"...the service trade agreement is the most important pillar within the ECFA framework and something that will be used to help China leverage investment, immigration and other incentives to control how Taiwanese vote and achieve its goal of unification."The view of Huang Tien-lin (黃天麟), a former presidential advisor, in a Taipei Times op-ed published today (Sunday). He is probably right, but notice his narrow horizon: it does not stretch beyond the bondage of the electoral mechanism.
Free trade ought to be embraced directly from principle, but any potential that cross-strait trade brings for enhanced coercion can only be confronted by a rejection of the principles of coercive political economy in Taiwan; and that means action toward ends logically prior to the electoral mechanism. The problems presented by Chinese investors and workers in Taiwan could surely be resolved if only the Taiwanese were not restricted from thinking and acting in their own interests by the very series of governments they themselves have now grown accustomed to electing.
The only real hope of an exit from this mess demands not votista abandonment of oneself to the irrational tides of electoral politics, but concentrated defiance directed toward a program of rational depoliticization.
I seem to remember a certain deceased queen once said something similar...
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