to wait and see what Beijing actually does, rather than propagandizing for its policy of using "anger" to manage its relations with foreign countries and to impact foreign media reporting?

AP then says:

Long dormant tensions between Washington and Beijing resurfaced last month when U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told an Asian forum in Hanoi, Vietnam, that the U.S. regarded settlement of a series of territorial disputes between China and several Asian countries in the South China Sea as being in America's national interest.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry described those comments - and Clinton's demand that the disputes be resolved through multilateral negotiations - as "an attack." China prefers to address the disputes bilaterally because it believes that approach works to its advantage.

Again we are given the Chinese perspective. No context is given for Sec of State Clinton's announcement, because of course such a context would reflect negatively on Beijing. Imagine if that paragraph had begun In response to recent aggressive moves by Beijing.... I'll bet the editors of AP wonder why people read blogs... Although the last sentence, which hints that maybe Beijing might be a bit of a bully, moves in the right direction.

Finally, the laugher:

Washington transferred recognition from Taipei to Beijing in 1979 but is legally committed to helping Taiwan defend itself against possible Chinese attack.

Dear AP: it is now 2010. The text of the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA) has been publicly available for thirty-one years. Maybe someone in the AP editor's office should read it, because nowhere in it does it require the US "to help Taiwan defend itself against possible Chinese attack." But just in case anyone is confused, please read this post, also written in response to the same AP eff-up three freaking years ago. Time to stop writing that shit, really.

Meanwhile AFP, always ready to step up to the plate and hit one out of the ballpark for Beijing, spewed:

A Chinese envoy who was shoved to the ground by a pro-independence politician on his last visit to Taiwan shrugged off the incident as he returned to the island Sunday.

"I respected Taiwan's judicial ruling" on the attack, Zhang Mingqing, the vice president of China's quasi-official Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait, said after flying into Taoyuan airport.

The incident occurred in October 2008 when Wang Ting-yu, a councillor in Tainan, and a group of his supporters pushed Zhang over as the Chinese envoy was touring the southern Taiwanese city, a hotbed of anti-China feeling.

The fracas was caught on camera and triggered fury in China, with the Beijing government calling for "severe punishment" of the attackers.

Wang was convicted of assault in September last year and sentenced to a four-month jail term. On appeal, that was reduced to a fine of 122,000 Taiwan dollars (3,800 US).

Nowhere does this article report that it is likely he only fell (see my long post with many links including videos) or even that there is an alternative story, or that the video is ambiguous, or that Zhang is a thug who has many times threatened to murder everyone in Taiwan who does not agree with his political stance. A totally slanted piece. Compare this with Taiwan News more balanced approach which takes in all sides and reports Zhang's actual role:

Zhang Mingqing, a vice chairman of the Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits, visited a park near a Confucian temple in Tainan when he was surrounded by opponents of China’s claims of sovereignty over Taiwan and landed on the ground.

Zhang accused his opponents of pushing and shoving him, but the accused said he had fallen over a tree root.

.....

Zhang first gained prominence in Taiwan as a spokesman on Taiwanese affairs in the years when China regularly issued threats against the island to underline its claims of sovereignty.

I don't actually expect AFP to improve; I merely place this here as additional data.
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AP: Peace Offer not Directed At Chen

AP strikes once more with a brilliant analysis of the Hu Jintao "peace offer."

Alexander Huang, former second-in-command at the Taiwanese government agency responsible for implementing China policy, said Hu's comments were made with the full knowledge that Chen will be leaving office next May, two months after Taiwanese voters elect a new president.

"(They were) intended for the Taiwanese ... presidential candidates, who both have a more moderate approach to China than President Chen Shui-bian," he said. "The Chinese Communist Party has decided not to deal with Chen anymore, so Hu's Taiwan proposal ... is not meant to be carried out before (Chen steps down)."

Andrew Yang of Taipei's Council of Advanced Political Studies agreed.

"Hu's remarks were directed at future elected leaders in Taiwan," he said. "The call for a peace treaty, the insistence on the one-China framework, these things are not on the agenda of the current Taiwanese leadership. And that means President Chen Shui-bian."

Gosh, what deep insight! And the media wonders why blogs are so popular. Peace offer not aimed at Chen? What next? AP: "Sun rises in East, Sets in West."

For seven years China has refused to talk to Chen Shui-bian. One wonders why, at this late date, anyone would imagine that Hu's words were aimed at Chen. Or anyone in particular -- earth to AP: Hu's words were aimed at the INTERNATIONAL MEDIA. That's you, AP. Note that AP says they were aimed at the other candidates -- that would be Frank Hsieh, longtime democracy advocate with the DPP, and Ma Ying-jeou, whose party is already working closely with Beijing (will that ever appear in the international media? Naw). Hsieh will never accept Hu's demand for surrender -- AP's analysis nowhere lets the reader know that the precondition for negotiations is that Taiwan surrender itself to China, nor that Hu announced no concrete peace measures.

