In an exclusive interview with the vernacular China Times, President Ma Ying-jeou revealed numerous blind spots that expose the risks that the China-centric policies of his rightist Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang) government pose for Taiwan's future well-being.
The prime point of the president's lengthly discourse was that his policies of cross-strait reconciliation were generating "peace dividends" for Taiwan, including an inflow of 1.5 million Chinese tourists and the signing of the controversial "Cross-Strait Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement" and other pacts with the PRC and will pave the way for the realization of his China policy goals of "peace and prosperity."
The first blind spot concerns the question of whether "peace" really exists in the Taiwan Strait given the PRC's increasing deployment of 1,600 missiles and other offensive forces targeted at our shores and Beijing's refusal to revoke its belligerent Anti-Secession Law which mandates that the PRC has the legal right to use "non-peaceful means" to "unify" Taiwan.
In addition, Ma's failure to list "democracy" or "human rights" among his listed cross-strait priorities of "peace and prosperity" reveals both the KMT leadership's aversion toward democracy and human rights and hints strongly that Ma will not "resolutely uphold" the right of democratic self-determination of the 23 million Taiwan people in future negotiations with the PRC.
This trend is a structural phenomenon of globalization that is particularly worrisome in Taiwan's case given the massive outward migration of industry and jobs to the PRC over the last two decades and the rise of "triangular trade" that has led to the production of a rising share of Taiwan's export orders in the PRC and is therefore depriving our economy of domestic private consumption and investment demand, exerting downward pressure on wages and employment and exacerbating income and wealth inequality.
Therefore, despite the 13.12 percent rebound of the economy in the first half of 2010 compared to last year's 7.85 percent contraction, the overall well-being of many ordinary Taiwan people has not bounced back or even improved at all.
Besides the expansion of the income gap between the top 20 percent of households and the bottom one - fifth to 8.22 times last year from 7.53 times in 2007, data issued by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics showed that the real wages for Taiwan workers in the first six months of 2010 contracted to their lowest level in 11 years at NT$34,400 a month compared to NT$34,600 a month in 1999 while the broadly-defined unemployment rate has risen from an average 5.59 percent in 2007 to 7.35 percent last year and 6.82 percent over the first seven months of this year.
Instead of facing this reality and devising policies to ensure that the fruits of economic recovery reach the majority of Taiwan's ordinary people, Ma has simply engaged in denial and spun warnings by some of Taiwan's most senior economists into a personal insult while promoting an ECFA whose features may exacerbate these trends.
It is also difficult to take seriously Ma's lamentation that "the situation would have been much different" and his government could have implemented his "633" [6% economic growth, under 3% of unemployment rate, and US$30,000 per capita income] economic platform for over six percent annual growth were it not for the global financial crisis. (Source: Taiwan News, Sep 2, 2010).