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.
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