Crux
30th June 2010, 18:42
I will post a chinese language version of this article when it gets up on chinaworker.info or http://socialism-tw.blogspot.com/
Taiwan and China: No to the capitalists’ ECFA pact
Wednesday, 30 June 2010.
Capitalist “economic cooperation” at the expense of workers and poor on both sides of the Taiwan Strait
Statement by Taiwan Socialist League (cwi in Taiwan)
Taipei witnessed a huge protest march amid thunderstorms and torrential rain on Saturday 26 June to oppose the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) with China. The trade deal was signed by representatives of the Chinese and Taiwanese governments on Tuesday 29 June. President Ma Ying-jeou and his ruling Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party) claim the deal will bring big benefits to Taiwan including the creation of 260,000 new jobs. But many workers and youth are sceptical to these claims and fear an even faster wave of outsourcing, job losses and de-industrialisation as Taiwanese companies shift production to exploit cheaper labour in China.
Hong Kong, which signed a Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement (CEPA) with mainland China in 2003, a pact that contains many similarities with ECFA, is often cited as a warning in the Taiwanese political debate. Hong Kong now has the most serious rich-poor disparity in the world according to the UN. The number living in poverty has risen in Hong Kong to around one sixth of the population, despite it boasting the highest average wealth in the world. While its billionaires have benefited from easier access to the Chinese market, the exodus of manufacturing and investment from Hong Kong has left a bulging low wage service sector as the only source of employment for many workers especially the young.
Saturday’s protest in Taipei was organised by the opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which opposes closer ties with China. Party organisers claim 100,000 people took part in the march, many travelling on 300 buses from central and southern Taiwan, which are regarded as DPP strongholds. Taipei police put the turnout at 32,000. Given the heavy rain, the real figure was probably somewhere between these two estimates, making it a sizable protest. The DPP released its own opinion polls showing that 86 percent believe ECFA will widen income disparities and 43 percent fear falling incomes.
ECFA — in whose interests?
Socialists and the Taiwan Socialist League (cwi in Taiwan) oppose the ECFA, which has been drafted in the interests of big corporations in Taiwan and China in order to extend their possibilities to make profits. The economic policies of Ma’s pan-blue administration are anti-working class to the core and ECFA conforms to the same pattern. The policies of the Kuomintang during and following the recent severe recession placed the economic burdens on working people and the younger generation through higher unemployment, wage cuts and an explosion of short-term contracts and the use of manpower agencies. Unemployment is currently at 5.39 percent of the workforce, but is more than twice as high for under-25s (13.3 percent). Nearly 40 percent of those who graduated from college last year are still out of work. ECFA will magnify these problems as big corporations gain even greater freedom to play workers off against each other, speeding up the “race to the bottom” which is a feature of globalised capitalism.
Last year, ostensibly to curb youth unemployment, the government introduced NT$22,000 monthly (US$682) subsidy for companies to hire college graduates. Rather than increase employment, many companies have dismissed older workers to take advantage of the scheme, while at the same time this has pressed down graduate wages towards a new NT$22,000 floor. This level is an outrage, just half of the nation’s average monthly wage of NT$42,509. A poll by the website Yes123.com showed average starting pay for new graduates is now NT$22,624 a month — NT$1,185 lower than their expected salary. By some estimates this represents a fall of one-third in graduates’ starting salaries compared to ten years ago (an average NT$30,000 in 2000). There is a growing trend for companies from Singapore and Hong Kong to recruit “cheap” graduates from Taiwan.
Class or nation?
