BBC Interview: Ma Ying-jeou struggles for “Independence”

One day before publishing the interview with DPP chairwoman and presidential nominee Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), the BBC made a rare interview with Taiwan’s president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), with questions asked by the BBC’s Rachel Harvey,  available online. The interview had been conducted at the presidential office on June 3.

Ma reiterated that more countries would be willing to improve their trade relations with Taiwan, once Taiwan improved its trade relations with China.

The reason behind this is that many countries have noticed the logic: that is to say, with the mainland willing to improve relations with Taiwan, they will ask themselves, if they can do it, why can’t we? That is the sort of benefit it is having.

Harvey also asked Ma about fears that stronger ties with China could erode Taiwan’s distinct identity. Those fears were understandable, weren’t they, she asked.

It’s worth to push the “pause” button at 1’26”. Ma’s face seems to be taking an expression of disgust, as he leans back before replying:

I… ah… wo bu xiang xin zhe zhong xianxiang… [I do not believe that this will affect our autonomy. (我不相信這种現象會影響到自主性)].

It’s hard to say independence in other words, without sounding ambiguous. “Autonomy” is only one possible translation for 自主性 (zì zhǔ xìng). Other possible translations would indeed be independence or liberty.

On another question, practically the same he had been asked by the BBC’s Stephen Sackur in 2006, Ma’s reply was much less vigorous this month, than five years earlier.

Harvey: You talk of the positive influence that you hope Taiwan might be able to have on mainland China through this relationship. I’m puzzled though as to how this can be an equitable relationship when China is pointing missiles at Taiwan. How can you negotiate [Harvey manages to put some of the same consternation into her voice as Sackur did five years earlier] with that implicit threat hanging over the relationship?

Ma acknowledged that China had steadily increased the number of missiles, and that those could reach Taiwan, even though Beijing claimed that they were not targeted at Taiwan. Taiwan wasn’t in a position to engage in an arms race with the mainland, “nor do we want to”. But “we absolutely cannot isolate ourselves”, he added, criticizing his predecessor Chen Shui-bian without naming him. The years prior to his presidency had isolated Taiwan from the rest of the world, and had even made some feel that Taiwan was a “troublemaker”.

We do not want to be a troublemaker. We want to be an enabler of peace.

Apart from the video’s 1’26”, where Ma almost stumbled into English, Harvey asked her questions in English, and Ma, who is a fluent speaker of English, replied in Chinese.

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Related

» President reaffirms ROC National Security Strategy, Taiwan Today, June 16, 2011
» Tsai Ing-wen’s BBC Interview, June 17, 2011

Tsai Ing-wen’s BBC Interview

DPP chairperson and presidential nominee Tsai Ing-wen was interviewed by the BBC during her visit to Britain earlier this month. The interview was broadcast on Thursday and Friday, and posted on her YouTube channel (with Chinese subtitles), also on Friday.

A personal impression, and nothing I can back up with statistics – I seem to have heard more from Tsai on foreign media very recently, than I have on Radio Taiwan International (RTI) in half a year. That said, German coverage of her visit hadn’t been ample during her recent visit to Berlin – but foreign affairs are usually no big issues here anyway.

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Related

» For the World to Hear, August 3, 2010
» BBC Hardtalk with Ma Ying-jeou, February 2007

Claudia Kotter, 1980 – 2011

I’ve carried an organ donor card for decades, ever since I was a student. I found that piece of paper in the entrance hall of some official building, filled it out, and put it into my wallet, feeling that it was the right thing to do. But I have never lobbied others to do likewise, even though just 14 to 17 percent of Germans are donors, while – paradoxically - around 60 percent of people say they think its a good idea, according to a Deutsche Welle article of June, 2008.

