The sufferings of Taiwan's farmers and fishermen did not begin today, but these good people are often misled and abused by those with ulterior motives. Government reforms of the credit departments of farmers' and fishermen's associations have been criticized as a plan to annihilate them. This misunderstanding has driven President Chen Shui-bian's (陳水扁) government into a corner, prompting a number of Cabinet ministers to tender their resignations.
Taiwan's farmers and fishermen deserve respect and gratitude for their past contribution to Taiwan's economy. However, the difficulties they face today are a result of government policies that overemphasized industry at the expense of the agricultural sector. Another factor was the KMT's practice of gaining control over the associations by manipulating their board elections and appointment of executives. Most of these KMT-cultivated cadres hail from local factions and gangs.
The KMT turned a blind eye to their abuses of power -- such as lending to their cronies without sufficient collateral -- because these cadres campaigned for the KMT during elections. This has led to today's high non-performing loans (NPLs) ratios at these grassroots credit units -- far higher than the overall average in Taiwan's financial industry. These institutions are losing at least NT$10 billion a year due to corruption by board members and managers.
Faced with this, the government needs to adopt heavy-handed measures to implement reform and to stop people sucking dry the farmers' and fishermen's savings. However, the government has obviously underestimated the power of a counterattack by corrupt forces among the normally oppressed farmers and fishermen, with assistance from ambitious politicians. Because these politicians are controlling all the farmers' and fishermen's organizations, they know how to use the latent dissatisfaction to add fuel to the fire, saying that the government -- by taking over the management of credit units with excessive NPL-ratios -- is aiming to terminate all 344 farmers' and fishermen's associations. By doing this, these politicians have awoken deep-seated fears among the farming and fishing population that they will not be able to find credit in the future and that this will have a serious impact on their livelihood. This is why they are participating in the demonstrations and protests to such a degree.
We should severely condemn the politicians who hide behind the scenes and their parties to engage in political wrangling at the cost of social stability. Their target is nothing less than the presidential elections, more than one year away. Some of them are also trying to pave the way for their party candidates in the fight against the DPP candidates in the upcoming mayoral elections in Taipei and Kaohsiung.
Some have pointed out that about 300,000 farmers and fishermen originally planned to participate in the protest -- the biggest of its kind in Taiwan's history. More than 100,000 showed up yesterday, and if each of them spent NT$1,000, the cost of the protest would be about NT$100 million. At a time when both farmers' and fishermen's associations are complaining about their financial difficulties, where did such a large sum of money come from?
While the helplessness of the local farmers and fishermen who protested on the streets is understandable, it is unacceptable for any political parties or politicians to use the issue to their own political advantage. Politicians should let them air their grievances -- not distort the development of Taiwan's democratic politics.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁) has caused havoc with his attempts to overturn the democratic and constitutional order in the legislature. If we look at this devolution from the context of a transition to democracy from authoritarianism in a culturally Chinese sense — that of zhonghua (中華) — then we are playing witness to a servile spirit from a millennia-old form of totalitarianism that is intent on damaging the nation’s hard-won democracy. This servile spirit is ingrained in Chinese culture. About a century ago, Chinese satirist and author Lu Xun (魯迅) saw through the servile nature of
In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.” Moreover, the two authors observe that those who denounce such legal threats to democracy are often “dismissed as exaggerating or
Monday was the 37th anniversary of former president Chiang Ching-kuo’s (蔣經國) death. Chiang — a son of former president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), who had implemented party-state rule and martial law in Taiwan — has a complicated legacy. Whether one looks at his time in power in a positive or negative light depends very much on who they are, and what their relationship with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is. Although toward the end of his life Chiang Ching-kuo lifted martial law and steered Taiwan onto the path of democratization, these changes were forced upon him by internal and external pressures,
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus in the Legislative Yuan has made an internal decision to freeze NT$1.8 billion (US$54.7 million) of the indigenous submarine project’s NT$2 billion budget. This means that up to 90 percent of the budget cannot be utilized. It would only be accessible if the legislature agrees to lift the freeze sometime in the future. However, for Taiwan to construct its own submarines, it must rely on foreign support for several key pieces of equipment and technology. These foreign supporters would also be forced to endure significant pressure, infiltration and influence from Beijing. In other words,
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