Socialists reject narrow nationalistic arguments against ECFA such as the arguments of the DPP leaders, which concentrate on the defence of Taiwan’s “national interest”. This is a catchphrase that workers and the oppressed should always be wary of. When rulers preach about “national interest” they want to hide the fundamentally conflicting interests of the capitalist minority and the exploited majority. They want us to think that the interests of Terry Guo, billionaire boss of Foxconn, whose militarised-sweatshop business model has driven 12 young workers to commit suicide in China, are the same as the Taiwanese trade union activists sacked by another ruthless company, YFO (a maker of touchscreen handsets). This is absolutely not the case of course. Guo and his class supports the ECFA to make it even easier to exploit workers and crush unions on both side of the Strait. Likewise, the Chinese side in the ECFA negotiations are not motivated by a desire to protect workers’ interests in China, but are quite happy to encourage more sweatshops, using Chinese labour as industrial “cannon fodder”.
Many DPP supporters sincerely want to resist ECFA and for the right reasons. But socialists do not put any confidence in the DPP leaders to lead the struggle against ECFA. When it ruled Taiwan in the noughties, the DPP also carried through neo-liberal attacks on workers, privatising state-owned companies and deregulating the economy in the interests of private capital. Its policies were therefore not fundamentally different from the economic policies of Ma Ying-jeou and the Kuomintang today. It was the DPP that took Taiwan into the viciously neo-liberal trading regime of the WTO (World Trade Organisation) in 2001. This is because the DPP bases itself on capitalism and seeks support from big business. The WTO is weighted in favour of the 500 biggest global corporations that control 70 percent of all trade and want a worldwide “police” mechanism to enforce the removal of trade barriers and the adoption of pro-business policies by member governments. The losers from WTO membership are the vast majority – workers, poor farmers and the environment. Therefore, for the DPP to now oppose the ECFA, a “mini-WTO” for China and Taiwan, smacks of hypocrisy. Ironically, the DPP government, despite its pro-independence bombast, agreed to the name “Chinese Taipei” as a condition for joining the WTO, such was the pressure from the capitalists in Taiwan to enter the WTO.
Lower prices — or wages?
Opposition in Taiwan to ECFA is based on a number of realistic concerns. Small businesses fear being driven out of the market by cheaper China-made goods — including many made by Taiwanese-owned companies. It will mainly benefit Taiwan’s bigger companies, in other words. Farmers in southern Taiwan, the heartland of the DPP, have expressed similar fears once tariffs on farm goods entering Taiwan are lowered. While this is not covered by the first phase of ECFA signed on 29 June, the pact will be revised and extended every six months. Workers, who have already faced more than a decade of job losses and outsourcing, accompanied by a bosses’ offensive to drive down wages, fear more of the same under ECFA. As permanent job contracts are replaced by short-term contracts and a proliferation of manpower agencies (another policy that both DPP and KMT have favoured), the downward pressure on wages is set to continue if outsourcing, as expected, increases under ECFA.
In order to sweeten the pill and mute opposition on the Taiwan side, Beijing’s negotiators have agreed to put 539 Taiwanese items on an “early harvest list” to receive immediate tariff-free access to China’s market. These goods account for around 16 percent of Taiwan’s exports to China. On the same list there will be 267 China-made items, accounting for 10.5 percent of its Taiwan-bound exports. Government propaganda is claiming consumers will reap benefits as prices will fall, but this is by no means certain. Capitalist governments in other parts of the world have made similar claims. This has been the case in the capitalist European Union every time a new country is admitted to membership, and also when the euro currency was introduced ten years ago. But most prices rose instead. Similarly, in Taiwan’s case, it is equally or even more likely that companies importing from China will keep for themselves any savings that flow from tariff reductions.
http://www.chinaworker.info/get_img?NrArticle=1104&NrImage=7Anti-ECFA protest organised by DPP in Taipei, 26 June 2010
A workers’ alternative
While the DDP-led march on 26 June showed the depth of opposition to ECFA that is growing in Taiwan, it completely failed to offer an effective way to fight this trade deal and other neo-liberal policies. Of course the DPP and its smaller pan-green nationalist allies like the TSU have every right to organise protests against ECFA. But rather than an attempt to mobilise a broad-based opposition to the ECFA, or offer a strategy for fighting its implementation, the DPP indulged in blatant electioneering. Long before the thunderclouds emptied their load upon the demonstration, it was in danger of drowning under endless portraits of DPP candidates for November’s mayoral race. Such an approach is incapable of winning support from wider layers of the population that would be attracted to a real struggle against ECFA, but do not wish to be used as pawns in the DPP’s election race.