Donating your organs is voluntary in Germany, and it’s one of the issues about which I have no clear-cut opinion. For sure, organ donation shouldn’t be mandatory. To be a donor seems to require some kind of trust in other people (medics who conduct transplants, for example, and who are faced with people who want to live, but may have to die, because there is no organ for them within reach). Trust doesn’t go without saying. There’s no obligation to trust. There may be no way to trust, and there may still be many other individual reasons to dislike the concept. But maybe it would be a good idea to have reluctant people carry a paper that states that they do not want to donate organs when they die. Maybe.

The strangest thing about the issue would be the discrepancy between liking the idea, but not making it happen – if the statistic quoted by Deutsche Welle  is accurate.

Claudia Kotter, a organ-donation activist, died in Berlin on Tuesday. She had suffered from a rare immune deficiency disease. In her late years – she only became thirty years old -, she lived with someone else’s lung. She didn’t advocate mandatory organ donation. “A disease is no license to blackmail others”, she said.

But she and the association she founded, “Young Heroes” (Junge Helden) would talk to people, grown-ups and schoolkids alike. Frequently, they threw parties to promote organ donation. “There is no ‘later’ and no ‘some day’. Life is now.”

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Related
» Junge Helden website

Tsai and Beijing play their Cards

“Taiwan Affairs Office” (TAO) spokesperson Yang Yi (杨毅), on a press conference on wednesday, reacted to a statement by Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) chairperson and presidential candidate Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文).

Tsai,  a day earlier, had said that her party would engage in dialogue with China with a more energetic attitude, but would not accept the One China principle, writes A-Gu.

Yang suggested that

cross straight relations and “peaceful development”, had advanced and produced results because they were being realized on the foundation of the common recognition of the One China principle of the ’92 consensus. It was hard to see how cross-strait relations could be maintained or developed without that foundation, if the “one-China framework was denied, and if the “splittist position” of “one side, one country” was intransigently upheld.

A-Gu is

struck by the way the statement closes: it’s merely difficult to imagine, not impossible, for relations to remain intact with a DPP that denies “One China.” That seems to hint to me that the Chinese leadership is at least still debating this question, though unlikely already resolved to maintain current agreements like the ECFA (however, uncertainty on this question would surely assist the KMT come  2012); and the Chinese leadership is doubtlessly eager to see just how “energetic” of an attitude the DPP will display during this time where the Chinese government need concede nothing.

Re-reading my (or A-Gu’s, again) translation of what TAO had to say after Tsai had been nominated as the DPP’s presidential candidate in April, Yang’s statement of Wednesday clearly looks more moderate. Among suggestions that “one side, one country” would influence things or have an impact, her April statement had also included the strong accusation that the DPP’s position would “破坏两岸关系和平发展” (destroy the peaceful development of cross strait relations).

Apparently no longer. But why the – relative – moderation?

One answer could be that as unwelcome as a DPP victory in Taiwan’s presidential elections would be to Beijing, it is quite a possibility. In the past, it has been Chinese practice to act as if no threats had ever been made. Rather than “eating their words”, they acted as if they had never been spoken.

That Beijing would still do everything it could to isolate Taiwan is a different story – but that applies to these days of Ma Ying-jeou‘s presidency, just as it did to the days of Chen Shui-bian‘s.

Another explanation might be that Ma isn’t quite the “chess piece” Beijing had hoped he would be. Ma wavered a lot – but as an elected leader (and one who sought reelection), he had to take the will of Taiwan’s public into account. (It’s no decent campaign approach anyway to suggest that Ma were Beijing’s willing henchman who’d put Taiwan’s de-facto independence to death.)

Another might be that points made by Taiwanese visitors to Beijing, such as Wang Hsing-ching (aka Nanfang Shuo), who is not suspected of being particularly splittist there, have had some impact after all. Wang had long argued that relying only on the KMT to get a picture of Taiwan’s public mood was no wise policy.

