Last Wednesday we were treated to the less than edifying spectacle of President Chen Shui-bian (
The occasion of this electioneering was the festival of the birthday of Matsu, the Taoist goddess of the sea. The eight days either side of the festival saw the annual 322km pilgrimage of a palanquin bearing a statue of the sea goddess from the Chenlan Temple (
The Matsu pilgrimage is one of Taiwan's highest profile religious events and there is no reason why the president shouldn't show up to court the central Taiwan Taoist vote -- if there is such a thing. The problem is that the whole Chenlan temple show is arranged by the ex-KMT, now independent, lawmaker Yen Ching-piao (
Yen has always been cultivated by the blue camp which has never seen any problem with gang bosses being politicians. And in fact only a few days before Chen's visit to the pilgrimage, PFP Chairman James Soong (
When campaigning for the 2000 election Chen attacked Soong over his connection with Yen claiming this showed that Soong was soft on corruption. And yet now we see Chen doing much the same thing. Once again we are bitterly disappointed. Once again we have to ask how many more of the DPP's supposedly core principles Chen is going to trash.
We expect better. The fact is that we hold the DPP to a higher standard of behavior than the blue camp. We all know that the KMT is monstrously corrupt; in fact it is probably more accurate to describe it as a criminal racket than a political party. We also know that Soong belongs in jail. But the DPP has always tried to portray itself as the party of honest government. Sometimes this has only been honored in the breach. After all, after 50 years of KMT corruption, Taiwan's politics is not going to suddenly achieve the squeaky cleanness of Sweden. But by and large if Taiwan's politics is ever to be cleaned up it will have to be done by the DPP. Which is why Chen's willingness to associate with trash like Yen is so bitterly disappointing.
It may be immoral but, even worse in the lexicon of political expediency, it may also be a mistake. For Chen is slowly whittling away almost everything distinctive about the DPP. But then voters have to ask what the DPP actually stands for anymore. What we have seen over the past three years is a KMT government run by the DPP. We have seen no radical change and are losing sight even of the concept. The DPP used to want to make a difference. Now it simply wants to beat the KMT -- at any price. But that is no reason to vote for it.
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
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,
“I compare the Communist Party to my mother,” sings a student at a boarding school in a Tibetan region of China’s Qinghai province. “If faith has a color,” others at a different school sing, “it would surely be Chinese red.” In a major story for the New York Times this month, Chris Buckley wrote about the forced placement of hundreds of thousands of Tibetan children in boarding schools, where many suffer physical and psychological abuse. Separating these children from their families, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) aims to substitute itself for their parents and for their religion. Buckley’s reporting is
Last week, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), together holding more than half of the legislative seats, cut about NT$94 billion (US$2.85 billion) from the yearly budget. The cuts include 60 percent of the government’s advertising budget, 10 percent of administrative expenses, 3 percent of the military budget, and 60 percent of the international travel, overseas education and training allowances. In addition, the two parties have proposed freezing the budgets of many ministries and departments, including NT$1.8 billion from the Ministry of National Defense’s Indigenous Defense Submarine program — 90 percent of the program’s proposed
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