Chinese people are fond of talking about their "vast, great, refined and deep" culture. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Lien Chan (
The KMT's bureaucratic culture continues to paralyze the legislature even though Lien is just a presidential wannabe. It is all about face. The number of people seeing off or welcoming a politician is considered a indicator of power and popularity. If only a handful of people turn out to meet him or her, the politician is seen as unpopular and unfit for high office.
Apart from satisfying vanity, these hail and farewell gatherings are an opportunity to brown-nose one's superiors and seek advancement. Especially if the boss is normally very busy and inaccessible, such opportunities are a chance to remind people who you are and impress the boss so that he or she won't forget you when opportunities for promotion arise.
The large number of people who showed up to greet Lien on Monday sent a clear message: KMT and PFP politicians are quite confident about their parties' chances in next year's presidential election. They are therefore already jockeying for position five months before voting day, vying to kiss up to Lien.
Lien also believes he has already won the election. On the evening of Oct. 12, he met with Taiwanese students studying at Cambridge University's Trinity College. After the talk, he walked to Queen's College to attend a banquet. According to John Chang (
But Lien was apparently uninterested in the scenery. He complained -- via the pan-blue media -- that the government's representative office in the UK had not taken good care of him. He was upset because the office had not arranged a car for him, thereby forcing him to "grope about and walk in the dark" and causing him to get lost on the way.
Diplomats from the office responded they had not arranged a car because Lien's own people had told them that he wanted to walk. They said the office had sent people to accompany Lien during the walk, so how did the talk about being discourteous come about?
Democratic Progressive Party Deputy Secretary-General Lee Ying-yuan (
On Monday, Lien demonstrated that he found nothing wrong in the legislature grinding to a halt so that 60 legislators could be at the airport to welcome him home. Perhaps he wanted to get even with his political enemies for not treating him as an emperor. Such political sychophancy is common in totalitarian societies and banana republics -- it has no place in a modern democracy.
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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