Global opinion may play a role, too. While China seems to be going ballistic in the South China (or West Philippine) sea, it may have registered that the DPP is making use of the cards Taiwan still has. Tsai travelled to Britain and Germany this month, and has met with a number of not-so-unimportant politicians there, and after her return to Taiwan. President Ma can show off some international contacts as well.

There would be many good reasons for Beijing to respect the results of democratic elections, either way, at least abroad. Maybe occasionally, such good reasons will be good enough even for China’s leaders.

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Updates / Related

» Ros-Lehtinen: a Duty to Deliver, Taipei Times, June 13, 2011

Foreign Affairs: Solms meets Tsai

[Main Link: http://www.shadowgov.tw/50074_0_is.htm]

Hermann Otto Solms (FDP), German Federal Parliament’s vice president, met with Taiwan’s opposition leader and DPP presidential candidate Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) on Wednesday, during his visit to Taiwan as leader of a delegation of German parliamentarians. During their meeting at the DPP headquarers, Tsai restated her agenda of turning  Taiwan into a country without nuclear energy by 2025.

Solms gallantly kept to his party’s – brandnew – policy of being anti-nuclear-energy, too (and granted – he stated some points that would support his own assertion that it was in fact a long-established FDP goal to abandon nuclear energy – see the account of his talk further down). All parties in Germany’s federal parliament agreed that nuclear energy should be abandoned, he said.

A transitional source of energy – that, of course, used to be a wonderfully vague concept. The Fukushima disaster – if reasonably so, or for a classical German bout of angst – has made the concept much more concrete. In fact, Solms, as a member of Germany’s most business-friendly party, must have felt a bit foreign during his meeting with politically-”green” Tsai, in front of big anti-nuclear artwork.

Just a week earlier, they had discussed energy issues in Germany, Tsai said. Alternative energy sources in Germany had been the topic then, Germany’s hadn’t only been a political, but also an economic decision, and new energy industries would also create new job opportunities.

Tsai Ing-wen welcomes Hermann Otto Solms at DPP headquarters in Taipei - click on the picture above for video

Tsai has had some good international (not least German) photo opportunities so far this month, but she, too, looked somewhat uneasy at times during her welcome talk, and looking at the interpreter behind Solms, she appeared to be backing away from the dignified guest, as if she felt that he wasn’t quite decontaminated yet. Besides, she could have used a glass of water. When she criticized the KMT’s still pro-nuclear position, or rather, after that bit, too, had been interpreted into German, Solms seemed to grin uncontrollably, while the interpreter was extremely busy with taking notes of Tsai’s next lines.

He was leading a delegation of members of several political parties, Solms replied, but in Germany, there was an overarching consensus among them that the atomic age should come to an end. As early as during the 1980s, his party, the FDP’s, position had been that nuclear energy was only a transitional source of energy, which had to be abandoned once technological alternatives had been created. It had been a member of his party who, as a minister of economic affairs, had opened the way for alternative sources of energy co-servicing the German grid in 1990.

As seems to be a rule, it took Tsai a while to relax and to smile. She seemed to be particularly fond of Solms “invitation” to learn both from Germany’s mistakes and its progress on the path of abandoning nuclear energy ^*).

Some latent (or supposed by this blogger) nuclear fission aside, Solms and his party might well be called friends of Taiwan. In May 2002, the FDP members of federal parliament, Solms among them, asked the other political parties to pass a resolution by which relations with Taiwan would be shaped in a pragmatic way, and in a way which would value or honor Taiwan’s democratic constitution and practice.
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Note

^*) Solm’s “invitation to learn” may appear to be somewhat haughty, but given the German political consensus on abandoning nuclear energy, and on reaching the objective by 2022 (rather than by 2025 as is the DPP’s goal), Taiwan could indeed think of Germany as its guinea pig, should Taipei embark on a similar policy after the 2012 presidential and legislative elections.

