Yesterday, People's First Party (PFP) Chairman James Soong (
In fact, Soong had just suffered a devastating defeat right before his departure to the US. In the legislative election his party lost the most seats of any. A few months earlier, the team of Chinese Nationalist Party Chairman Lien Chan (
Soong has the political chaos in the Legislative Yuan to thank for his miraculous ascent back into political favor. Still unable to win enough seats to enjoy a legislative majority, the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is worried sick that the nightmare scenario of the past four years -- in which a pan-blue legislative majority made up of KMT and PFP lawmakers cooperated to block much important work -- will continue.
The DPP will do just about anything to win the PFP's cooperation. Take for example the upcoming election for the Legislative Yuan speaker and vice speaker. The DPP has indicated that it is keeping all options open -- including supporting PFP candidates for both the speaker and vice speaker offices -- in the hope of wooing over the PFP. In fact, it's generally believed that President Chen deliberately postponed the announcement of the appointment of the next premier, just in case Soong would be interested in the post.
On the other hand, as much as Soong loathes Chen, he has also been waiting for the chance to teach the KMT some lessons. In retrospect, the frictions between the PFP and KMT were probably inevitable. Soong can never forget how close he was to the presidency in 2000, when he trailed Chen by a thin margin of votes. He must have felt belittled in agreeing to serve as Lien's sidekick in last year's presidential election, which made it easy for him to feel taken for granted and taken advantage of in cooperating with the KMT.
At first Lien and the KMT probably thought talk of cooperation between DPP and PFP was a big joke. After all, the two parties couldn't be further apart in terms of political ideologies. However, the two arch-enemies experimented with cooperation in the review of the bill seeking to regulate ill-gotten assets. That finally got the KMT's attention.
Realizing that he is now the crucial political weight that will determine which side of the seesaw comes up and which side down, Soong wouldn't say -- even as late as yesterday -- whether he will support Wang for the speaker's office. The problem is this: here in Taiwan, it's sometimes hard not to feel saddened about how power is obtained.
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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