Likewise, while DPP leaders have made some references to the effects of ECFA on working people and small businesses, the main slant of their anti-ECFA propaganda is narrow nationalism of the type “protect Taiwan”. This can serve temporarily to shore up their base within the the majority community of Taiwanese speakers, but is incapable of winning significant support from the working class of other ethnic groups who will also lose out from ECFA. Consequently, the DPP’s approach does not provide a political basis for uniting broad sections of the population, and crucially the working class, to actually block the implementation ECFA. The aim of the exercise, for the DPP leaders, seems to have been merely to “let off steam” and mobilise support for its bid to capture control of cities like Taipei from the Kuomintang in November. Above all, the DPP hopes to recapture the presidency from an increasingly unpopular Ma Ying-jeou in 2012. But what then? Will they break with his disastrous pro-capitalist policies? Will a future DPP administration pull out of ECFA? Based on the record of the DPP in government the answer to these questions is not a chance!
The DPP’s often crude anti-China propaganda (not directed solely against the dictatorship) represents a serious barrier to building unity between workers and poor farmers in both Taiwan and China to fight ECFA and neo-liberalism. Ultimately, the unity of the oppressed in both places, and internationally against capitaism and its agencies like the WTO, is the only way to block the growing appetite of Chinese, Taiwanese and other capitalists for more sweatshops, exploitation and pro-business policies.
Socialists advocate a broad “united front” approach in order to build a movement that can stop neo-liberal attacks such as ECFA. Above all this should be based on the working class and initially upon the small number of more politically advanced trade unions in Taiwan that have come out against the pact, rejecting the argument that ECFA will benefit “their” companies or sectors. Now that the deal has been signed, the emphasis must shift from merely saying “no” to ECFA, towards preparing trade union action, including strikes and other forms of struggle to block the inevitable factory closures, outsourcing and further casualisation of the workforce.
Right of self-determination
The Chinese regime’s promotion of ECFA with speeches about “one family” and of Taiwan as an “insider” have only undermined Ma’s position and increased fears among significant layers of Taiwanese, including the DPP’s main electoral base, that ECFA is a “Trojan horse” with which Beijing plans to capture control over Taiwan. Undoubtedly, the long-term desire to reincorporate Taiwan is a big factor in the Chinese regime’s calculations. But this applies even without ECFA. The DPP’s old strategy of relying on US imperialism and foreign capitalism as a counterweight to China’s growing power is coming under increasing pressure as governments and big capitalist corporations around the world become more dependent upon the Chinese regime and more reluctant to encounter its disapproval.
Socialists stand for the right of self-determination for Taiwan. If a majority clearly favoured independence (which is not the case at this stage), socialists would support this, while also defending the right to self-determination for non-Taiwanese speaking minorities within Taiwan. To attain this goal, avoiding the prospect of a horrific cross-strait military conflagration, any struggle for independence would need the solidarity and active support of the working masses internationally and crucially in China itself. This would of necessity need to be a socialist struggle, linking up with the oppressed masses of the wider region, to end one-party rule in China and sweep away capitalism throughout East Asia, putting the working class in control of its economic powerhouses and opening the way to a voluntary socialist confederation of East Asian states.
What is widely perceived as a growing threat from Beijing, as its economic might expands, alongside growing discontent over Ma’s handling of the economy, have produced a certain rebound in support for the DPP. Taiwan’s deep nationalist divide and a political system monopolised by two nationalistic capitalist blocs (one pro-China and the other anti-China), allows the capitalists to continue railroading neo-liberal policies onto the population. What is lacking is a mass workers’ alternative to these two blocs. Socialists must link the fight against ECFA to the need for a working class and socialist alternative to the blue, green and “red” capitalists.
