US policy on arms sales unchanged, Clinton says
　

STATUS QUO: The US secretary of state said she was pleased to see reduced tension between Taipei and Beijing, but reaffirmed support for Taiwan’s defense

STAFF WRITER, WITH CNA, WASHINGTON
Wednesday, Feb 18, 2009, Page 1

“Under the Taiwan Relations Act, there is a clear provision that the United States will provide support for Taiwan’s defense. And that is why there have been, over the many years, the sale of defensive materials to Taiwan.” — Hillary Clinton, US secretary of state

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton affirmed on Monday that there would be no change in Washington’s policy on arms sales to Taiwan under the administration of US President Barack Obama.

Clinton, who departed on Sunday for a four-nation Asia visit — her first overseas trip since assuming office — made the remarks in an interview during her flight to Japan, her first stop.

Clinton said US policy with respect to Taiwan “remains as it has been” because it is based on Washington’s long-standing “one China” policy, the three communiques with China and the Taiwan Relations Act.

“And under the Taiwan Relations Act, there is a clear provision that the United States will provide support for Taiwan’s defense. And that is why there have been, over the many years, the sale of defensive materials to Taiwan,” she said.

Clinton said she was pleased with the decreased tensions and increasing cooperation between Taiwan and China over the past months, which she said is a direction that the US wants to support and promote.

The US has long been Taiwan’s most important weapons supplier, despite this being an irritant in US-China relations.

In the latest arms deal between the two sides, the administration of former US president George W. Bush late last year approved the sale of a package of weapons to Taiwan including 30 Apache attack helicopters, 330 advanced capability Patriot (PAC-3) missiles, 32 Harpoon sub-launched missiles, 182 Javelin guided missiles and four E-2T system upgrades.

The move drew strong protest from China, which reacted by suspending military-to-military exchanges and nonproliferation talks with the US.

The contacts are expected to resume sometime next week, media reports said.

China will be the final leg of Clinton’s Asia trip, which will also take her to Indonesia and South Korea.

In response to the news, Ministry of National Defense Spokeswoman Major-General Lisa Chi (池玉蘭) said yesterday that the military welcomed the US administration’s decision to maintain its arms sales policy on Taiwan.

A stable peace in the Taiwan Strait would be in the interest of Taiwan, the US and all countries in the region, Chi said.

Continuing to offer Taiwan defensive weapons would help maintain a stable peace in the Taiwan Strait, she added.
　

How not to salvage the economy

Wednesday, Feb 18, 2009, Page 8

Has Taiwan’s economy bottomed out yet? The industrial, government and academic sectors seem to disagree. Optimists believe this is as bad as it gets and that although we are far from a rebound, at least it will not deteriorate further. Pessimists, on the other hand, believe the worst is yet to come and that the problems will haunt us for a long time.

It’s too soon to tell who is right and who is wrong, but the latest statistics on the economy showed that the downturn is an undeniable fact.

Rather than haggling over the future economic situation, it would be better to work together to come up with a strategy to revive the economy. This is how we should ride out the crisis.

We could summarize the policy direction of President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) government over the past eight months by saying that the first half of the period was a time of making big plans, while the second half was one of desperate measures to cure the problems.

This highlights the fact that the government doesn’t know what to do.

How bad is Taiwan’s economic situation? The government’s monitoring indicators for December flashed blue for the fourth consecutive month, indicating that the economy is in recession. The total export value for last month dropped by 44.1 percent year-on-year, showing the difficulty facing our export-oriented economy.

Meanwhile, tax revenues for last month decreased 40.1 percent year-on-year, with business tax revenues — which best reflect the economic situation — falling 53.7 percent year-on-year. Even if we exclude the fact that part of the revenues were not registered because of the Lunar New Year holiday, it still fell 17.2 percent, a serious decline.

While the government issued more than NT$80 billion (US$2.31 billion) in consumer vouchers on Jan. 18, business tax revenue still dropped sharply, showing that the economic situation was far worse than expected.

Foreign investors have adjusted their economic growth forecasts sharply downward. Two predictions are particularly frightening: CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets said Taiwan’s economy would contract 11 percent, while Morgan Stanley Taiwan expects a contraction of 6 percent.

Remarks by foreign investors should always be assessed with a critical mind and alarmist talk need not send the government in a frenzy. However, the government must not ignore the fact that the nation’s economy is dropping dramatically. Political leaders have the responsibility to propose concrete policies to deal with the crisis, boost public confidence and lead the country out of darkness.

Sadly, when we examine the government’s policies over the past eight months, we can’t help but worry about the future.

