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Updated Thursday, January 19, 2012 0:08 am TWN, The China Post news staff

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Ma faces daunting task of fulfilling campaign promises

On re-election Saturday, President Ma Ying-jeou warned his campaign managers and Kuomintang leaders “We have to be glad for just one day.” He was also warning himself. The president has to face the daunting task of guiding the nation in the face of a European debt crisis threatening to engulf the whole world, and he must remember that Day One of his lame duck years begins at the same time.

Ma has a credible mandate, though not as solid as the one he got four years ago. He won 52 percent of the votes cast by the nearly 75 percent of voters who turned out, quite a feat when compared with President Chen Shui-bian's razor-thin margin of 0.22 percent. His Kuomintang did much better than was expected in the legislative elections held alongside the presidential race by winning a majority of seven seats in the new Legislative Yuan. Chen wasn't that lucky, his Democratic Progressive Party never had a majority control of the nation's highest legislative body. But like Theodore Roosevelt, who declared he wouldn't run for a second term upon his election as president, Ma is a lame duck whose orders will be challenged or disobeyed, while the defeated opposition party is prepared to chant the “sell out Taiwan” mantra against whatever China-policy action he may take.

Nobody knows whether the European crisis will cause more damage worldwide than the financial tsunami of 2008 or how hard it may hit Taiwan, which continues to rely on China for economic progress. Economic downturns can hardly be managed and reversed no matter how hard economists may try to come up with new ideas to manage a recovery. In Taiwan's case, outside help is needed in order to pull out of a recession. As a matter of fact, Beijing did come to our help by expanding China's imports from Taiwan and by signing an economic cooperation framework agreement, or ECFA, which is tantamount to a free trade agreement. When a new financial tsunami is touched off by the European debt crisis, it will be China to which Taiwan must turn to for help yet again.

Chinese President Hu Jintao was willing to go to any length to assist Taiwan in surviving the 2008 crisis almost unscathed. He has gone on the record by saying the People's Republic wants to conclude a peace agreement with Taiwan to formally end the long Chinese civil war which Mao Zedong won, thereby forcing Chiang Kai-shek to come to Taiwan and upgrade the then-province restored from Japanese colonial rule in less than five years before to the founding of the sovereign state of the Republic of China. Hu is going to step down at the end of this year, and Xi Jinping, his heir apparent, will continue to insist on ending the state of war between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait.

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