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Democratic Taiwan needs ECFA referendum
This is an interview by staff reporter Vincent Y. Chao with Taiwan Solidarity
Union Chairman Huang Kun-huei on the signing of an economic cooperation
framework agreement.
By Vincent Y. Chao
STAFF REPORTER
Monday, Jun 28, 2010, Page 3
Taiwan Solidarity Union Chairman Huang Kun-huei,
second right, World United Formosans for Independence chairman Ng Chiautong,
third left, Taiwan Friends Association president Hwang Kun-hu, first left, and
other participants cheer as former president Lee Teng-hui, third right,
addresses a rally in Taipei on Saturday backing demands for a referendum on the
proposed cross-strait economic 苞ooperation framework agreement.
PHOTO: LIAO CHEN-HUEI, TAIPEI TIMES
Taipei Times (TT): The government released the ECFA’s early harvest lists —
goods and services that will be subject to immediate tariff reductions — for the
first time on Thursday. It looks like the list will favor Taiwanese exporters as
China will lower tariffs for 539 Taiwanese items, Taiwan’s market will open up
to 267 items from China. What’s your thoughts on this list?
Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU) Chairman Huang Kun-huei (黃昆輝): All these figures
that the government talks about don’t reflect the true realities of an ECFA.
What we are concerned about is neither Taiwan nor China’s early harvest list of
tariff reductions, but instead the continued opening of Taiwan’s market to China
— a move that could liberalize up to 90 percent of China’s exports toward Taiwan
in 10 years.
Under the WTO [both Taiwan and China are members of the WTO] regulations, both
sides will have to significantly lower customs barriers ... 10 years after the
agreement is signed. So, while we see that Taiwan has more goods and services
subject to tariff reductions than China, we have to take into account that this
is only the first negotiations.
For example, the government says that agricultural goods won’t be liberalized,
but this is only for now, what about the future? The labor market is the same:
It’s not open for now, but how about in the future?
TT: Which exactly is this WTO regulation that you mentioned?
Huang: The WTO’s regulations state that if a free-trade Agreement (FTA) is
signed between two member countries, trade between the two must be liberalized
by up to 90 percent within a decade. So, if the government considers [an ECFA]
to be an FTA under the WTO framework, or a transition toward an FTA, we must
accept WTO regulations.
So when they say that agricultural products won’t be opened, it is only for now
that we have not included them in our early harvest list. But in the future?
Every six months, we have to reopen negotiations, every year twice and in 10
years we will have had 20 meetings that will deliberately and continuously tear
down our trade barriers.
TT: So far, we have heard mixed comments from government officials on whether an
ECFA would constitute an FTA. Based on your understanding, is an ECFA an FTA?
Huang: Currently, the talks between Taiwan and China on an ECFA seem to treat it
like a transitional agreement to an FTA, but it is very ambiguous. After we sign
an ECFA, we will have to meet two challenges: If we recognize that this is an
FTA, we will have to open up our market. But on the other hand, if we don’t want
to follow WTO regulations, then an ECFA will entirely become a domestic law.
Under a domestic law, China will assume a commanding position and Taiwan will be
entirely subject to Chinese authority.
However, as I see it, [an ECFA] should count as a transitional agreement to an
FTA.
TT: One of the arguments your party has used to oppose the signing of an ECFA is
the fear that the trade pact would result in Taiwan becoming part of a “one
China market” — a concern the government has denied. The government says the
talks have not infringed on Taiwan’s sovereignty, what are you views toward
this?
Huang: The Chinese side has already made their position very clear — that
signing an ECFA takes place under the “one China framework.” An ECFA is the
start of a “one China” market — which Taiwan’s market would become part of and
be locked into.
We have to ask ourselves why we cannot just sign an FTA with them; after all, we
are both WTO members that have equal rights and responsibilities. Instead, we
have to sign an ECFA that degrades our status — a move that puts Taiwan and Hong
Kong into the same category. Both Hong Kong and Macau have Closer Economic
Partnership Arrangements (CEPA) with China, both of which are not FTAs.
China wants to complete its unification goals by first signing the CEPAs and
then an ECFA with Taiwan.
TT: You allege that China harbors dangerous political ambitions toward Taiwan.
How does this affect the signing of an ECFA and your opposition to it?
Huang: China’s strategy has been very clear since 2008 — they want to unify
Taiwan through the use of economic integration and use this to move toward
political unification. China’s policies are to use its business clout to
further its political interests and use economics to influence politics.