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Related

» The Issue of Transparency, March 29, 2011
» German Federal Parliament (Bundestag) website
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People’s Daily: Locals and Migrant Workers “Hand in Hand”, like in Developed Countries

People’s Daily / Xinhua — [Main Link: http://news.xinhuanet.com/society/2011-06/15/c_121538119.htm]

“It was very scary – the scariest thing I have encountered since I was born”, Asia One (Singapore) quotes a 27-year-old owner of a denim shop in Zengcheng (增城市), Guangdong Province. That’s not to suggest that what happened there, east of Guangzhou and north of Shenzhen, would be all that spectacular – it may just be another of many unharmonious outbreaks of local dissatisfaction, and in this case, one between relative haves and have-nots, rather than between distrusting citizens and untransparent authorities.

But the Zengcheng story has become prominent enough to earn itself a Wikipedia entry as a 2011 Zengcheng riot or incident (6•11事件). While thousands of – mainly migrant workers – were involved in the protests and riots, following the man-handling of security personnel working for the local government, no deaths were reported. China.org.cn referred to some or all news surrounding the incident as rumors, and reported that a panel had been entrusted with dispelling such rumors.

Besides, the incident was also worth an editorial by People’s Daily (RMRB, 人民日报, signed Zhan Yong, 詹勇) on Wednesday, and (sub)titled

“Let different people coexist harmoniously, enter continuous industrial development hand-in-hand, with the prospect of urbanization – this is the task to master for social management today” (让不同人群和谐共处，携手融入不断发展的工业化、城市化图景中，是今天社会管理需要破解的新课题).

A RMRB editorial suggests that the CCP attaches importance to an issue, even if most of the article itself consists of platitudes, and Zengcheng isn’t even mentioned. The point the editorial tries to make is that

From a global perspective, the major industrialized countries also went through a process of social governance (社会治理, shèhuì zhìlǐ) -

the wording of which is somewhat different from the now constant leitmotif of social management (社会管理, shèhuì guǎnlǐ, as mentioned in RMRB’s subtitle), but probably means the same in substance.

From general closed-door policies to orderly (or step-by-step) liberalization (有序开放), from comprehensive exclusion [of people] to the promotion of [their] integration, the governments of many developed countries are successively making efforts to be good “referees” and “service people”, putting different nationalities and the interests of people from different regional backgrounds into harmony with one another, solve social contradictions which stem from different demands and cultures. For us, this isn’t without inspirational and referential meaning. (从普遍采取“关门政策”到有序开放、从全面排斥到促进融合，许多发达国家的政府，现在也纷纷致力当好“裁判者”和“服务员”，协调好不同民族、不同来源地居民的利益，解决好不同诉求、不同文化的社群矛盾。这对我们不无启示和借鉴意义。)

Inclusion is harmonious, and exclusion is harmful, reasons RMRB -

It is therefore that the central government brought up “the coordination of social relations”, demands “the strengthening of migrant (or floating) as well as distinctive population’s management” as important contents, and attaches importance to the perfection of a system that protects the rights of the masses, under the leadership of the party and the government. (融合则和谐，排斥则俱伤。从这个意义看，中央提出“协调社会关系”，要求把“加强流动人口和特殊人群服务管理”作为重要内容，并注重“完善党和政府主导的维护群众权益机制”，有很强的现实性和针对性。)

The editorial reminds its readers that life is as colorful, as problematic and as beautiful as shown in a long-running soap opera broadcast by Guangzhou television, “Daughter-in-Law from outer Province, and the Local Man” (外来媳妇本地郎), and asks if not, “the development of our society should become just this kind of exciting drama?” This depended on social management and united efforts of all individuals, the editorial suggests.

The referral to a Guangzhou-produced television series is the only indication that the editorial actually reacts to the Zengcheng incident.

Xinhua doesn’t provide a commenter function next to the editorial, and on Enorth (Tianjin), who also republished the RMRB editoral, there are no comments yet (暂时还没有评论).

