It would have been nice to write the editorial that we had planned, an upbeat piece about how, now President Chen Shui-bian (
Let us make it clear, this rapprochement must still take place. And in this light Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Lien Chan's (
It was not a concession speech. It was not the speech that an honorable and responsible political figure would make telling his supporters that they had had to abide by the verdict of the ballot, go home and try again in four years time.
Instead Lien told his supporters that the election had been stolen, he demanded that it be annulled and tried his best to turn an election crowd into a vengeful mob. The message Lien gave his supporters was that until the assassination attempt on the president on Friday was cleared up, the election should not have gone ahead.
This is amazingly ironic given that it was the pan-blues who had said that the Democratic Progressive Party would try to find some pretext before the election to declare martial law and stop it from happening. Even with the president lying shot in hospital -- and let us reiterate that the idea that the president had himself shot in the stomach as a ploy to win the election can only be the product of minds unhinged by the irrationality and bitterness of the pan-blue campaign -- the DPP stood firm on its commitment to democratic practices. It is the pan-blues that now want the election, having taken place, annulled. Why? Simply because they lost.
The pan-blues reject the result of the election because they lost. Taiwan is apparently only allowed to hold elections that the pan-blues win. Thus the pan-blues show what their real attitude toward democracy is. Something perhaps like Joseph Stalin's who once said that the trouble with free elections was that you never knew who was going to win them.
Let us be frank: Today's pan-blues are yesterday's bunch of vicious, thieving, fascistic thugs who raped and looted Taiwan for half a century. They have been trying to give the impression that they are reformed, that they are democrats to the core and during the election campaign we at least tried to believe that this was so, even if we though their policies stank. But last night they reveled themselves in their true colors.
There was patently nothing wrong with the election -- it was honestly carried out and the vote tallying was impartial. That the DPP went ahead with it after Friday's shooting was none the less brave for being the sensible thing to do. We have no doubt that the challenge to the election will fail. But we now have to fear what mischief the pan-blues have up their sleeves.
Lien last night appeared to want to foment a state of civil insurrection. This is either because his mind has been unhinged by losing or because he seeks a pretext to invite China to intervene in Taiwan's affairs.
It is absurd to think this would not be resisted. Lien is either a case for psychiatric treatment or a two-time loser who would rather lead Taiwan into war than admit that, with a 20-point lead a year ago, the election was the pan-blues' to lose -- and they lost it.
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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