It is ironic that yesterday, at the end of the week of the Chen-Soong 10-point consensus, President Chen Shui-bian (
The cunning of triangulation is that it leaves the betrayed with nowhere to go. In its devastating, yet effective cynicism it assumes that party faithful who feel betrayed will nevertheless continue to support the party if only because the alternatives are appalling. Clinton therefore could betray black voters knowing that the chance of them voting Republican was slim. Chen has decided that he can betray the greens because they are highly unlikely to vote blue to show their disapproval.
There is also with Chen the issue of his own legacy; he does not want his presidency to be seen as eight wasted years, so he is prepared to sup with the devil himself if it will gild his lackluster record.
Chen is, as Winston Churchill said of Clement Atlee, "a modest little man with a lot to be modest about." And if signing the sellout with People First Party Chairman James Soong (
The question Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) supporters now have to ask themselves is where do they go from here. The anger over the "10-point betrayal" as it should henceforth be called, is palpable, so much so that some even say Chen should somehow be impeached. After all, he is in the Presidential Office under false pretenses, having chopped up and burned every plank of his re-election platform on the fire of "inter-party reconciliation."
Certainly Chen deserves to be tossed ignominiously out of office. But then what? Chen might be an apostate but at least, as the Americans would say, he is our apostate. Surely nobody prefers Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Lien Chan (
In answering this question it is at least important to know how much of Chen's sellout is backed by the DPP. There are of course toadies who will call it a move of subtle wisdom. But the rank and file have to be as bitterly disillusioned as we are. What happened to their party? How did it get hijacked by the appeasers, by those who have buried their sense of justice under self-serving expediency? How the DPP might return to its roots and to some kind of moral rectitude is something needing serious thought.
Should we turn to the Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU), then? The problem with the TSU is, however, that it entirely dependent on former president Lee Teng-hui's (
What we perhaps need is another organization, outside political parties and electoral politics, which can unite greens behind a coherent ideology and which can serve as a check on both green apostasy and rising blue assertiveness, a grassroots civic organization which can be above party politics and yet can articulate Taiwanese nationalism in a way that parties cannot ignore, rather as the Christian Coalition operates in US politics. If readers will forgive us the mixture of doctrinal metaphors, Taiwanese nationalism needs its Church Militant now more than ever.
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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