According to Chinese Wikipedia, there are no national regulations for the management of inter-provincial migration in place, and such regulations are mainly issued by the provinces and cities (目前中国没有制定流动人口管理的法规，流动人口管理的法规主要是省市一级).  No source given by the article, but most news articles about the issue seem to suggest that Guangdong Province is conducting research of its own, as to if migrant workers should be granted temporary or even permanent residence.

Even if the central government repealed the household registration system nation-wide, against the provincial level’s resistance, it’s hardly conceivable that Guangdong – and many other well-off provinces – would take orders. In fact, Kam Wing Chan (University of Washington), believes that  reforms of the registration – or hukou – system hadn’t changed the situation in principle, but rather devolved responsibility for hukou policies to local governments, which in many cases actually makes permanent migration of peasants to cities harder than before.

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Related
» Wen Jiabao’s Endgame, April 21, 2011
» Shenzhen: Here to Stay, May 11, 2010
» Household Registration Reform, March 2, 2010
» The Sticking Point (comment), Jan 28, 2011

Tannock: WHO Undermines its Credibility

No United Nations specialised agency has the right unilaterally to decide on the status in international law of any given country or territory.

From a letter to Margaret Chan, the World Health Organization’s director general, written by EU member of parliament (MEP) Charles Tannock, and co-signed by 20 more MEP. Within the WHO bureaucracy, Taiwan has to be referred to as a “province of China”, according to an internal, but no longer unknown, WHO memo.

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Related
WHO does Chan think she is, Writing Baron, June 14, 2011

Euroland, Aching to Grow

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Our Beautiful Money

When I listened to the Voice of Greece last time, probably on a Sunday morning in May, while doing my share of the chores, I caught myself thinking something like: Why the heck are they still broadcasting on shortwave, while other countries, including mine, are cutting their foreign radio stations’ budgets? My brain didn’t add “It’s our money”, because, despite reading Germany’s biggest tabloid once in a while, I know that things are a bit more complicated. It’s more like the banks’ money, or it’s becoming the money of the German state, several other European states, and the European central bank’s in that they are trying to save not only the commercial creditors’ existence, but actually every Eurocent the Greek state owes to the commercial banks.

I hope the Greek government won’t get this influential blog wrong. I love shortwave radio, and I don’t care how the Greeks find their feet again, as long as they do manage to bounce back at all. And while I do feel that, once upon a time, a Greek government did fool Berlin and many other Euroland capitals when it provided numbers seemingly consistent with the convergence criteria and joined Euroland – apparently in 2002 -, its European partners were only too willing to be fooled at the time. And I guess that next time a similar opportunity arises, they will be only too willing to be fooled, once again.

It would be heartening to think that even the most skeptical German might have some sympathy for the average Greek,

Inside Greece wrote in May, given that the average Greek, knowing nothing more than you or I about political economics, was still facing a barrage of opinions on debt restructuring.

Which is true. But it would be heartening, too, to think that even the most skeptical Greeks might have some sympathy for the average German, who has lived with very little growth in individual purchasing power ever since the mid-1990s, who has seen restructuring which spelled upheaval of sorts, and who is under the impression that this was exactly the restructuring the Greeks saved themselves, at about the same time, and at our costs.

Either way, the main question is no longer how we got into the mess, but how we get out of it again – as Europeans, if possible.

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Want of Fresh Ideas

Science and Politics

The Economist is in no doubt about which European state can do most to prevent the situation from aggravating further. But

[Germany's] strategy, in so far as there is one, has followed a twin track. One has been to push others to adopt Germanic rigour through tougher fiscal rules and a “fitness programme” to make economies more competitive. This is meant to prevent a future crisis. As for today’s ills, caused by the sins of the past, the answer has often been just to play for time: to try to repair Europe’s banks, insist on deficits being trimmed and hope that growth makes the problem more manageable. (May 14, 2011, page 40)

And the same article pointed out that Germany had opposed Eurobonds, resisted immediately imposing losses on bondholders (while insisting that they had to share the pain from 2013), and backed arguments against Ireland burning its bank creditors.

