Chinese rallies call for boycott of French goods

AFP, BEIJING
Sunday, Apr 20, 2008, Page 1

Hundreds of Chinese protested yesterday in Beijing and several other cities against France over its attitude toward Tibet and the Olympic Games, police and witnesses said.

Many of the demonstrators congregated in front of branches of Carrefour, the French supermarket chain accused by some Chinese of supporting Tibet, an allegation it denies.

“There were a couple of hundred, mostly young people in the morning, and by noon they were gone,” said an employee at a bookstore near one Carrefour outlet in the central city of Wuhan.

“I don’t know whether they were persuaded to leave or what. I didn’t see any signs, only some national flags,” he said, declining to be named.

The protest started with about 300 demonstrators, which swelled to around 10,000 toward noon, a a separate source said, quoting a Wuhan police report.

Crowds at the protests chanted “Boycott Carrefour” and “Oppose Tibet independence,” Xinhua news agency reported.

It reported protests in Beijing, in the eastern cities of Hefei and Qingdao, in the southwestern city of Kunming and in Wuhan.

Anti-French sentiment in China has been rising since the chaotic Paris leg of the Olympic torch relay, where pro-Tibet protesters tried to wrestle the flame from Jin Jing (金晶), a young wheelchair-bound fencer.

The resentment has been amplified by French President Nicolas Sarkozy linking his appearance at the Olympic Games opening ceremony to progress on human rights in Tibet, following China’s crackdown in the region.

In Hefei yesterday, the square where Carrefour is located was packed with people, a receptionist in a restaurant across the street said.

“There are protesters and people who gathered to watch and show their support. Even crossovers and footpaths are packed with people,” she said.

“Yesterday, there were many trucks in the parking lot of Carrefour and people standing on top of the trucks to protest,” she said.

A witness in Qingdao said there were a large number of demonstrators at a Carrefour on Friday and yesterday.

“Today, there are more people than yesterday joining in. With all those protesters, I wonder how anyone can still manage to buy stuff there,” she said.

Smaller protests erupted in Beijing around the French embassy and the nearby French School, Xinhua and other witnesses said.

About 10 cars draped in Chinese flags drove around the embassy before the area was blocked by police, witnesses said.

A little later, a small group of Chinese people gathered in front of the school, holding placards, the witnesses said.

Further protests took place outside a Carrefour store in Shenzhen, an amateur film on a video-sharing Web site showed. It was unclear whether ittook place on Friday or yesterday.

No injuries or arrests were reported at the demonstrations. It was unclear whether they were spontaneous or engineered by the government.

PRC ship carrying arms for Zimbabwe leaves South Africa
　

RESTRICTIONS: The 'An Yue Jiang' left after a court ruling that its weapons cargo could be offloaded but not transported across South Africa to Zimbabwe

DPA, JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA
Sunday, Apr 20, 2008, Page 1

A Chinese ship that was carrying arms for Zimbabwe hurriedly left Durban harbor in South Africa on Friday evening after a local court ordered that its cargo could not be transported overland across South Africa, reports said.

The An Yue Jiang lifted anchor after the Durban High Court ruled that its shipment of weapons and ammunition could be offloaded but could not be transported across South Africa to Zimbabwe, SAPA news agency reported.

It was not clear where the ship, which was carrying 70 tonnes of arms for the Zimbabwe Defense Forces, was headed. Zimbabwe has previously imported weapons through Beira port in Mozambique.

The court order was granted on an application brought by an Anglican bishop and an activist under the National Conventional Arms Control Act.

Dock workers had refused to offload the cargo, which included millions of bullets for AK-47 rifles, mortar bombs and rocket-propelled grenade launchers, on the grounds that to do so would be “grossly irresponsible.”

The ship had been anchored just outside the port since at least Monday, according to SAPA, which said it was owned by Cosco, a Chinese state firm.

An investigative magazine in South Africa, Noseweek, sounded the alarm over its cargo and its destination on Wednesday.

Opposition parties had pleaded with the government not to issue a conveyance permit for the shipment given the tensions in Zimbabwe caused by the three-week wait for presidential election results. The government said the permit had been issued as far back as Monday.

Since the EU placed Zimbabwe under an arms embargo in 2002, President Robert Mugabe has sourced much of his weapons in China, which he calls Zimbabwe’s “all-weather friend.”

Meanwhile, German Human Rights Commissioner Guenter Nooke said yesterday that China’s arms deliveries to Zimbabwe were “alarming in the extreme.”

Beijing was delivering arms to a regime that had effectively been voted out of office, Nooke said.

Forum discusses Taiwan's sovereignty
　

CHIANG'S VICTIM: Stephen Yates said that Taiwan was paying the price for Chiang Kai-shek's refusal to accept US efforts to recognize Taiwanese sovereignty
　

By Shih Hsiu-chuan
STAFF REPORTER
Sunday, Apr 20, 2008, Page 3

Deliberately avoiding Taiwan’s sovereign status has been the predominant theme in US thinking and that trend would likely continue if Taiwan’s leader agrees with the stance, an analyst with the American Foreign Policy Council said yesterday.

