Television viewers last Saturday witnessed violence committed by pan-blue demonstrators, who insanely attacked police officers maintaining order on Ketagalan Boulevard with slingshots and sticks and threw Molotov cocktails, fire extinguishers and rocks. Journalists documenting the event also fell victim to the crowd's brutality. Our law does not tolerate such barbarism. We urge judicial authorities to speed up their investigation so that the outlaws who commit-ted crimes that night can be put behind bars.
According to police accounts, dozens of citizens and law enforcement officers were injured that day, including a dozen photographers and reporters, some of them women. These brutal beatings startled television audiences. By yesterday, Taipei police had gathered concrete evidence showing that at least two protesters who encouraged other demonstrators to attack the police and journalists belong to organized crime groups.
In this light, we can see that some gangs had been waiting for an opportune moment to take action in order to benefit from the political turmoil. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Secretary-General Lin Feng-cheng (
In retrospect, the disorder in the wake of the presidential election can be traced back to the Taiwanese media. News organizations did not act according to professional ethics, but instead reported inflated opinion polls conducted with specific political motives. On election day, in their competition for ratings, many TV news programs reported fraudulent vote figures showing that the pan-blue camp led by a large margin. The reported results were completely inconsistent with those reported by the Central Election Commission (
In addition, KMT Chairman Lien Chan (
Taiwan upholds not only democracy but also the rule of law. Election conflicts among different parties are not something new for us, but have been occurring ever since the implementation of local autonomy. Therefore, if Lien and Soong are not satisfied with the election results, they should seek a solution through the judicial system. That's what opposition leaders should do, rather than repeating untrue accusations. Nor should they attempt to force President Chen Shui-bian's (
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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