Taiwan and China: No to the capitalists’ ECFA pact
Wednesday, 30 June 2010.
Capitalist “economic cooperation” at the expense of workers and poor on both sides of the Taiwan Strait
Statement by Taiwan Socialist League (cwi in Taiwan)
Taipei witnessed a huge protest march amid thunderstorms and torrential rain on Saturday 26 June to oppose the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) with China. The trade deal was signed by representatives of the Chinese and Taiwanese governments on Tuesday 29 June. President Ma Ying-jeou and his ruling Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party) claim the deal will bring big benefits to Taiwan including the creation of 260,000 new jobs. But many workers and youth are sceptical to these claims and fear an even faster wave of outsourcing, job losses and de-industrialisation as Taiwanese companies shift production to exploit cheaper labour in China.
Hong Kong, which signed a Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement (CEPA) with mainland China in 2003, a pact that contains many similarities with ECFA, is often cited as a warning in the Taiwanese political debate. Hong Kong now has the most serious rich-poor disparity in the world according to the UN. The number living in poverty has risen in Hong Kong to around one sixth of the population, despite it boasting the highest average wealth in the world. While its billionaires have benefited from easier access to the Chinese market, the exodus of manufacturing and investment from Hong Kong has left a bulging low wage service sector as the only source of employment for many workers especially the young.
Saturday’s protest in Taipei was organised by the opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which opposes closer ties with China. Party organisers claim 100,000 people took part in the march, many travelling on 300 buses from central and southern Taiwan, which are regarded as DPP strongholds. Taipei police put the turnout at 32,000. Given the heavy rain, the real figure was probably somewhere between these two estimates, making it a sizable protest. The DPP released its own opinion polls showing that 86 percent believe ECFA will widen income disparities and 43 percent fear falling incomes.
ECFA — in whose interests?
Socialists and the Taiwan Socialist League (cwi in Taiwan) oppose the ECFA, which has been drafted in the interests of big corporations in Taiwan and China in order to extend their possibilities to make profits. The economic policies of Ma’s pan-blue administration are anti-working class to the core and ECFA conforms to the same pattern. The policies of the Kuomintang during and following the recent severe recession placed the economic burdens on working people and the younger generation through higher unemployment, wage cuts and an explosion of short-term contracts and the use of manpower agencies. Unemployment is currently at 5.39 percent of the workforce, but is more than twice as high for under-25s (13.3 percent). Nearly 40 percent of those who graduated from college last year are still out of work. ECFA will magnify these problems as big corporations gain even greater freedom to play workers off against each other, speeding up the “race to the bottom” which is a feature of globalised capitalism.
Last year, ostensibly to curb youth unemployment, the government introduced NT$22,000 monthly (US$682) subsidy for companies to hire college graduates. Rather than increase employment, many companies have dismissed older workers to take advantage of the scheme, while at the same time this has pressed down graduate wages towards a new NT$22,000 floor. This level is an outrage, just half of the nation’s average monthly wage of NT$42,509. A poll by the website Yes123.com showed average starting pay for new graduates is now NT$22,624 a month — NT$1,185 lower than their expected salary. By some estimates this represents a fall of one-third in graduates’ starting salaries compared to ten years ago (an average NT$30,000 in 2000). There is a growing trend for companies from Singapore and Hong Kong to recruit “cheap” graduates from Taiwan.
Class or nation?
Socialists reject narrow nationalistic arguments against ECFA such as the arguments of the DPP leaders, which concentrate on the defence of Taiwan’s “national interest”. This is a catchphrase that workers and the oppressed should always be wary of. When rulers preach about “national interest” they want to hide the fundamentally conflicting interests of the capitalist minority and the exploited majority. They want us to think that the interests of Terry Guo, billionaire boss of Foxconn, whose militarised-sweatshop business model has driven 12 young workers to commit suicide in China, are the same as the Taiwanese trade union activists sacked by another ruthless company, YFO (a maker of touchscreen handsets). This is absolutely not the case of course. Guo and his class supports the ECFA to make it even easier to exploit workers and crush unions on both side of the Strait. Likewise, the Chinese side in the ECFA negotiations are not motivated by a desire to protect workers’ interests in China, but are quite happy to encourage more sweatshops, using Chinese labour as industrial “cannon fodder”.
