http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2014/06/30/2003593983/1
By William Kao 高為邦, Taipei Times Mon, Jun 30, 2014 - Page 8
The mission of China’s
Taiwan Affairs Office (TAO) is to push for unification with Taiwan, and the way it works can be
summed up as “cheat, cheat and cheat again.”
If that is understood, people will not be misled by some of the things the
TAO has said and done in the past or expect it to resolve cases in which
Taiwanese businesspeople have been victimized.
Taiwanese businesspeople started investing in China after martial law was lifted
in 1987.
In the early days, the only way to invest in China was by means of joint-venture
investments with Chinese partners, with the Chinese side holding the majority
share.
More often than not, Taiwanese partners would end up getting kicked out,
after which the business would be quietly sold at a cut-price to Chinese. These
sales would be approved by the courts, leaving Taiwanese victims without access
to legal remedies.
In those days, the TAO’s excuse was that there was no law that
specifically protected Taiwanese businesspeople’s interests.
In 1994, the Chinese authorities enacted the Law of the People’s Republic
of China
on Protection of Investment by Compatriots From Taiwan.
However, their purpose in doing so was not really protection, but
propaganda. The law was designed to mislead Taiwanese businesspeople into
thinking that the Chinese authorities were sincere about resolving their
problems, so that they would invest their money with confidence.
Over the next five years, there were more incidents of victimization
against Taiwanese businesspeople, and the TAO needed to come up with a new
trick.
Saying that the investment protection law was not far-reaching enough to
give Taiwanese businesspeople adequate protection, in 1999 the Chinese
authorities enacted a set of rules for implementation of the protection law.
However, then TAO boss Chen Yunlin (陳雲林), knew full well that the problem was
not a matter of how well-formulated the law was, but whether the authorities
would enforce it.
Why were the authorities not enforcing the law?
It was beecause robbing Taiwanese businesspeople was Chinese Communist
Party (CCP) policy. That is why no Taiwanese investor could ever get a just
resolution, and the criminals and their accomplices in the police, prosecution
offices and law courts never got punished.
The failure to enforce these laws only encouraged more Chinese to find
various ways of stealing from Taiwanese businesspeople. As the thieves’
appetite continued to grow, even investors in major enterprises like the Shin Kong Place
department store complex in Beijing
and the huge Foxconn factory in Shenzhen found themselves on the receiving end.
The problem of victimized Taiwanese who could not get restitution was
raised again when former premier Lien Chan (連戰) visited China in 2005.
This time there was a new excuse, which was that the department
responsible for speaking on behalf of Taiwanese businesspeople lacked
authority.
For this reason, the office of complaints and coordination, which had been
a section of the TAO’s Department of Economy, was upgraded to become the
Department of Complaints and Coordination. However, the problems of defrauded
Taiwanese businesspeople were still not resolved, because the TAO does not
sincerely intend to sort any disputes.
The proof is not hard to find. During the plenary sessions of the National
People’s Congress and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference in
2011, Chen reported that Taiwanese businesspeople had lodged 28,215 complaints
during the 10 years from 2000 to 2010, and that more than 24,000 of these
disputes had been settled.
In claiming a
settlement rate of 85.4 percent, Chen took cheating to a whole new level.
February this
year marked one year since the Cross-Strait Bilateral Investment Protection and
Promotion Agreement came into effect.
According to
figures released by the Ministry of Economic Affairs’ joint service center for
Taiwanese businesses operating in China, it had resolved 17 disputes.
Compared to
the average 2,821 disputes that arise each year, that is a settlement rate of
just 0.6 percent. To make matters worse, not one of these disputes was settled
fairly.
The
conclusion to be drawn is that the TAO exists to work toward unification with Taiwan and
eventually annex it. The way it goes about this task is to cheat, cheat and
cheat again, and this will be the same no matter who occupies the post of TAO
minister.
William Kao
is president of the Victims of Investment in China Association.
Translated by
Julian Clegg
