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DPP slams Ma for
pro-China interview
‘STRANGE’: The DPP’s chairman said it was odd
that the president was talking about Chinese interests throughout the interview,
during which he said he wanted to meet Xi
By Chris Wang / Staff reporter
The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) yesterday criticized comments President
Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) made in an interview which touched on the possibility of
meeting Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) next year and saying that the
cross-strait service trade agreement cannot be renegotiated, as some have
requested.
The Hong Kong-based Chinese-language Yazhou Zhoukan quoted Ma as saying he would
love to meet Xi at the APEC summit in Beijing next year and make a “historical
breakthrough in cross-strait relations,” while rejecting that the service trade
pact can be altered because “Taiwan is not like the US” in that it cannot
unilaterally demand that an agreement be changed by using its economic strength.
“The interview was strange in that Ma appears to have been speaking for Chinese
interests throughout its duration, be it the ‘one China’ principle, the service
trade agreement or China’s air defense identification zone,” DPP Chairman Su
Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) said yesterday.
“Ma would rather meet Xi, who is thousands of kilometers away, than those
Taiwanese who are suffering from land expropriations, factory closures and [will
bear] the negative impacts of the service trade deal, which is not right,” Su
added.
At a press conference held at the party headquarters, DPP Department of China
Affairs director Honigmann Hong (洪財隆) said the president’s comments regarding
the cross-strait deal were inappropriate and incorrect.
In the interview, Ma reportedly said that international agreements are rarely,
if ever, renegotiated and that in the case of the US-Korea Free Trade Agreement
signed in 2007 — known as the KORUS FTA — it was Washington rather than Seoul
that proposed renegotiations.
“Ma has to realize that the legislature — not the president — is the
constitutional institution which has the final say on exterior agreements in
democratic countries,” he said.
While neither Washington nor Seoul used the term “renegotiation” when altering
their free-trade deal, the pact was not ratified in the nations’ respective
legislatures due to disagreements and opposition from the public on both sides,
Hong said.
Hong added that the most important factor — and No. 1 reason Taiwanese are
skeptical about the cross-strait agreement — is that the trade pact negotiations
were conducted without prior consultation with the public and in the absence of
legislative monitoring.
A meeting between the leaders on either side of the Taiwan Strait would be
“serious business” and if Ma was sincere about making a meeting with Xi happen,
he would first have to offer a clear explanation to Taiwanese about “what
political issues are at stake and what he would do for such a meeting,” former
DPP chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) said on the sidelines of an event organized
by her foundation yesterday.
“Ma would have to inform the public on what positive impact the meeting would
have on cross-strait relations and, hopefully, make the process of arranging the
summit as transparent as possible,” she said.
On Ma’s assertion that renegotiating the cross-strait trade pact is impossible,
Tsai said the president should not have ruled out the possibility because there
are lots of precedents for the renegotiation of international agreements.
“It’s only natural for adjustments to be made and the content of an agreement
altered if the legislature or the public are not satisfied with a deal. It is
not strange to see negotiations going back and forth between both sides, as was
the case in the free-trade agreement inked between South Korea and the US, as
well as Taiwan’s accession to the WTO,” she added.
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