The agreement to cooperate between KMT Chairman Lien Chan (
For those of us less enamored with the blue camp and with a perhaps more realistic view of Taiwan's political dystopia, the immediate reaction was, in the worlds of baseball great Yogi Berra, "deja vu all over again." Yes, folks we have been here before -- at least twice.
For example, the two parties were supposed to cooperate in the races for county commissioners for the election in December last year as well as hammer out some kind of vote-equalization strategies for the legislative candidates. Such attempts at cooperation were laughable and "pan-blue unity" for all the sweet talk, became an oxymoron as inter-party relations became as edifying as two dogs fighting under a rug.
Then we saw the pathetic attempt to cooperate over the recent Kaohsiung mayoral election. True, cooperation of a sort was finally achieved, but only because Soong couldn't find his own candidate -- even his own vice chairman dropped out of the race.
Not the most impressive of track records.
Of course there are many who will say that the blue camp has learned its lesson, that united it wins office and divided it gets pasted by the DPP -- something that has been apparent ever since the Taipei mayoral election of 1994. But whether this is enough to rein in the giant egos remains to be seen. True connoisseurs of Taiwan's political freak show will now look forward to the clowns beating each other about the heads with inflated opinion polls before slipping on the banana skins of their own shady pasts and dubious relationships.
As usual it is what is deemed "not necessary to deal with right at this moment" that is the essence of the problems surrounding pan-blue cooperation, namely, as Abbott and Costello would put it, who's on first. Is it going to be Lien-Soong or Soong-Lien? We have almost a year of watching these two arm-wrestle over this question. But the result is hardly a cliff-hanger. Soong-Lien is simply never going to happen. Lien has no intention of playing second fiddle again after four -- very undistinguished -- years of it before. Is Soong willing to do so, or is he going to wreck the blue camp's chances a second time? Note the interesting use to which Ma Ying-jeou's (
Already we are seeing polls that suggest a Lien-Ma pairing is a winner. Now polls in Taiwan are almost invariably corrupt, being often the tools of political factions trying to show support for their questionable agendas. So polls showing support for a Lien-Ma pairing are best seen, not as a reflection of what the public really wants but as a message to James Soong that the KMT is quite prepared if need be to go it alone. In which case Soong would have to as well. The implication is that, though this might deny the top job to the KMT, a Lien-Ma pairing would probably take enough votes off Soong to keep him out of office as well. And Soong is of an age where he can't afford another four years in the wilderness. So forget what the polls claim to show, instead see them for what they are -- the KMT's ultimatum Soong can't refuse.
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,
RSS