Ma Ying-jeou meanwhile is described as a moderate:

Ma, a former mayor of Taipei, is even more a China policy moderate than Hsieh. His party supports eventual unification with the mainland, though Ma himself wants Beijing to dismantle the estimated 1,000 missiles it has aimed at Taiwan as a precondition to any negotiations.

Observe that AP does not mention that the DPP has been calling for the removal of the Chinese missiles for years. Instead, it credits that position to Ma -- a position his party rejected only a year ago!

But just to show you how completely disconnected from reality AP is, let's look at the last paragraph of this "analysis"....

Early polls give a 10-20 point advantage to Ma, but some analysts believe Hsieh's formidable campaigning skills and razor sharp intelligence could eventually put him over the top.

If you are dumb enough to believe the opinion polls in pan-Blue papers, you are dumb enough to believe anything. If there is a 10 point separation, it is most probably in Hsieh's favor.

[Taiwan] [media] [US] [China] [Chen Shui-bian]

AP Resurrects Mad Chen

Mad Chen continues his Mad ways...love the hugely slanted headline:

Chen seen continuing hard-line PRC policy

Remember when Chen was pragmatic and flexible? My, how a thousand missiles can change things. AP goes on to explain:

Several Taiwanese newspapers said yesterday that Chen has decided to pick a loyalist, former Premier Chang Chun-hsiung (張俊雄), to succeed Su, an appointment expected to be announced today.

"Chen Shui-bian would thus have a full control over the Cabinet and on the other hand also set the tune for the 2008 race" for the DPP, the mass-market United Daily News reported.

UDN is a "mass-market" paper?!! The presentation here is completely disingenuous. The AP writer must know that the "analysis" being presented is in a pro-KMT paper that obsessively hates Chen Shui-bian. Yet no identification of the paper's political allegiance is given. This reflects either abysmal laziness, naked bias, or complete incompetence. Readers are invited to choose. AP then maunders on:

Chen has enraged China by seeking a separate identity for Taiwan while underscoring the self-ruled island's sovereignty. Hsieh, on the other hand, is known to favor closer ties with its giant neighbor.

However, Hsieh is unlikely to have a major role in policymaking in the run-up to the 2008 polls, political scientist Hsu Yung-ming (徐永明) said.

I wonder if AP will point out that China has enraged Taiwan by pointing missiles at it and threatening to murder Taiwanese whenever they exercise their democracy. Naw. That would make it look like Beijing was somehow a part of the problem, which this article is studiously trying to avoid. The obsessive focus on the actions of Chen Shui-bian is a marker that either the source or the reporter are pro-China, or both.

More seriously -- I've made this point before, but it can't be made enough -- China chooses to be provoked, for the same reason an elderly matron becomes incensed at the behavior of her servants: it gets instant results. For China, being provoked is a policy option that is very effective. It is a shame that AP has chosen to simply regurgitate this shallow thinking, rather than interrogate this claim to see what it might mean. Such reporting only encourages the authoritarians on the other side of the Strait by confirming that they have adopted the right approach.

Chen's immense power is guaranteed by the constitution, preventing him from becoming a lame duck president in his last year.

Under Taiwan's political system, the president appoints the premier, the island's second most powerful person, who oversees day-to-day government. As his power comes from the president, the premier would try to avoid confronting the top leader.

If Chang is appointed, he is expected to support Chen's hard-line policy toward rival China, refraining from taking steps to allow more Chinese tourists to visit Taiwan or sanctioning regular weekend direct charter flights between the sides, Hsu said.

This section contains several false claims. First, the Chen administration is not "refraining from allowing more Chinese tourists" but is encouraging Chinese tourism. Premier Su said last month:

Premier Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) said at the Legislative Yuan that welcoming Chinese tourists to visit Taiwan was an established governmental policy, although some details require more discussion.......

The MAC earlier this year said that Taiwanese representatives had reached a consensus with China on allowing 1,000 Chinese visitors to come to Taiwan per day for sightseeing.

According to rules jointly formulated by the MAC, the Ministry of Interior and the Ministry of Transportation and Communications, Chinese who are permitted to come to Taiwan fall into three categories: visitors coming for sightseeing via Hong Kong and Macau; visitors coming after or before they visit a third country or conduct business trips overseas; and visitors residing abroad permanently or studying overseas.

If all the negotiations on the tourist issue are settled, these three categories will be canceled and Chinese visitors will no longer be categorized according to these rules, according to the council.

Having Chinese tourists here is established policy, and the Chen administration has been working on getting them here since 2001.

