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The Sunflowers can take on Beijing
By Parris Chang 張旭成
The students’ 24-day occupation of the chamber of the Legislative Yuan ended peacefully on April 10, but its aftermath and ramifications remain to be examined.
Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (王金平) was instrumental in getting the students to leave the chamber, as he took the initiative to cut a deal with them the previous day. He promised the students that a law to empower lawmakers to closely supervise cross-strait agreements would be enacted before the legislature would again review the cross-strait service trade agreement.
In so doing, Wang defied the wishes of President Ma Ying-Jeou (馬英九), who has steadfastly opposed such a concession. However, as legislative speaker, Wang has the prerogative to set the legislative agenda and wield considerable influence in forging consensus among lawmakers of the ruling and opposition parties. Thus, the Ma-Wang political strife that began with Ma’s attempts to purge Wang from the party in September last year remained unabated and become intertwined with the Sunflower movement.
The students’ larger protest, which the media have dubbed the Sunflower movement, in reference to sunlight and transparency, continues and is spreading to grassroots level. As Chen Wei-ting (陳為廷), one of the student leaders, said at a press conference announcing the end of the occupation: “Everything we’ve said and all our energy has allowed this to spread from a student movement to a movement of all the people.”
The students have called for Ma to convene a citizens’ constitutional conference with representatives from all walks of life to institute reforms to enable the public’s full and active participation in major national issues.
The reason for the change is, they argue, that Taiwan’s representative democracy has been impaired and rendered dysfunctional by Ma’s party-state authoritarian regime.
To the disappointment of the students, Ma’s response was not a citizens’ constitutional conference. Instead, he announced a national economic conference in July, to be chaired by Premier Jiang Yi-huah (江宜樺), and attended, perhaps, mostly by the nation’s economic and business leaders, who have benefited from Ma’s policy of economic engagement with China.
The students have been angered by Ma’s idiosyncrasy and duplicity in evading and refusing to listen to the students’ appeals. They have come to a painful conclusion that Ma does not listen to the public and behaves like a dictator, and that the public themselves must act to bring about change. Their call for a participatory democracy appears to resonate well with the view of most concerned citizens.
Contrary to Ma’s claim that his pro-China policy and 19 specific agreements to liberalize trade and investment with China would help boost Taiwan’s economy, in reality, Taiwan’s overall economy has fared poorly.
While big businesses have benefited considerably from the opening up of cross-strait economic engagement, these are exceptions, and ordinary people have suffered from the flight of capital and the relocation of production facilities to China, as unemployment has been high, particularly among the young.
There are growing concerns that the cross-strait service trade agreement would badly harm local businesses, especially small and medium-sized enterprises. Moreover, in addition to the economic woes, many are also worried that the trade pact would have greater adverse political and security implications.
They say that, in the guise of businesspeople and shopkeepers, Chinese Communist Party agents and the “fifth column” may worm their way into Taiwan to engage in espionage, sabotage, subversion and a united front operation to facilitate China’s annexation of Taiwan. Student protesters have warned that China would do to Taiwan what Russia did to Crimea.
Ma has also refused to withdraw the trade pact from the legislature as demanded by the students, contending that failure to approve it would harm Taiwan’s credibility, impede the nation’s competitiveness with its regional rivals, such as South Korea, and hinder the nation’s chances of joining regional economic organizations. Such arguments were discredited by an American Institute in Taiwan official, who stated that joining the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations is not conditional on Taiwan’s approval of the cross-strait service trade agreement.
In his meetings with foreign visitors, Ma has declared that “those who interfere with public functions or willfully damage and forcibly occupy public properties shall be subject to the law.”
To implement the “get tough” tactics, the government is seeking to prosecute more than 200 students, including the two bright and charismatic leaders, Lin Fei-fan (林飛帆) and Chen, who seized the legislative chamber in Taipei on March 18, and others who broke into the Executive Yuan on March 23.
Is it wise for Ma, who is suffering from a deep crisis of public trust and lacking leadership legitimacy, to resort to legal persecution for revenge? Why is he so obstinate and unwilling or unable to comprehend the root cause of the protests? Will his revenge infuriate the protesters further, fire up their crusade and polarize society?
Despite his disclaimer, Ma seems to be mindful of Beijing’s concerns, and especially of his personal legacy. In a video conference with Asia experts at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and other US think tanks on April 9, Ma told them that he still hoped to attend an APEC summit in Beijing and facilitate a historic meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平).
Rightly or wrongly, Ma seems to believe that the ratification of the cross-strait service trade agreement is a “must.”
If a source in Beijing can be trusted, a meeting with Ma is not Xi’s top priority. In Beijing’s calculations, Ma is already a lame-duck president and unable to engage in substantive political dialogue on such vital issues as mutual confidence-building measures and the cross-strait peace accord that Xi wants.
Beijing has not flatly said no, but has stipulated three conditions that Ma may find hard to swallow. These are: The meeting should not take place in an international setting (that will rule out the APEC summit); the venue should be inside China (that will exclude any third country such as Singapore, as well as Hong Kong or Macau); and the meeting will be between the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the chairman of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) — contrary to Ma’s wish to have a summit between the two heads of state.
Chinese officials are closely monitoring the developments in Taiwan. They are apprehensive that the Sunflower movement could inspire Hong Kong’s students, as scores of them were in Taipei to take part in the protest rally last month, and that advocates of Taiwan’s and Hong Kong’s independence could join hands to promote their common cause in the years to come.
Nevertheless, what Beijing worries about most is that, as Ma’s regime has alienated the public so much, there is a real danger Taiwanese voters could reject KMT candidates in the seven-in-one elections in November and bring the opposition Democratic Progressive Party back to power in the presidential and parliamentary elections in 2016. Beijing is looking for and cultivating alternatives to Ma, who is a lost cause. It has hand-picked Sean Lien (連勝文) to run in the race for mayor of Taipei.
Lien’s father is former vice president and former KMT chairman Lien Chan (連戰), who started the KMT-CCP rapprochement in 2005 and enjoys the the full confidence of the leadership in Beijing.
If he is elected mayor of Taiwan’s capital (he has won the KMT’s primary, but still needs to defeat the candidates of other parties), Sean Lien would become Beijing’s vital link to the KMT leadership. Moreover, the capital city provides him with a strategic power base and huge resources to contend for the top government position.
In addition to Sean Lien, Beijing has reached out to New Taipei City Mayor Eric Chu (朱立倫), the nation’s largest municipality, with a population of 3.8 million. Previously Chu was vice premier and Taoyuan County commissioner. He is up for re-election in November and is widely seen as a strong KMT candidate for president in 2016.
During the presidential and parliamentary elections in 2012, quite a few Taiwanese business tycoons campaigned openly for Ma’s re-election at Beijing’s behest. In light of this successful experience, Beijing’s officials in charge of Taiwan affairs can be expected to redouble their efforts to recruit more Taiwanese compradors to buy votes in the elections this year and in 2016 to help keep the KMT regime in power.
There are signs of hope in the Sunflower movement that the young, and increasingly people from all walks of life, in Taiwan have awoken to the danger and seen through the CCP’s gambit to control Taiwan’s economy and politics. Hence, they will not allow Beijing to take Taiwan for granted.
As Taiwan belongs to the community of democracies, it must stand up and fight for its freedom and independence.
Equally important, Beijing’s evil design to undermine Taiwan’s democratic system should be exposed and condemned in the international community, and Taiwanese should call upon the US and other democracies to join our fight for common values.
Parris Chang is a professor emeritus of political science at Penn State University and chief executive of the Taiwan Institute for Political, Economic and Strategic Studies.
source: Taipei Times
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