So Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (
As the "official" bagman for Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Lien Chan (
Yesterday saw another piece of mendacity from Wang, which cannot go without comment, when he told a group of supporters in Kaohsiung that he would be able to end the Democratic Progressive Party's (DPP) manipulation of ethnic bias in elections.
The problem with this statement is that it is not the DPP which manipulated ethnic bias but the pan-blue camp. When the KMT arrived here from China it had a simple policy of excluding Taiwanese from power. When it realized that it would have to fill its thinning ranks with some Taiwanese, it adopted the age-old tactic of imperialism from the Romans to the British: divide and rule.
The main opposition to the KMT's monopoly of power came from the Hoklo-speaking gentry, outraged at their exclusion from power on "their" island as well as the iniquities of the land-reform compensation system. The KMT was able to counter Hoklo demands for majority rule by manipulating ethnic difference to its advantage. Basically it intimated to Mainlanders that the Hoklo were ungrateful savages who would push them into the sea should the KMT ever lose power -- an opinion the vast majority retain to this day, hence their post-presidential election trauma.
It also suggested to the Hakka that majority rule meant rule by the Hoklo, which, given three centuries of Hoklo-Hakka rivalry, would likely be detrimental to Hakka interests. Much the same pitch was made to the Aborigines for whom there was little love lost toward Hoklo or Hakka. The KMT's clever strategy was to make the native minorities believe that they would be very much worse off under majority rule, and only the KMT could guarantee some sort of level playing field between the different ethnicities.
Such a strategy gave the KMT a lockhold on between 30 and 35 percent of the electorate, and in communities which, because of their more tightly knit nature, were actually rather more easy to mobilize than the Hoklo themselves, the KMT only needed the support of one in four. This it managed to do by playing the "class" card.
It was central to the alien KMT's ideology, and the cultural indoctrination that succeeded "retrocession" that everything Taiwanese was crass and its own imposed culture was superior. Aspirational Taiwanese were encouraged to identify with the KMT's "metropolitan" and see anything rooted in a specifically Taiwanese identity as backward. Many of them did and do, resulting in wide middle-class Hoklo support for the KMT. It is, of course, false consciousness, in the Marxian sense, but none the less powerful for that.
This KMT strategy worked well in the past and still does, though it is fraying a little at the cuffs. Every election campaign sees the KMT criticize the DPP for ethnic campaigning, not because the DPP has been doing anything of the sort, but really as a message to remind the minority voters of the "threat" majority rule might pose. It's a dirty little tactic, but then the KMT is a dirty little party.
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,
RSS