Reject unequal service trade dealBy Jang Show-ling 鄭秀玲Publisher Rex How (郝明義), who was at the time a national policy adviser to the administration of then-president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英久), on June 20, 2013, wrote an open letter to Ma on the eve of the signing of the cross-strait service trade agreement. This explains why the cross-strait service trade agreement required Taiwan to liberalize far more items than China. If this unequal cross-strait service trade agreement had been passed, it would have had a direct impact on the livelihoods of the 5,835,000 employees of Taiwan’s approximately 1,148,000 service companies, which have an average of just 5.08 employees, and 85 percent of which are micro-enterprises with fewer than five employees. Furthermore, they must not simply accept all the terms of the unequal cross-strait service trade agreement signed by Ma’s administration 10 years ago. A decade ago, Ma repeatedly told the public that Taiwan’s economy would be doomed to lag far behind that of South Korea if it did not quickly sign the cross-strait service trade agreement.
