yawn yawn

China Post editorial:

Perhaps Tsai, DPP will think twice about more public debates

Taiwan's groundbreaking first public debate between the president and the leader of the main opposition party concerning government policy went ahead yesterday afternoon as planned. Early indications are that it gained a significant international audience online, in addition to domestic viewers and listeners.

Those expecting high drama will have been disappointed, however, as the two participants, President Ma Ying-jeou and Democratic Progressive Party Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen, managed to remain polite and adhere to the rules of debate. This was in stark contrast to their foot soldiers, partisan experts and media supporters, who over recent weeks have engaged in increasingly vitriolic disputes over the rights and wrongs, benefits and weaknesses, and economic and/or political dimensions to the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement that Ma's administration plans to sign with China, perhaps as early as June.

Unfortunately, those expecting incisive intellectual jousting would similarly have been disappointed. The two party leaders spent almost every minute of the 150-minute televised debate playing to the camera and wider audience, and merely restating the positions with which anyone interested in this issue would already have been well aware of.

Thus Ma stressed the urgency faced by his government, claiming that eight years of waiting, worrying and time-wasting by the previous DPP administration meant that time was now short for Taiwan to catch up with regional and world economic developments, particularly the latest advances between ASEAN nations and China.

The three prongs of an ECFA signed with the mainland—reducing tariffs, increasing exports and protecting intellectual property rights—would lead to the creation of more than a quarter million jobs. Moreover, Taiwanese businesses that had moved to China would return, and the increased exports to China would attract foreign investment that would naturally lead to further job increases.

Signing the ECFA would open Taiwan's doors to FTAs with other countries, Ma said, and responding to accusations of helping big business at the expense of small and medium-sized firms, the president said that the economies of all such companies were intertwined and helping some would help the others. The ECFA was not for anyone's personal benefit but for the national good. Regarding those industries that would suffer through their inability to compete with Chinese goods, Ma repeated that NT$95 billion would be set aside over 10 years for assistance to domestic industries that experienced any negative impact.

The key difference between the two sides was his administration's open and international approach compared with the closed attitude of the DPP. This latter would lead to Taiwan's marginalization on the world stage.

Regarding fears of a threat to Taiwan's sovereignty, which the ruling Kuomintang had accused the DPP of whipping up, Ma stressed that after signing the ECFA it would be submitted to the Legislative Yuan for scrutiny, and he reaffirmed his commitment to no unification, no independence and no war.”

The DPP's Tsai Ing-wen was similarly unoriginal, merely restating her party's accusations that ECFA negotiations were being undertaken with unnecessary haste and undue secrecy, were not under Taiwan's control, would affect the regional strategic balance, and were of great concern to many laborers, farmers and white-collar workers.

She said Ma only talked about benefits and not about negative impacts, and claimed that within just 10 years 90 percent of domestic agricultural products would be open to tariff-free imports.

If the legislature did not pass the ECFA after it had been signed, would the government resort to stating it was too late to make changes, as it had with the U.S.-beef-import issue, Tsai asked.

In short, she said, it was not her party's incitement but the government's lack of transparency that was causing the public anxiety, she said, repeating her call for a referendum on the ECFA issue.

So, was the debate a disappointing anticlimax and a waste of a pleasant Sunday afternoon after the recent poor weather?

No. The fact that the audience included many from outside the “chattering classes” who may not be so familiar with the ECFA issue, gave President Ma an opportunity to fill the void of understanding that he has often blamed for causing the opposition from much of the public to the agreement.

For the KMT, it showed that the party has moved on from the days when Taiwan's government made decisions behind closed doors, which it then informed the people afterwards. And on a personal level, it showed that Ma is more than capable of holding his own in one-on-one political sparring with the best the opposition can produce.

It also gave him a stage, with the nation watching, to make one final surprise announcement. With the nation's television cameras whirring and in almost his last paragraph before the microphone went dead, President Ma announced that the status of the cross-Strait ECFA discussions was being upgraded, and that he would personally be leading the negotiating team from now on.

Perhaps Tsai and the DPP will not push so hard for televised public debates in the future.