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Political benefits of
trade pacts with China
Huang Tien-lin ¶À¤ÑÅï
From the day that the cross-strait service trade agreement was signed, it has
been questioned constantly by the public. While the administration of President
Ma Ying-jeou (°¨^¤E) is directing all its efforts toward calming things down, the
faction within the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) that advocates economic
integration with China is attempting to cooperate with China in promoting
unification through economic means.
On Friday, a former DPP legislator published an article in the Chinese-language
Apple Daily that seemed to criticize the government for being insensitive and
inept, although he also found ingenious ways of praising the service trade
agreement. He said the government ¡§manages to turn a good thing into a bad¡¨ ¡X in
effect saying that the service trade agreement is a good thing ¡X and ¡§when the
agreement was signed after two years of talks, the mainland had made more
concessions [than Taiwan]. The government should be praised for this hard-earned
achievement, and if someone calls it a mistake, that is the result of bad
communication.¡¨ This is tantamount to telling the public that the agreement is
good and should not be opposed.
Some may say this legislator¡¦s point of view is not mainstream within the DPP,
but history says otherwise. Since 1996, the mainstream view of China within the
DPP has been to ¡§bravely go west,¡¨ to ¡§stabilize fundamentals and move west¡¨ and
¡§active opening.¡¨ All of these policies were aimed at promoting economic
integration with China in direct opposition to the pursuit of Taiwanese
sovereignty and independence. Promoting both political independence and economic
integration is like having two horses pull a cart in opposite directions; the
cart will break and the horses will take off in different directions. This would
spell the end for the localization movement of the past dozen years.
Will economic integration benefit Taiwan?
The past dozen years or so have made it clear that the more we open up to China,
the worse Taiwan¡¦s economy does. Eight years of active opening up has been good
for China and bad for Taiwan. It helped defeat the DPP government. The Ma
administration¡¦s comprehensive deregulation has brought with it a ¡§22 karat
depressed economy¡¨ instead of a ¡§golden decade.¡¨
There is still a force in the DPP for the Economic Cooperation Framework
Agreement (ECFA) which managed to break intra-party resistance to the ECFA in
2010. The DPP¡¦s intra-party truce over the ECFA from 2010 to last year allowed
the government¡¦s China policy to start anew as it planted in the public the view
that the ECFA is good for Taiwan, thus paving the way for the DPP¡¦s defeat last
year.
Because the service trade agreement has a direct impact on key parts of Taiwan¡¦s
economy, it threatens the existence of small and medium-sized and individual
companies in the service industry. This showed the public that a small economy
like Taiwan¡¦s cannot be integrated with a big economy like China¡¦s. If the DPP
can take this opportunity to expound on the harm that the ECFA, the service
trade agreement and other such economic colonization policies will cause ¡X such
as only benefiting big business while China attracts all the investment and
talent, and the eventual marginalization and colonization of Taiwan ¡X the
revealed relationship between the depressed economy and the economic integration
policy will surely set off another wave of grassroots awareness that may
effectively defuse the economic terror card that the KMT will play in time for
the 2016 presidential and legislative elections.
The lessons learned from the truce over the ECFA are not very distant. Will the
DPP really repeat the same mistake?
Huang Tien-lin is former president and chairman of First Commercial Bank.
Translated by Perry Svensson
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