The article also refers to Chen's "immense" powers, but in fact the powers of the President are much circumscribed and the office itself is weak. Nor are the powers of the Premier well-defined. Taiwan's government was never meant to function as a government, but was simply the exoskeleton of a one-party state. That is why both the KMT and the DPP have supported Constitutional reform for most of the last twenty years. The article then goes on to make some dramatically slanted claims:

Taiwanese businesspeople have long pressured the government to allow more travel and trade with the mainland to help stimulate the island's sputtering economy. Chen has refused to relax his China policies, saying any concessions would undermine the island's sovereignty.

At moment a million Taiwanese businessmen are in China. Chinese tourists flock to the outlying islands. Chinese media organizations operate in Taiwan, and two Taiwan media firms, TVBS, and Apple Daily, are Chinese-owned.

None of this was possible under the KMT. Here's a striking fact: the DPP is the most open to China of any government of the last 60 years.

As the party's presidential candidate, Hsieh is expected to refrain from openly advocating reconciliation with China to avoid conflicts with Chen during the presidential campaign.

"If Taiwan ever softens its policy toward China, it would come after the 2008 race, not before," Hsu said.

Clearly both the reporter and the source are pro-KMT. It is sad that the AP regurgitates this nonsense as if it were serious analysis -- sad that AP resurrects the Zombie Monster Mad Chen to set him loose on Frank Hsieh. Surely a major international news organization is capable of reporting at a higher level than this.

[Taiwan] [DPP] [KMT] [Frank Hsieh] [media] [2008 Presidential Election] [China]

Letter: absolutely the last word on AP and Lu

The Taipei Times was kind enough to run my letter on the AP's use of the "scum of nation" in describing Vice President Lu:

What AP Did

The recent "scum of the nation" flap, and the response to it from the Taipei Times, Associated Press (AP) and other organizations, shows that the media still do not understand why Vice President Annette Lu (呂秀蓮) -- along with those of us who follow international media coverage of Taiwan -- find the story so offensive.

The issue is not, as the Taipei Times framed it in a recent editorial ("Annette Lu tames the world press," March 10, page 8), one of naive bias on the part of CNN and AP. Nobody is accusing either organization of slanting stories to favor China. Rather, the issue is the foreign media's uncritical incorporation of propaganda from Beijing into its reporting on Taiwan in a way that is automatic and unconsidered, allowing those opinions to shape its discourse on the nation, instead of developing a robust understanding of Taiwan in its own context.

(more)

For historical purposes, here is the paragraph on the assassination attempt in its entirety as originally written:

"Near the end of the article the writer refers to the assassination attempt by a pan-Blue supporter on Chen and Lu in 2004, noting "The opposition alleged the shooting was staged to win sympathy votes." Fundamentally, there was no reason to mention the shooting; it is irrelevant to Lu's presidential candidacy. The use of "the opposition" coyly refuses to name the KMT (the failure to use "Chinese Nationalist Party" as the correct name of the KMT is widespread in the international media). The writer also failed to mention that no evidence supports the opposition claims, making a hollow pretense of the sound journalistic ethic of balance in ssigning equal weight to nonsense claims, and using the phrase "the police said" as if no investigation was conducted and no chain of evidence was followed. Note that opposition's claim is set off in a sentence of its own, and that it comes last in the discussion of the assassination attempt. It goes with saying that Beijing supports the opposition on that one."

The editor was forced to shrink it a little; my habit of writing long sentences filled with parenthetical comments doesn't really work in the newspaper context. One thing I could kick myself for was forgetting to mention how the Scum of the Nation flap illustrated yet another silly habit of the international media -- its reliance on people based in Beijing and Hong Kong for commentary on Taiwan. As Tetsuo at Forumosa put it, commenting on another blog, that is like asking your Washington DC correspondent for a report on what is going on Canberra.

[Taiwan] [media] [AP] [Annette Lu]

Media Problems in the AP on Ma Indictment

Peter Enav of AP filed an article last night on the Ma Ying-jeou indictments....it mostly covers ground I covered in the post below. I just want to highlight this all-too-common annoyance:

The indictment could well put a damper on chances for a thaw in Taiwan's perennially troubled relations with China. Beijing is believed to have high hopes that a Ma victory in the 2008 presidential elections would help lead the way to eventual reunification of the rivals, which split amid civil war in 1949.

Taiwan did not split with China in 1949. It was not part of China in 1949, but was administered jointly by the ROC and the US under UN auspices, sovereignty at that time belong to Japan and would until 1952. Rather, the KMT and the CCP split in 1949. This claim that Enav makes is totally common in the media, and totally wrong. Let's not even get into the use of Beijing's terminology, unification.....

I just loved this:

Chang added that Ma gave contradictory explanations to officials investigating how the money was handled.

Remember when the prosecutors said Chen Shui-bian gave conflicting explanations? That little tidbit from the prosecutor has to be deliberate.

[Taiwan] [China] [Chen Shui-bian] [media] [corruption] [Ma Ying-jeou]