What strikes me most is how resentful – and at the same time fatalistic – many of my compatriots seem to react to the bad  news they are showered with. Granted – Germans and revolutions live on two different planets. But innovative thought should be nothing outlandish here.

I am skeptical of too innovative ways of thinking, and frequently, what is meant to be innovative is in fact only dogmatic. The political Left and the Vatican aren’t as different from each other as they may like to think. But this country would deserve a much more open press which would discuss real political alternatives. There will be no change without new concepts. Christian Y. Schmidt, a journalist living in China, stated correctly in a talk half a year ago that even though the German press criticized the government – and the opposition – frequently and with pleasure, there were limits. Germany’s economic order wasn’t questioned. The idea that banks could be nationalized, as a result of the recent financial crisis, hadn’t been discussed in the aftermath of the global financial crisis.

Not that nationalizing the banks would necessarily be a great idea. But legislation that would make banks more responsible creditors, and less prepared to bet on bailouts with public money, is mandatory. Unfortunately, German politicians have preferred to defame the Greek pension system, rather than to address the actual issues.

I have shifted somewhat during the past few years, from reading mainstream printed papers to more “exotic” stuff online. Der Spiegelfechter is a website which provides posts from fresh (usually rather leftist) perspectives, and its contributors aren’t shying away from explaining  the background to the issues in the news (in German).

In many cases, I disagree with hopeful leftist articles about a European preparedness to address the real issues. When – mostly young – Spaniards began to protest at Madrid’s Puerta del Sol, for example, I heard some of them vent their frustrations in front of a BBC microphone – in Spanish. It struck me because, whenever they can, BBC reporters seem to use  English-language statements from foreigners in their coverage, even from Joe Blow. Could it be that there were no protesters with sufficient confidence in their English language skills available? If so, don’t blame the state for that.

And am I jumping to conclusions when thinking that many “people in the street”  are just as prepared to have their lives subsidized, as are many commercial banks?

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Change don’t come Easy

In the Grapes of Wrath (1939), chapter 14, John Steinbeck wrote:

The causes lie deep and simply – the causes are a hunger in a stomach, multiplied a million times; a hunger in a single soul, hunger for joy and some security, multiplied a million times; muscles and mind aching to grow, to work, to create, multiplied a million times. The last clear definite function of man – muscles aching to work, minds aching to create beyond the single need – this is man. To build a wall, to build a house, a dam, and in the wall and house and dam to put something of Manself, and to Manself take back something of the wall, the house, the dam; to take hard muscles from the lifting, to take the clear lines and form from conceiving. For man, unlike anything organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments. This you may say of man – when theories change and crash, when schools, philosophies, when narrow dark alleys of thought, national, religious, economic, grow and disintegrate, man reaches, stumbles forward, painfully, mistakenly sometimes. Having stepped forward, he may slip back, but only half a step, never the full step back.

I hope this is true. And I hope that what followed in the same chapter, is not:

This you may say and know it and know it. This you may know when the bombs plummet out of the black planes on the market-place, when prisoners are stuck like pigs, when the crushed bodies drain filthily in the dust. You may know it in this way. If the step were not being taken, if the stumbling-forward ache were not alive, the bombs would not fall, the throats would not be cut. Fear the time when the bombs stop falling while the bombers live – for every bomb is proof that the spirit has not died. And fear the time when the strikes stop while the great owners live – for every little beaten strike is proof that the step is being taken. And this you can know – fear the time when Manself will not suffer and die for a concept, for this one quality is the foundation of Manself, and this one quality is man, distinctive in the universe.

Human brains will need to be aching to work and to create, too.

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Related
» Creative Destruction or Development, March 15, 2010
» From Confederacy to Federation, Joschka Fischer, May 12, 2000

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