Many DPP supporters sincerely want to resist ECFA and for the right reasons. But socialists do not put any confidence in the DPP leaders to lead the struggle against ECFA. When it ruled Taiwan in the noughties, the DPP also carried through neo-liberal attacks on workers, privatising state-owned companies and deregulating the economy in the interests of private capital. Its policies were therefore not fundamentally different from the economic policies of Ma Ying-jeou and the Kuomintang today. It was the DPP that took Taiwan into the viciously neo-liberal trading regime of the WTO (World Trade Organisation) in 2001. This is because the DPP bases itself on capitalism and seeks support from big business. The WTO is weighted in favour of the 500 biggest global corporations that control 70 percent of all trade and want a worldwide “police” mechanism to enforce the removal of trade barriers and the adoption of pro-business policies by member governments. The losers from WTO membership are the vast majority – workers, poor farmers and the environment. Therefore, for the DPP to now oppose the ECFA, a “mini-WTO” for China and Taiwan, smacks of hypocrisy. Ironically, the DPP government, despite its pro-independence bombast, agreed to the name “Chinese Taipei” as a condition for joining the WTO, such was the pressure from the capitalists in Taiwan to enter the WTO.
Lower prices — or wages?
Opposition in Taiwan to ECFA is based on a number of realistic concerns. Small businesses fear being driven out of the market by cheaper China-made goods — including many made by Taiwanese-owned companies. It will mainly benefit Taiwan’s bigger companies, in other words. Farmers in southern Taiwan, the heartland of the DPP, have expressed similar fears once tariffs on farm goods entering Taiwan are lowered. While this is not covered by the first phase of ECFA signed on 29 June, the pact will be revised and extended every six months. Workers, who have already faced more than a decade of job losses and outsourcing, accompanied by a bosses’ offensive to drive down wages, fear more of the same under ECFA. As permanent job contracts are replaced by short-term contracts and a proliferation of manpower agencies (another policy that both DPP and KMT have favoured), the downward pressure on wages is set to continue if outsourcing, as expected, increases under ECFA.
In order to sweeten the pill and mute opposition on the Taiwan side, Beijing’s negotiators have agreed to put 539 Taiwanese items on an “early harvest list” to receive immediate tariff-free access to China’s market. These goods account for around 16 percent of Taiwan’s exports to China. On the same list there will be 267 China-made items, accounting for 10.5 percent of its Taiwan-bound exports. Government propaganda is claiming consumers will reap benefits as prices will fall, but this is by no means certain. Capitalist governments in other parts of the world have made similar claims. This has been the case in the capitalist European Union every time a new country is admitted to membership, and also when the euro currency was introduced ten years ago. But most prices rose instead. Similarly, in Taiwan’s case, it is equally or even more likely that companies importing from China will keep for themselves any savings that flow from tariff reductions.
http://www.chinaworker.info/get_img?NrArticle=1104&NrImage=7Anti-ECFA protest organised by DPP in Taipei, 26 June 2010
A workers’ alternative
While the DDP-led march on 26 June showed the depth of opposition to ECFA that is growing in Taiwan, it completely failed to offer an effective way to fight this trade deal and other neo-liberal policies. Of course the DPP and its smaller pan-green nationalist allies like the TSU have every right to organise protests against ECFA. But rather than an attempt to mobilise a broad-based opposition to the ECFA, or offer a strategy for fighting its implementation, the DPP indulged in blatant electioneering. Long before the thunderclouds emptied their load upon the demonstration, it was in danger of drowning under endless portraits of DPP candidates for November’s mayoral race. Such an approach is incapable of winning support from wider layers of the population that would be attracted to a real struggle against ECFA, but do not wish to be used as pawns in the DPP’s election race.
