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EDITORIAL: Attacks on
Lee, Chen nonsensical
The only consistent thing about Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) accusations that
former presidents Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) and Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) were “extremists”
who opposed all things Chinese, is how inconsistent, and at times contradictory,
those attacks have been.
President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), administration officials, as well as the media,
have repeated ad nauseam the refrain that cross-strait ties “suffered” under Lee
and Chen because of their stance on Taiwanese sovereignty. More than once, those
officials have also claimed that Taiwan’s economy was weakened during their
tenure as a direct result of their supposedly “anti-China” policies.
It is curious, then, that when facing accusations that Taiwan under Ma has
become too reliant on China for its economic well-being, those same officials
tend to play down the matter by pointing to the rapid pace of increasing
cross-strait economic ties during the very same presidencies of Lee and Chen.
Just last week, Representative to Japan John Feng (馮寄台), one of Ma’s closest
confidantes, rebutted claims by Japanese media that Ma’s policies had put Taiwan
in a position of dangerous reliance on China.
Using data to support his position, Feng said that although Lee had proposed
limited ties with China, Taiwan’s trade with China reached 23.79 percent of the
total value of the nation’s foreign trade in 2000. That percentage grew to 40.7
percent in 2007 under Chen, he said, pointing out that this figure had only
grown slightly to 41.8 percent last year.
Fair enough, numbers don’t lie. It follows, though, that the Ma administration
and the media should cease their claims that Ma’s predecessors were extremists
who would go out of their way to alienate Beijing. Surely, if the twain had been
such hardliners on China, Taiwan’s economy would not have become as reliant on
China as it did under Lee and Chen.
The two propositions — that they were “anti” China or too “pro” China — cannot
both be right. That is, unless a decision has been made by the KMT and the large
body of domestic and foreign media that are biased in Ma’s favor that Lee and
Chen could do no good, in which case it is possible to attack the former leaders
from both sides simultaneously, as if there were no contradiction in doing so.
Or it could be that Lee and Chen were far more pragmatic than their critics
would admit and realized well before Ma became president that it would be
impossible for Taiwan — even an independent Taiwan — to ignore the giant Chinese
market. Self-interested though this may have been (and can we really blame
presidents for putting national interest first?), Lee and Chen laid the
groundwork that made it possible for Ma to push cross-strait relations to the
next level.
It is also possible that these two “extremists” were aware that close economic
engagement with China required a precarious balancing act and called for great
caution to ensure that growing ties did not turn into a Trojan horse. It was
possible, in their view, to be both an economic partner of China while remaining
at odds over politics.
There the pith lies: China’s share of Taiwan’s total external trade may have
increased by only 1.1 percent since 2007, but the context in which that trade
relationship occurred is markedly different. Whereas caution characterized Lee
and Chen’s approach to cross-strait ties, Ma’s has been much more permissive and
subject to political manipulation by Beijing.
One last bit of data for Feng: Taiwan’s trade surplus with China in the first
half of this year dropped 6.1 percent year-on-year. Prior to the global economic
downturn of 2008, Taiwan’s trade surplus with its neighbor had only declined
twice — during the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997 to 1998, and in 2001, when the
dot com bubble burst.
Since Ma came into office, Taiwan’s trade surplus with China has contracted for
three of the past four years.
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