Beijing blurs divide with Taiwan
economy By Jens Kastner
TAIPEI - Beijing is gearing up its efforts
to achieve unification with Taiwan only a few
weeks after Ma Ying-jeou of the Kuomintang (KMT),
the mainland's favorite candidate, won re-election
as Taiwanese president.
Since conditions
are not ripe for opening cross-strait talks on
political issues, Beijing is launching an
aggressive campaign - bypassing the Taiwanese
government - to implement another strategic goal
of "placing the hope [of unification] on Taiwanese
people", or winning the hearts and minds of
Taiwanese people in various social sectors by
directly offering them money-making opportunities.
In one of its new approaches, Beijing aims
at those sectors of Taiwanese society that believe
cross-strait business ties have benefited only the
north of the island and the rich. It has
established the "Pingtan
Comprehensive Experimental Zone" on a cluster of
islands belonging to Fujian province and targeting
central Taiwan, just across the Taiwan Strait.
Pingtan island, the scene of large-scale
war games against Taiwan in the mid-1990s by the
People's Liberation Army (PLA), is now referred to
as a "Little Taiwan" and seeks to attract small,
medium-sized and family-owned Taiwanese
enterprises to set up business operations.
Those Taiwanese willing to move will find
a long list of preferential treatments and US$40
billion-worth of brand-new infrastructure that
includes several ports of over 200,000 tonne
capacity and 18 square kilometers that will also
accommodate a cross-strait financial service
center for banks, insurers and securities.
Tax benefits are to be offered and bank
loans generously granted, while Taiwanese
professional qualification certificates will be
accepted. Taiwanese lawyers and doctors will be
allowed to operate freely. Exclusively for
Taiwanese investors in Pingtan, the mainland's
strict restrictions on imports of certain
products, such as steel, are to be eased, which
will give them an edge over their foreign
competitors in the mainland.
To make the
bait even more irresistible, both the mainland
currency, the yuan, and the New Taiwan Dollar will
circulate next to each other in the zone.
New roll-on, roll-off passenger ferries
have been awaiting the starter's gun at Pingtan,
ready to make the trip to the central Taiwanese
city of Taichung in two-and-a-half hours - about
the same time it takes a car drive from Taichung
to the Taiwanese capital of Taipei on a good day.
Fujian governor Su Shulin announced in
mid-February a plan to jointly develop Pingtan.
All Taiwanese municipalities, counties and
institutions are welcome to participate. Around
1,000 Taiwanese professionals will be hired within
the next five years, to be offered annual incomes
of between US$30,000 and US$300,000. In addition,
around 1,000 Taiwanese with agricultural expertise
may hired.
Eventually, the Pingtan
Comprehensive Experimental Zone, together with
Taichung, is envisaged as a cross-strait
free-trade zone. Once established, Taiwanese
people, ships and cargo could enter Pingtan freely
and from there the huge mainland market. The
status of Taichung - Taiwan's third-largest city -
would be lifted significantly, which is
undoubtedly an important factor in the Chinese
strategy as the area is generally assessed as
being amongst Taiwan's key electoral
battlegrounds.
Another Beijing initiatives
- this one aimed at Taiwanese small entrepreneurs
from throughout the island - is to come into
effect some time later this year. Under a new
rule, Taiwanese citizens as natural persons or
families may register certain types of small
businesses in a number of mainland cities and
provinces as "individual industrial and commercial
households".
As the move is most likely
meant as a pilot project that will eventually be
extended, it could be an attractive offer to many
Taiwanese, facing negative growth in real wages
and relatively high unemployment at home, given
that wages have risen much faster in the mainland
coastal provinces than in Taiwan and are expected
to catch up with those on the island within in a
few years.
Mother China is gradually also
refining plans for those who cannot move across
the Taiwan Strait, such as farmers and fishermen.
Since Ma Ying-jeou took office in 2008, and
particularly since Taipei and Beijing signed the
Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) in
2010, mainland delegations have roamed Taiwan's
south - the home turf of the opposition
anti-unification Democratic Progressive Party
(DPP) - trying to soften the attitude of locals by
large-scale procurements. Beijing has recently
been fine-tuning this approach.
Assessing
that before the presidential and legislative
elections held in January, much of the profits
earned through the export of farm and fishery
products to the mainland were pocketed by
intermediaries, which meant mainland money failed
to buy votes away from the DPP, Beijing now
engages farmers and fishermen directly.
Zheng Lizhong, deputy chairman of the
Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait
and the mainland's No 2 negotiator, recently
toured the area and forged closer relationships
with the ordinary people there, effectively
bypassing intermediary agents and also the
government in Taipei as well as local
administrations. Zheng reportedly even stayed
overnight at humble countryside homes.