Let’s think about this, if our economy is entirely under their control and we
lose our financial independence, it will be very hard to maintain our political
sovereignty.
Taiwan’s democracy is based on the foundation of a strong middle class, but when
this middle class becomes destitute, how will we maintain our democratic ideals?
No one can say that politics is politics and economics is economics — it’s not
like that. Politics and the economy are directly related, they are interlocked
and cannot be separated.
It’s not easy for China to attack Taiwan; after all we live in a highly
internationalized society. At the same time, Taiwanese will also not accept both
sides heading into political negotiations.
Instead, they are aiming to give Taiwan short-term economic benefits and
undermine Taiwan’s business and economy — moves that are easier for them to
undertake.
TT: You have said on previous occasions that the government has not carefully
analyzed an ECFA’s impact on Taiwan, politically and economically. At the same
time, you have focused much of your criticism on an ECFA’s potential impact on
Taiwan’s middle class salaries and traditional industries, why is that?
Huang: Let’s start with traditional industries. Now, I have said previously that
the part we are most concerned about in an ECFA is that market liberalization
will continue to take place after it is signed. Taiwan has a small market, it
really cannot stand up to an influx of cheaper goods from China.
Our traditional industries are focused on selling to Taiwan’s own domestic
market. The import of cheaper Chinese products will eventually replace our own
industries.
On the other hand, the bulk of Taiwan’s export-oriented industries have already
moved to China. You won’t find some of Taiwan’s high technology sectors on the
early harvest list at all because China wants them to move their entire
factories over there.
They want to use our investment dollars to manufacture goods in China and sell
them overseas, which allows them to accrue foreign current holdings. Our
factories in China also provide their labor market with job opportunities.
How will Taiwan survive if our export-oriented industries relocate to China and
our domestic market-oriented companies are replaced because of competition from
Chinese products?
And now the government even wants to open up Taiwan’s services sector to China —
a move that will expose our middle class white collar workers to competition
from the Chinese work force and their lower wages. Our wages are currently high,
while China’s are low. If we were to equalize our salaries, the money that we
make would be reduced.
Currently, our university graduates are happy if they can earn NT$20,000 to
NT$22,000 a month after graduation. But at the end of president Lee Teng-hui’s
(李登輝) presidency in 2000, our university graduates were already making NT$30,000
a month. Our wages have gone down and it’s because our investments and our
industries have gone to China. Our industries are empty now and our job
opportunities are gone.
In a recent job recruitment fair, 40 vacant positions were contested by
thousands of people. The newly hired are happy that they’ve been accepted, how
are they going to ask for higher wages?
That’s the way it will be. I believe that because of an ECFA, future Taiwanese
employment will be limited to low-wage, low-skilled jobs marked by high work
hours and no benefits. How can we say that an ECFA will not have a huge impact
on Taiwan’s middle class?
TT: These arguments you use against an ECFA, including lower wages and affected
industries, are often heard before FTA negotiations worldwide, including when
the US signed the North American Free-Trade Agreement with Mexico and Canada.
However, these concerns have often failed to materialize or have proven not to
be serious issues after the agreement is signed. Could this not be the case here
in Taiwan?
Huang: The signing of an FTA will more or less have similar effects around the
world — but the signing of an ECFA between Taiwan and China is different. We
have to take into account the cultural and linguistic similarities between both
sides. While the FTA between the US and Mexico has its impact, Taiwan’s will be
much more serious because of these similarities.
Let’s use the US fast food chain McDonalds as an example, after it came to
Taiwan, it had a direct impact on [Taiwanese restaurants]. Our competition with
the US is a competition between steamed buns and hamburgers; but some people
don’t like to eat hamburgers. On the other hand, our competition with China is
between steamed buns and steamed buns, their products compete directly with
ours.
What I mean is that any competition between two other countries will always have
its slight differences in goods and products, but these differences are very
small when it comes to Taiwan and China.
Furthermore, when we talk about differences between an ECFA and other FTAs, we
cannot but take into account political considerations. While the US does not
want to annex Mexico, China has very publicly said that it wants to one day
unify with Taiwan.
Signing an ECFA sends the international community the wrong message. It says
that Taiwan wants to be part of China, like Hong Kong and Macau. It makes it
seem that Taiwanese development is entirely dependent on China.
The fact is, instead of reaching out internationally, an ECFA locks Taiwan into
a “one China” framework. The government insists that an ECFA has to be signed
... but in all this time that we haven’t yet signed the agreement, hasn’t Taiwan
continued to move forward?
