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Peace plan and
elections don’t mix
By Tung Chen-yuan 童振源
The presidential election is just more than two months away and President Ma
Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) announcement of a possible peace accord with China has many
voters worried. This is a blow to his re-election efforts and he has tried to
mitigate the damage by promising a referendum on peace talks and giving us his
“10 guarantees.” It is important that Ma does not see his possible re-election
as a mandate for going ahead with peace talks and that the Chinese Nationalist
Party (KMT) and Chinese Communist Party do not get the impression it is up to
them to decide Taiwan’s future.
There is no pressing need for a peace accord to be signed, as far as Taiwan is
concerned. While it is true that the public craves peace, no one thinks it will
be easy to achieve. Even former presidents Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) and Chen Shui-bian
(陳水扁) suggested peace agreements in the past, but the Chinese government
rebuffed them. It was only when Ma took office that Beijing actively started
promoting talks about a possible peace accord with the “one China” principle as
a precondition.
Over the past three-and-a-half years, China has made all kinds of economic
concessions to Taiwan and stabilized cross-strait relations. However, the Ma
administration has indicated that it will not oversee unification, emphasizing
the idea that Taiwan is an independent country and that its future is to be
decided by the 23 million Taiwanese.
Beijing has not been happy about this and has been pressuring the government to
reach a peace agreement based on the “one China” principle. It is therefore not
entirely unreasonable to assume that China wants Ma to confirm that he will, if
re-elected, enter into cross-strait political talks. Otherwise, Beijing might be
more reluctant to give its overt blessing to a second term for Ma and it could
withhold the economic, military and diplomatic benefits that it has given him.
However, cross-strait peace talks cannot be rushed. Genuine peace needs to be
built upon a domestic consensus, mutual trust between Beijing and Taipei, as
well as international assurances. If it is not, it will just propagate more
tensions and conflicts within Taiwan and between it and China.
If Taipei rushes into these talks and accepts the political precondition of “one
China,” it means that Taiwan’s very sovereignty will be up for discussion and
the timetable for talks would be set for within a decade, or even four years.
Taipei would be left without any bargaining chips or the time it needs to adjust
to the changes. The country does not stand to gain anything by entering into the
negotiations.
Ma’s chances of securing a second term have been severely compromised by
bringing up the idea of a peace accord.
According to the electronic prediction market exchange run by the Exchange of
Future Events and National Chengchi University’s Center for Prediction Market,
predictions for the period from Oct. 16 through Oct. 20 showed a 7.2 percentage
point drop in Ma’s lead over Democratic Progressive Party Chairperson Tsai
Ing-wen (蔡英文) in terms of the number of votes they are likely to get, and an
18.6 percentage point drop in terms of the probability of winning the election.
In the period after Oct. 21, Ma and Tsai were about equal in terms of potential
votes and probability of winning the election. A China Times opinion poll also
saw Ma’s lead over Tsai close from 10 points on Oct. 19 to 3.7 points on Oct.
25.
In response to these numbers, the Presidential Office announced on Oct. 19 that
the results of any peace talks would have to be ratified through a referendum,
only for Ma to clarify the next day that the referendum would simply be a way to
gauge public support. He then came out with his 10 guarantees on Oct. 24,
including an assurance that the peace accord would require prior agreement
through a referendum.
It is quite clear that the Ma administration is completely up in the air when it
comes to this peace agreement. After first mentioning it, the government has
felt the need to clarify its position again and again. The administration is
bouncing back and forth between the need to assure Taiwanese and the need to
accommodate Beijing, who does not like the sound of a referendum deciding the
outcome of an agreement.
There cannot, then, be any political conditions placed on any peace agreement.
If there is to be peace across the Taiwan Strait, it must be done against the
backdrop of domestic consensus, mutual trust between China and Taiwan, and
international assurances. Without these, any agreement will be nothing more than
a way for China to pressure Taiwan into accepting its own political
prerequisites, which will only serve to amplify tensions within Taiwan and
between it and China.
Consequently, victory in the upcoming election, irrespective of who wins, should
not be interpreted as a mandate for signing a peace accord.
Taiwanese sovereignty and the interests of the public can only be protected if a
peace agreement and its conclusions are put to the public through a referendum.
Tung Chen-yuan is a professor at National Chengchi University’s Graduate
Institute of Development Studies.
Translated by Paul Cooper
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