Young educated Taiwanese are being tempted
by long-term visits to the mainland's top cities
where they can stay with selected families, part
of Beijing's intention to make a greater effort in
encouraging study in the mainland.
Taiwan's United Daily News in an editorial
named the mainland strategy as "Penetrating into
the island, into the households, into the hearts
of people". The newspaper didn't fail to identify
the dilemma the Taiwanese government finds itself
in: "Can you really stop Beijing building Pingtan?
Can you really oppose Beijing buying Taiwanese
produce?"
President Ma is well aware that
Beijing has begun to actively undermine Taipei's
power over the island, Chen In-Chin, a professor
at Taiwan's National Central University's Graduate
Institute of Law and Government, told Asia Times
Online.
"Beijing takes very seriously that
many Taiwanese think Ma's cross-strait policies
only benefit the rich. It has hence changed its
approach to a practical one. That it now gets
directly in touch with the Taiwanese population
makes Ma very nervous," Chen said.
According to Chen, in order to escape such
a frighteningly tight Chinese embrace, it has all
along been Ma's strategy to gain more
international space and sign free-trade agreements
(FTA) with industrialized countries while at the
same time keeping the cross-strait situation
peaceful by acknowledging that the mainland and
Taiwan both belong to China.
"Of course,
Ma sees that ECFA, Pingtan and their likes are
merely tools for unification in the eyes of
Beijing. That's why he wants to pull the United
States as a balancing power into the game. But now
it becomes very clear that he cannot take the
international hurdles."
As an example of
the weakness of Ma's efforts to secure improved
international ties, Chen singled out Taipei's
relations with Singapore. The two sides started
FTA talks well before the presidential election,
but once Ma was re-elected, this FTA bubble seemed
to burst.
Taiwan's representative to
Singapore, Vanessa Shih, was recalled in
mid-February, supposedly because she was caught by
the Singaporean government displaying the Republic
of China (ROC), or Taiwanese, flag in public and
singing the ROC anthem, which if true would amount
to a considerable faux-pax, given Taiwan's
diplomatic situation.
Chen believes this
story is a pretense.
"Beijing made it look
as if it consents to Ma signing an FTA with
Singapore because it wanted to help him get
reelected. But since he won, they see no more need
for such compromises. Behind the Vanessa Shih
controversy stands China, of course," he said.
One of the very few moves left in Taipei's
bag of tricks that could potentially delay
unification indefinitely by making the Taiwanese
export-reliant economy less dependent on mainland
China is Taiwan becoming a member of the
Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).
Ma has on
many occasions stated that within a decade he
wants Taiwan to join the multilateral trade bloc
that will likely be comprised of US, Japan,
Australia, Brunei, Chile, New Zealand, Singapore,
Malaysia, Peru and Vietnam. He has promised that
Taiwan's first free-trade zone will be set up in
the southern port city of Kaohsiung by that time.
While Beijing is certain to oppose
Taiwanese TPP membership as it would provide the
island with about the only real alternative to
putting all eggs into the mainland basket,
Washington says Taiwan is welcome but must first
get rid of import restrictions on US beef. Those
were initially imposed in relation to incidents of
mad cow disease in the United States and were
later renewed over the use of ractopamine; this
lean meat enhancer is banned in Taiwan, the
European Union and mainland China but is allowed
in the US, Canada and a number of other countries.
For the sake of satisfying the Americans,
Ma's cabinet has been pushing for an end to the
beef import ban, but as the DPP, the staunchly
pro-independence Taiwan Solidarity Union, the
island's farmers and civic groups, and even parts
of Ma's own KMT are all up in arms against the use
of ractopamine, it is hard to see how Washington's
demand will be met.
Professor Chen
dismissed the notion that Beijing secretly pushes
Taiwanese farmers to work against scrapping the
ractopamine ban in order to ruin Taiwan's chances
of joining the TPP. He also pointed out that as
the DPP has effectively lacked a leadership since
its election loss, what is currently seen and
heard of the party represents individual opinions
rather than a clear party line.
Chen then
singled out what he believes is the crux of the
problem. He holds that it is Ma's personality that
brought Taiwan into the precarious situation in
the first place.
"Ma knows that the TPP is
vital. Yet his political will isn't strong enough
to challenge Beijing. In [South] Korea, there are
also many conflicting opinions and intense
domestic tension over FTAs. But a Ma Ying-jeou is
not a [Korean President] Lee Myung-bak," Chen
said.
Jens Kastner is a
Taipei-based journalist.
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2012 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights
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