During the second election debate last Saturday, President Chen Shui-bian (
Certainly, Chen made numerous campaign promises during the 2000 election -- including stipends for senior citizens, farmers and fishermen. But Chen has made relatively few campaign promises this time. Being the incumbent, he knows the government's budget constraints and the difficulty of delivering on extravagant promises. Besides, his government's NT$500 billion national construction budget is still blocked by the opposition at the Legislative Yuan.
Lien has made a large number of promises -- an 18 percent preferential interest rate on deposits made by retired workers, a reduction of the military conscription period from the current 20 months to three months and an increase in the proportion of female legislators up to 30 percent, among others. Lien even boasted that Taiwan has the defensive capability to win the initial stage of a cross-strait war. Most of these policies are naive, while others are plain foolishness.
The government in the past granted a preferential 18 percent interest rate for servicemen, civil servants and teachers because these people had relatively low salaries. Over the decades, however, the policy created a heavy financial burden for the government and finally had to be terminated. Now only those who retired before 1995 still enjoy the special interest rate. Now, extending this largesse -- which in the past was only available to a small portion of society -- to retired workers will certainly cause a financial burden far beyond what the government coffers can endure. The policy is also unfair to other sectors of society. Apart from tax hikes, there is no way the government can pay for this perk. It is a typical pork-barrel policy, but the people have not been fooled. According to an opinion poll, 46 percent of respondents oppose the policy and 31 percent support it.
In the eyes of most Taiwanese men, serving in the military is a waste of time. Cutting it down to three months will create a serious national security burden. First of all, the purpose and usefulness of three months of military training needs to be clearly defined. Secondly, the entire strategic deployment, troop structure and personnel allocations need to be readjusted. Thirdly, large numbers of officers in command positions need to be laid off as the armed forces shrink. This will have a huge impact on the military and pose a major challenge for society as well.
China far outnumbers Taiwan in terms of weapons that can be used in pre-emptive strikes -- missiles, fighter jets and submarines. Qualitative superiority is all Taiwan has. Lien said Taiwan can win in the initial fight against China. We wonder what he bases his ideas on. China can, as Mao Zedong (毛澤東) said, sacrifice a tenth of its population. How many lives must Taiwan sacrifice in a first strike? Besides, Taiwan is gradually losing its qualitative superiority due to the opposition's obstruction of arms procurement budgets.
If Lien is truly concerned about Taiwan's security, he should tell his party's legislators to support the arms procurement budgets. He should also vote "yes" for both referendum questions on March 20.
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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