DPP bill
calls for poll on cross-strait agreements
By Rich Chang
STAFF REPORTER
Thursday, Oct 16, 2008, Page 1
The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) caucus yesterday proposed a draft bill
that would require any cross-strait agreements on issues concerning “critical
national interests” be put to a referendum and decided on by Taiwanese voters.
“The proposed bill prohibits the government from authorizing civil groups to
sign agreements between Taiwan and China on issues that concern national
defense, diplomacy, finance and economics,” DPP caucus whip William Lai (賴清德)
told a press conference.
Under the proposed bill, before the government signs any agreements with China,
the Executive Yuan must submit drafts of the agreements to the Legislative Yuan.
Those drafts must then be negotiated and passed by respective legislative
committees and the agreements could only take effect after gaining the approval
of Taiwanese voters in a referendum.
“The spirit of the bill is to make sure that Taiwan’s future is decided by its
23 million people,” Lai said, adding that such major agreements as the Closer
Economic Partnership Arrangement (CEPA) with China must first obtain the
approval of Taiwanese voters via a referendum.
DPP Legislator Chen Chi-yu (陳啟昱) said the proposed bill was also aimed at
strengthening the Legislative Yuan’s monitoring system and supervising
cross-strait agreements undertaken by the Executive Yuan on national issues.
As an example of why the bill was needed, Chen said that this June after an
agreement on cross-strait charter flight services was signed by Taiwan’s Straits
Exchange Foundation and its Chinese counterpart, “[President Ma Ying-jeou’s
(馬英九) government] was oblivious to the legislature’s supervision but only
informed the legislature later via an administrative directive.”
On agreements to be signed by civil groups authorized by the Mainland Affairs
Council, the proposed bill said that the Executive Yuan must agree to the items
and talk them over with the legislature before the agreement is signed.
Lai yesterday said that the caucus would send the proposed bill to the
legislative Procedure Committee for approval next week.
When asked for comment, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus secretary-general
Chang Sho-wen (張碩文) dismissed the need for such a bill. Chang said the
Legislative Yuan should deliberate over the content of the proposal as it might
constitute a legislative interference in the executive branch.
Chang added that he would urge the Executive Yuan to propose its own version of
the bill.
Beijing
orders sweeping dairy product tests
BLANKET WITHDRAWAL: China’s
quality watchdog ordered all milk powder and liquid milk produced before Sept.
14 pulled from shelves and tested for melamine
AP, BEIJING
Thursday, Oct 16, 2008, Page 1
China sought to reassure Taiwanese consumers that its dairy products were safe
yesterday, a day after authorities confirmed that a toddler in Hong Kong
developed kidney stones from consuming milk and cookies laced with melamine.
Beijing has ordered that all milk products more than a month old be pulled for
testing.
Spokesman Yang Yi (楊毅) of China’s Taiwan Affairs Office said at a news
conference in Beijing that authorities were very concerned about the scandal, in
which contaminated infant formula killed four babies and sickened tens of
thousands of children nationwide.
“We have taken a serious approach,” Yang said. “China has launched a thorough
investigation into this issue to help restore the trust of Taiwanese consumers.”
After China’s melamine scandal broke last month, Taiwanese authorities launched
a sweeping inspection of milk powders and related food items. More than 160
products containing Chinese milk and vegetable-based proteins have been removed
from stores.
Taiwanese and Chinese food safety authorities have agreed to set up a hot line
to inform each other of food safety emergencies.
China has ordered all milk products more than a month old pulled from store
shelves for emergency testing, the largest blanket product withdrawal since the
scandal first came to light.
All milk powder and liquid milk produced before Sept. 14 must be tested by
manufacturers nationwide, China’s chief quality watchdog said in an announcement
reported by the Xinhua news agency on Tuesday and posted on its Web site
yesterday.
“Regardless of the brand or the batch, they must be taken off shelves. Their
sale must be stopped,” the order from the General Administration of Quality
Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine said.
Products will be sold again only after they pass quality tests and are labeled
as saying they do not exceed limits for melamine, the safety watchdog said.
It was not clear why the cutoff date for the latest notice was Sept. 14, but
China launched a countrywide inspection of dairy-producing facilities focusing
on milk collecting centers on Sept. 15.
In Vietnam, state-controlled media said yesterday the Health Ministry has banned
all products for human consumption that are contaminated with melamine.
Deputy Health Minister Cao Minh Quang also told the Labor newspaper that
importers must send back any tainted imported products to the country of origin.
Chinese authorities have blamed dairy suppliers for the food safety scandal that
began last month, saying they added melamine to watered-down milk to fool
quality control tests and make the product appear rich in protein.
Melamine can cause kidney stones as the body tries to eliminate it and, in
extreme cases, lead to life-threatening kidney failure.
Infants and toddlers are particularly susceptible.
Hong Kong’s government said on Tuesday that a two-year-old boy developed two
kidney stones after consuming melamine-laced milk and cookies.
