The bizarre thing about this election campaign is that the most vehement attacks against President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) are coming not from Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Lien Chan (連戰) or People First Party Chairman James Soong (宋楚瑜) but from fugitive tycoon Chen Yu-hao (陳由豪). By any standard, this is an election novelty: a disgraced businessman on the lam fighting an asymmetrical war against a president.
The former Tuntex boss' accusations against the president do not hold water. He said he donated money to Chen Shui-bian's campaign for Taipei mayor, which the president readily admits. Receipts were also issued to the fugitive as required by law. Chen Yu-hao also donated large sums to the KMT and to Soong.
There is no way to regulate such donations while the Political Donations Law (政治獻金法) is stuck in the legislature, so they do not constitute illegal acts. But if they were problematic, the KMT and Soong would have far bigger problems explaining themselves, having received far larger amounts from Chen Yu-hao. Yet the media have turned a blind eye to the donations made to the KMT and Soong, while dogging first lady Wu Shu-chen (吳淑珍) on trivia such as whether Chen Yu-hao visited the presidential residence. This has turned an issue of propriety into a question of correct memories. Predictably, the dispute is now seriously out of focus.
Political donations are different from bribery in that one makes donations to parties and individuals that one favors to help them enact policies. Bribery also involves a cash transfer, but in this case the donor hopes to extract an illegal favor or benefit in return.
In the case of Chen Yu-hao, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) government did not bail out his troubled company, as a previous KMT administration would have been expected to do. Instead, the DPP government put him on the most-wanted list for embezzlement and illegal investment in China. Put simply, there is no give-and-take relationship between Chen Yu-hao and this government.
But the claims made by Chen Yu-hao -- via fax, from overseas -- have caused some damage. The TAIEX yesterday slumped an irrational 164 points, prompting a number of Taiwanese and foreign journalists who have a superficial understanding of the issue to ask, "Is the Chen Shui-bian government corrupt?"
We would not dare offer a guarantee that no one in this government is involved in bribe-taking, but unlike former KMT governments, with their intricate and formidable networks of collusion with gangsters and business conglomerates, "black gold" does not pose a structural problem for the DPP. There are only isolated cases, and minor at that.
Moreover, much of the civil service is still pro-KMT. This creates an enormous monitoring force against the DPP. With 50 years of experience in government and corruption, the pan-blue camp's sympathetic elements in the public service would have easily exposed any corrupt behavior on the part of DPP officials by now.
Chen Yu-hao's accusations, safely hurled from overseas, may mesmerize some people for a while, but voters should be able to identify the purveyors of genuine "black gold" when they have their say on Saturday.
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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