Likewise, while DPP leaders have made some references to the effects of ECFA on working people and small businesses, the main slant of their anti-ECFA propaganda is narrow nationalism of the type “protect Taiwan”. This can serve temporarily to shore up their base within the the majority community of Taiwanese speakers, but is incapable of winning significant support from the working class of other ethnic groups who will also lose out from ECFA. Consequently, the DPP’s approach does not provide a political basis for uniting broad sections of the population, and crucially the working class, to actually block the implementation ECFA. The aim of the exercise, for the DPP leaders, seems to have been merely to “let off steam” and mobilise support for its bid to capture control of cities like Taipei from the Kuomintang in November. Above all, the DPP hopes to recapture the presidency from an increasingly unpopular Ma Ying-jeou in 2012. But what then? Will they break with his disastrous pro-capitalist policies? Will a future DPP administration pull out of ECFA? Based on the record of the DPP in government the answer to these questions is not a chance!
The DPP’s often crude anti-China propaganda (not directed solely against the dictatorship) represents a serious barrier to building unity between workers and poor farmers in both Taiwan and China to fight ECFA and neo-liberalism. Ultimately, the unity of the oppressed in both places, and internationally against capitaism and its agencies like the WTO, is the only way to block the growing appetite of Chinese, Taiwanese and other capitalists for more sweatshops, exploitation and pro-business policies.
Socialists advocate a broad “united front” approach in order to build a movement that can stop neo-liberal attacks such as ECFA. Above all this should be based on the working class and initially upon the small number of more politically advanced trade unions in Taiwan that have come out against the pact, rejecting the argument that ECFA will benefit “their” companies or sectors. Now that the deal has been signed, the emphasis must shift from merely saying “no” to ECFA, towards preparing trade union action, including strikes and other forms of struggle to block the inevitable factory closures, outsourcing and further casualisation of the workforce.
Right of self-determination
The Chinese regime’s promotion of ECFA with speeches about “one family” and of Taiwan as an “insider” have only undermined Ma’s position and increased fears among significant layers of Taiwanese, including the DPP’s main electoral base, that ECFA is a “Trojan horse” with which Beijing plans to capture control over Taiwan. Undoubtedly, the long-term desire to reincorporate Taiwan is a big factor in the Chinese regime’s calculations. But this applies even without ECFA. The DPP’s old strategy of relying on US imperialism and foreign capitalism as a counterweight to China’s growing power is coming under increasing pressure as governments and big capitalist corporations around the world become more dependent upon the Chinese regime and more reluctant to encounter its disapproval.
Socialists stand for the right of self-determination for Taiwan. If a majority clearly favoured independence (which is not the case at this stage), socialists would support this, while also defending the right to self-determination for non-Taiwanese speaking minorities within Taiwan. To attain this goal, avoiding the prospect of a horrific cross-strait military conflagration, any struggle for independence would need the solidarity and active support of the working masses internationally and crucially in China itself. This would of necessity need to be a socialist struggle, linking up with the oppressed masses of the wider region, to end one-party rule in China and sweep away capitalism throughout East Asia, putting the working class in control of its economic powerhouses and opening the way to a voluntary socialist confederation of East Asian states.
What is widely perceived as a growing threat from Beijing, as its economic might expands, alongside growing discontent over Ma’s handling of the economy, have produced a certain rebound in support for the DPP. Taiwan’s deep nationalist divide and a political system monopolised by two nationalistic capitalist blocs (one pro-China and the other anti-China), allows the capitalists to continue railroading neo-liberal policies onto the population. What is lacking is a mass workers’ alternative to these two blocs. Socialists must link the fight against ECFA to the need for a working class and socialist alternative to the blue, green and “red” capitalists.