Taipei Times (TT): You have advocated that an economic cooperation framework
agreement (ECFA) should first be subject to a public referendum before it is
signed. Why do you believe it is so important that the public vote on the
proposal?
Huang Kun-huei (黃昆輝): The government continues to say that signing an ECFA will
benefit Taiwan, but it never talks about the potential negative impacts. They
make the proposal sound very good, but economists, opposition parties and
members of the public have raised many concerns about this ECFA — concerns that
the government has yet to fully address.
While everybody can agree that an ECFA is a piece of important national policy,
that it’s an agreement that will affect Taiwan’s economy and possibly have an
impact on our country’s future development, it is nevertheless an extremely
controversial agreement. Under these circumstances ... it should be up to the
public to make a final decision in a nationwide referendum. We should let the
people have the final responsibility for agreeing to this proposal.
When we say that we want a referendum, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it will
be voted down. In fact, the government should see the referendum as a
confirmation by the people of its policies. After all, the government’s power
and authority ultimately come from the people and it should recognize this.
Since there has been so much controversy, so much debate over an ECFA, it’s
clear that the agreement should be decided democratically, using the most
democratic method — a referendum — to resolve this issue. The government should
not just say that it will go ahead and sign this agreement unilaterally. This
should not be happening.
TT: The Referendum Review Committee has twice rejected proposals by both the
TSU and the Democratic Progressive Party [DPP] to hold a referendum on the
issue. In a 12-to-four ruling earlier this month, the committee ruled that your
referendum question was in violation of Article 14, Section 1.4 under the
Referendum Act (公民投票法) because of a contradiction in its content. What are your
thoughts on this?
Huang: The [review] committee wrote off our referendum proposal based on
completely illogical reasons. I don’t think there is a single country that
places such limits on how we should write the text of a referendum question or
how we should style the question.
We have to take into account that the Central Election Commission — the
governing body of the Referendum Act — already ruled earlier that they did not
believe our referendum proposal had a contradiction in its content. In a full
committee decision, it said it did not find any conflicts with our proposal and
Article 14, Section 1 of the act.
Under the Referendum Act, the review committee is only responsible for
determining whether a referendum question is based on one of four issues allowed
under law: the review of a law, the initiation or review of legislative
procedures, the initiation or review of important policies or an amendment to
the constitution. Our ECFA proposal clearly falls under the review of an
important policy issue.
On the other hand, it also looks for issues that are prohibited from being put
to a referendum — investment, tax and government personnel-related decisions.
Those are issues that our ECFA referendum question did not address.
So when the review committee rejected our proposal by saying that there was a
contradiction in our referendum content — a finding that directly contradicted
the previous ruling by the CEC — they were clearly abusing their authority.
TT: The TSU says a majority of the public is against an ECFA, a figure that the
government denies. However, let’s say that the public did vote down an ECFA
through a referendum. What would happen then? Would it cause a repeat of the US
beef controversy if the government were forced to re-open negotiations with
China?
Huang: The US beef controversy was caused because President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九)
administration conducted negotiations with the US secretly and without public
input. They did not consult with related businesses or consumers before deciding
that they would relax restrictions on [select parts of bone-in] beef from the
US. The public was completely kept in the dark.
Because they did not take public opinion into account, they were completely
unprepared for the level of opposition after they [signed the agreement] with
the US. The government was completely at fault there, not the people. We had
hoped that through this process, the government would have learned a lesson it
could apply to cross-strait negotiations, but that was not the case.
The negotiations on an ECFA were done in secret. Not until [last week] did the
government finally release the details of an “early harvest” list [of goods and
services subject to immediate tariff reductions]. Their attempts to come up with
reasons to explain why they could not reveal the details of the negotiations
were a complete joke.
As a former Mainland Affairs Council [MAC] chairman. I know the government can
reveal the items covered in negotiations and gather public opinion without
giving away our bottom line. After all, public opinion should be the best gauge
of whether a government’s policy is heading in the right direction.
TT: The government said that its inability to publicize its negotiations with
China on an ECFA was because they had yet to finish at the time, but the TSU has
alleged that the secrecy was a result of Chinese pressure. Can you elaborate on
this?
Huang: Chinese pressure to keep the negotiations under wraps is ultimately what
caused the Taiwanese government to follow suit. China has an autocratic
government, it does not have to publicize anything or gather public opinion.