The government’s inability to see the devastating financial crisis-in-the-making when it came to power shows that it was still dreaming of the “6-3-3” policy and the TAIEX index climbing to more than 20,000 points. As a result, the 12 major construction projects and the NT$500 billion infrastructure expansion plan were shown to be grandiose schemes aimed at impressing the public.

Soon after the government came to power, the stock and real estate markets began their decline while the unemployment rate surged, hurting both employers and employees. When the government finally began to grasp the severity of the situation, it merely employed short-term emergency measures to save the stock market, but altogether failed to address the fundamental deficiencies in our system.

Equally if not more alarming is the government’s pinning its hopes on a traditional enemy, China, to rehabilitate the economy. Its first move was to relax all restrictions on investment in China, which threatens to further undermine Taiwan’s economy and takes us down a road from which there may be not return.

Last year, China passed the Labor Contract Law (勞動合同法) along with other tax and environmental protection laws. As a result, operational costs for Taiwanese businesses in China increased substantially, causing many to go bankrupt. Consequently, Taiwan’s total export value to China shrank by more than 50 percent in the past two months.

The key to Taiwan’s economic downturn lies in an excessive dependence on investment, production in and exports to China. Aside from the obvious ills of such dependence, this also puts Beijing in a position where it can use investment restrictions to apply political pressure on Taipei and undermine Taiwan’s sovereignty in the process.

Taiwan’s high dependence on China is its Achilles’ heel. And yet, against all logic, Straits Exchange Foundation Chairman Chiang Pin-kung (江丙坤) was still extolling this dangerous policy on Feb. 4, saying that economic dependence on China was not necessarily a bad thing.

The diligence and intelligence of Taiwanese will help us survive this economic crisis, but to do so, we must also guard against the government’s moves to increase our dependence on China, which can only slow down recovery and take us closer to “unification.”

The KMT is a master at silencing dissidents
　

By Cao Changqing 曹長青
Wednesday, Feb 18, 2009, Page 8

Ever since President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) government came into power, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) has irritated the public by using the judiciary as a tool to assault former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) and pan-green camp supporters. This has caused strong protest within Taiwan and prompted Western academics to release three open letters criticizing the unfairness of the judiciary and the way in which human rights have regressed under Ma’s rule.

Even those who criticized the Ma government and emphasized Chen’s rights have come under attack and been defamed by pro-KMT media. The government is using detention to threaten the public and scare people so that nobody will dare voice differing opinions. However, squelching difference of opinion domestically is not enough for the Ma government, which recently set out on a mission to eliminate pro-greens stationed in Taiwanese embassies overseas.

In a column dated Feb. 13, China Times Washington correspondent Norman Fu (傅建中) wrote that not long after coming into office, Taiwan’s representative to the US, Jason Yuan (袁健生), caused much controversy by transferring two advisers who had been stationed in the US for less than one year to Greece and Switzerland. Fu said both advisers were pro-green and had received training at the Ketagalan Institute, which was established by Chen in March 2003. Yuan was reportedly uneasy about their political views and made a request to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to have them transferred from the sensitive diplomatic battlefield that is Washington.

Getting rid of diplomats based on their political affiliations is still not enough for the Ma administration.

It is now meddling with academia in the US and trying to get rid of foreign supporters of Taiwan. One example is John Tkacik, a former senior research fellow of the Heritage Foundation who cosigned all three of the abovementioned open letters. Fu’s report tells us that Tkacik was forced to “retire” after the Ma administration pressured the foundation.

Tkacik, Fu said, had been particularly close to the pan-green camp during Chen’s eight-year rule and was well liked by the Democratic Progressive Party. However, during that time, the KMT viewed Tkacik as a serious hindrance. Therefore, after gaining power, the KMT insisted that Tkacik leave his post. The KMT even invited foundation president Edwin Feulner to the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in the US to convince him, during face to face talks, that Tkacik should be removed from his post.

In the end, Tkacik did “retire.”

But why should a renowned US think tank yield to the Taiwanese government?

Foundation insiders have said that Taiwan’s foreign ministry donates hundreds of thousands of US dollars to the organization each year. That being so, did Ma’s government use public funds in the name of sponsorship to force Tkacik to retire? Fu is known for his sources and has a good understanding of the KMT’s internal affairs. His latest report proves that the Ma administration is aligning itself with its allies and pushing its foes out of the picture. It also shows that the KMT is so despicable that it would even attack pro-Taiwan academics in the US.

If we do not condemn and stop the KMT from employing these tricks, the KMT could very well use the foreign ministry’s funds to eliminate all pro-green academics in the US rather than using them to expand Taiwan’s international space.

The KMT’s arrogance and bullying are reaching intolerable levels.

Cao Changqing is a writer based in the US.