“[US] leaders ... would rather not have to deal with Taiwan or do anything for Taiwan. They feel preoccupied elsewhere and they would like to believe that Taiwan could go on being a happy democracy without [the US] having to do anything with it,” said Stephen Yates, an analyst who is also president of DC Asia Advisory, a Washington-based consulting firm.

Yates made the remarks while presenting a paper entitled American Political Perspective on Taiwan’s Sovereign Status at the second day of a forum on Taiwan’s sovereign status organized by the Taiwan Thinktank at Taipei’s Howard Plaza Hotel.

He said many people in Taiwan mistakenly believe that the US government may offer support or benefits because of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) victory in the presidential election.

“The problem is the US isn’t looking for a partner [in Taiwan’s leader]. It is looking for someone to be quiet and leave us alone,” he said.

Yates, who is the former deputy assistant for national security affairs to US Vice President Dick Cheney, disagreed with the US position, saying that it is not consistent with support for democracy and would not be good for US interests over the long term.

Yates said that the US position was a problem for Taiwan because “they [those in the US] don’t see Taiwan as having a separate sovereign status.”

“They understand their government view as ... Taiwan was a province of Qing empire, Japanese colony and had ROC jurisdiction, but Taiwan has never been recognized as a separate sovereign entity,” Yates said.

He said that the US impression in this regard was shaped by the idea that it had wanted to help Taiwan gain sovereignty, but the government had not accepted that help.

Yates said the people of Taiwan today inherit the bitter fruits of dictator Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) rule as he resisted the US preference in the 1950s to recognize Taiwan’s sovereign status and he also rejected US efforts to secure Taiwan’s separate membership in the UN even as China became a member in the 1970s, Yates said.

Paul Monk, managing director of Australian think tank Austhink Consulting, presented a paper on the future of Taiwan’s sovereign status from the perspective of geopolitics.

He said that China’s claim that it has the inherent right to sovereignty over Taiwan and the notion that Taiwan is a democratic trading state that should have a right to determine its own destiny are both “second order issues” in the larger scheme of things, Monk said.

“The fundamental issue is the geostrategic significance ... of Taiwan in the eyes of Chinese grand strategists and the major powers other than Taiwan, for it is this which will almost certainly determine the fate of the island in the next 10 to 20 years,” Monk said.

Monk suggested that China offer Taiwan de jure independence and seek to cultivate its goodwill as a neighbor to serve its own best interests.

“That way, the freedom of the people of Taiwan would not be threatened, and overweening Chinese ambitions would not give Japan the jitters or cause the Philippines and other regional states including Australia to look with great apprehension at its rising power,” he said.

Where the DPP went wrong on localization

By Lu Chun-wei 盧俊偉
Sunday, Apr 20, 2008, Page 8

The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) may have lost both the legislative and presidential elections, but the path it chose for itself — localization — remains the right one. The problem lies in the fact that the value of localization has been narrowed down by politicians to mere political discourse, while its economic aspect has been largely ignored.

By putting politics before the economy while facing the globalization of Taiwan’s economy and the rise of China, DPP supporters were forced to choose between desinicization or exploiting China.

Localization will have greater meaning if it is not limited to political discourse. If we examine Taiwan’s economic problems pragmatically and objectively, we will see that the rise of China plays an important part.

But does this mean that without China’s rise, Taiwan’s economy would not have experienced any problems? Of course not. Some of Taiwan’s industries would still have relocated to Vietnam and other developing countries.

Economic development is dependent on the government’s power to transform the industrial structure. In other words, the future of Taiwan’s economy lies in our own hands and should not be decided by developing countries such as China or Vietnam.

After the DPP came to power, the biggest difference from the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) regime was the promotion of a knowledge-based economy focused on research and development and brand building at either end of the profit curve, also known as the “smile curve.”

This economic policy helped many emerging knowledge-based industries such as IC design and the service sector.

Traditional industries, however, were left behind. If we review the history of the nation’s manufacturing industry from the 1990s to the present in terms of density of technology staffing, we find that high-tech intensive industries have been constantly growing while low-tech industries have been in recession. In other words, the national economy has performed very well as a result of the successful transformation of medium and high-tech industries, but some employees in traditional industries have not enjoyed the fruits of economic growth.

Moreover, most of these people are often considered traditional DPP supporters. Therefore, while the DPP government helped GDP growth, it never managed to grasp why its supporters continued to argue that the economy was not faring well.

This is also why pan-green supporters complained that top DPP officials were increasingly out of touch with the public.

Globalization and the rise of China and other developing countries have played a part in the decline and relocation of domestic traditional industries. But these industries cannot solely rely on China or other foreign markets to improve their competitiveness.

The key still lies in whether the government can ensure the interests of the those who have lost out to globalization. One of the reasons why the DPP lost election after election is that it failed to bring up a comprehensive localization discourse on the economy.

If the pan-green camp attributes the KMT’s victories solely to a successful opening up of the economy to China — and as a result changes its attitude toward localization — it means that the pan-green camp’s understanding of localization remains too limited and fails to meet the demands from its supporters.

Lu Chun-wei is a doctoral student in the Department of Political Science at National Taiwan University.