Government spokesman Alex Cheng said the boy had been drinking three packs of
milk produced by Chinese dairy Yili Industrial Group Co each week for the past
two years. He also ate about five packs per week of chocolate-filled Koala
cookies, made by Tokyo-based snack maker Lotte Group.
The Cairo
Declaration, 65 years on
By Jerome Keating
Thursday, Oct 16, 2008, Page 8
The 65th anniversary of the Cairo Declaration (Dec. 1, 1943) approaches and I
have always wondered at its rhetoric as well as how often this simple
declaration is used by some to justify China’s claim to Taiwan, which was called
Formosa at the time.
Let us grant that the declaration was made in wartime, and that it would require
rhetorical wording to rally the troops to the righteousness of a cause. Granted,
it was a statement and not a treaty. It had no legal force; there were no
binding commitments. It was also made at a time when, although the darkest hour
of the war was past, there was much more to come. For some, the concern that
Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) might sign a private peace treaty with Japan and opt out
of the war remained. Look past that, however, and focus on one simple, neglected
aspect: the rhetoric involved and the problems that arose from this.
The declaration states: “The three great Allies are fighting this war to
restrain and punish the aggression of Japan. They covet no gain for themselves
and have no thought of territorial expansion. It is their purpose that Japan
shall be stripped of all the islands in the Pacific which she has seized or
occupied since the beginning of the First World War in 1914, and that all the
territories Japan has stolen from the Chinese, such as Manchuria, Formosa and
the Pescadores, shall be restored to the Republic of China.”
A quick check reveals that Japan secured Formosa in the legitimate Treaty of
Shimonoseki (1895) at the end of a war with the Qing Dynasty. It was a war that
both countries entered because each wanted a controlling influence in Korea. The
primary issue in 1895 was control over Korea; Formosa was given away to keep
Korea free. The Republic of China was not yet formed, nor the People’s Republic
of China.
Questions arise from this. Did Japan actually steal Formosa? Do all treaties
represent or involve stealing? If so, who did Japan steal Formosa from? Did it
steal Formosa from the Chinese or was it the Manchu Qing Dynasty that had
conquered China as well as Manchuria, Tibet and parts of Formosa? Did the
Chinese ever own Formosa? Who were the Chinese on Formosa?
Certainly there were Chinese people that had come to Formosa, but many of them,
aside from Qing bureaucrats, came illegally to escape their lives under the Qing.
In addition, no country had controlled the whole island of Taiwan before the
Japanese.
The western half of Taiwan was governed by the Qing and that half became a
province in 1885 — 10 years before the 1895 treaty — but the other half was
Aboriginal territory. The Qing surely had designs on the lands of those
“uncooked savages” and acquiring that land would clearly be stealing.
Even on the land governed by the Qing, history records a tenuous rule there with
an uprising every three years and a rebellion every five. In the treaty of 1895,
the Qing government was getting rid of its troublesome half of the island. The
remaining land was not the Qing government’s to give. It didn’t mind Japan
“stealing” it.
The Cairo Declaration has additional nebulous aspects; unfortunately in all of
this no one ever asked the Taiwanese and Aborigines what they wanted. Even if
one thinks that US President Franklin D. Roosevelt was trying to do the right
thing, one needs only to look at the Tehran Conference immediately following,
when Roosevelt agreed to let Stalin redraw the borders of Poland so that he
could “steal” some Polish territory.
Wartime rhetoric yes, but more than a half century has passed. The Treaty of San
Francisco never stated who Japan should give Taiwan to.
A faint ray of hope appears when you force the US government into a corner and
ask what the status of Taiwan is: The answer is that it is still “undecided.”
Even the “one China” mantra that the US State Department constantly trots out
simply means the US acknowledges that China thinks it owns Taiwan.
But that mantra leaves unsaid that the official US position is that Taiwan’s
fate is undecided.
Undecided? Isn’t it time to end this circuitous rhetoric? Here we are, some 63
years after the end of World War II, and the fate of 23 million people in a
thriving, hard-won democracy is still “undecided.” Ironically, after that war,
the UN charter states that all people have the right to self-determination. All,
that is, except 23 million Taiwanese.
One can excuse the rhetoric of the Cairo Declaration as a result of the
circumstances. But now it is time to see it for what it was and to right its
results. It is a great shame for the US and the rest of the world community not
to recognize Taiwan’s right to self-determination. It is also time to recognize
that the real greed and threat to stability in the Taiwan Strait is from China,
and not the freedom-loving people of Taiwan. It is time to give Taiwan a place
in the UN — not in the kow-towing, mealy mouthed, fawning approach of the Ma
Ying-jeou (馬英九) government, but in the simple straight-forward recognition that
free people deserve the recognition of their freedom and their land.
If there is anyone that wants to steal Taiwan from its people, it is the PRC.
Taiwan belongs to the Taiwanese. Taiwan is Taiwan, China is China. That is not
rhetoric, that’s fact. It is time the world acknowledges this.
Jerome Keating is a writer based in
Taipei.