However, we have a democratic government, one that should put the public first
and foremost. Our government should not have yielded to China; it should have
instead listened to the public.
What our government should have done was talk to the people and gauge their
opinions, including those from businesses and experts on what we should be
negotiating. When we talk about signing an ECFA, the government should first
identify which industries we should be protecting and which we should be
developing. It should have had this basic information at hand when the
negotiations with China were held.
Instead, the government questioned why the public wanted to hold a referendum on
the issue; because it wasn’t transparent during the negotiations, the people did
not understand what an ECFA was. As a democratic country, we need public
consensus, acquired through clear and transparent negotiations.
While [the government] maintains that an ECFA would be subject to substantive
review from the legislature, we have to take into account the fact that Chinese
Nationalist Party [KMT] legislators account for almost three-fourths of the
total number of seats. Considering that they did not so much as speak out during
the previous 12 agreements the government has signed with China, it is hard to
imagine they will give an ECFA more than a glance.
TT: On the issue of the government’s China policies, during your stint as MAC
chairman, you were the direct superior to Ma, who served as deputy minister at
the time. How do you view his current China approach?
Huang: I think a reliance on China is the Ma administration’s only political
policy. It relies on China economically and it also relies on China for its
foreign affairs. But how can we rely on China when it has said that it wants to
swallow us up, to annex Taiwan?
How can Ma not know this? Of course he says he knows China’s ambitions, yet he
continues to believe in eventual unification — that’s his conviction. Instead,
by understanding China’s ambitions, it is easier for Ma to cooperate with it on
this front. There is nothing the government hasn’t cooperated with China on.
Ma says that none of the 12 agreements signed with China [during his term in
office] infringe upon Taiwan’s sovereignty. Well, let’s take a closer look at
his policies for cross-strait direct flights. When he worked under me as first
deputy chairman, I asked him to draw up an analysis for the possibility of
cross-strait direct flights.
At the time, the outline of what he wrote was that Taiwan could not engage in
direct flights with China, because of three large barriers on the Chinese side.
The first was that China continued to maintain that Taiwan was a provincial
government, while they were the central government. The second barrier was on
the issue of security, as China had not given up the threat of using force
against Taiwan. The third barrier was because the Convention on International
Civil Aviation states that direct flights should include national registrations
on aircraft. China does not recognize our country, so our aircraft were unable
to carry national registration.
Ma said at the time that unless the [Chinese] removed these three barriers, we
would not be able to engage in direct fights with them. But now, he has changed
his position and, at the same time, changed his thinking.
He told DPP Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) during their debate [on the ECFA
issue in April] that he succeeded in opening direct flights where the previous
DPP administration failed, but at what cost? It was done at the sacrifice of our
sovereignty. The DPP could have done the same if it wanted, but it didn’t.
TT: How about an ECFA, how do you view the agreement in the context of the
future development of cross-strait relations?
Huang: Once this ECFA is signed, I think that not only will it fail to improve
cross-strait relations, as both the KMT and China hope, but instead will cause
cross-strait relations to decline. I say this because I believe that [an ECFA]
will widen income disparity in Taiwan, lower the living standards of Taiwanese,
cause job opportunities to decrease and unemployment to go up.
Our export-related industries are moving to China, while our domestic industries
will be replaced because of competition from cheaper Chinese products. So
Taiwanese will have to work harder and wages will flatline — all because of
China. So when we think about better cross-strait relations, I don’t think that
an ECFA will be a magical cure, instead it will continue to poison the
relationship.
TT: Saturday’s DPP rally brought out tens of thousands of protesters against
Ma’s China policies and against an ECFA. Do you expect this level of opposition
to continue? How about the TSU, what is your party’s next step in opposing an
ECFA?
Huang: Opposition from the Taiwanese society against an ECFA will continue.
Recently, we have seen a great deal of public participation and debate on the
issue of an ECFA. While the majority of the public originally supported an ECFA,
most people now oppose it. As more and more people continue to talk about it,
this will become the trend.
When the government killed our ECFA proposal ... it wanted to buy time before it
signed the agreement. We have appealed the decision through the courts and
launched an investigation into the rejection through the Control Yuan. To be
honest, all these processes will take time and the government still has a
certain amount of control over these proceedings.
In the meantime, we will continue to launch new ECFA referendum proposals. The
government rejected the aspirations of the 110,000 people who signed our
petition the last time around, but we will not give up. And I think that this
time around the public is watching. This government will one day pay a price for
its political maneuvering.
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