Senior Presidential Adviser Koo Kwang-min (
The elections have even been portrayed as a confidence vote in the president and the prelude to Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Ma Ying-jeou's (
Taiwan has been holding democratic elections for decades. The form of these elections may have changed, but there have been no major changes in election culture -- vote-buying and mudslinging still rule the day. The government's rapid and forceful crackdown on vote-buying has not rooted out the practice, but only forced it further underground, making those involved ever more sneaky. The mudslinging war waged by politicians and the media has become the focus of the Dec. 3 elections.
On the surface, the pan-blue camp is still hell-bent on exposing government scandals and claims of corruption. In response, President Chen Shui-bian (
This mudslinging has blurred the focus of the elections and made middle-of-the-road voters reluctant to vote, which may result in a low overall turnout. This is simply a repeat of what happened during the last National Assembly elections, when middle-of-the-road voters did not show up because of the pan-green and pan-blue camps' ideological warring. Such fighting is diametrically opposed to what middle-of-the-road voters expect. The exposure of scandals and smear tactics has no impact on die-hard loyalists, but is rather a catalyst for stronger animosity. More animosity and irrational behavior will only strengthen the political fanaticism of diehard loyalists. We have already seen how the poet Tu shi-san (
Mudslinging is off-putting to most of us. If we do not get the election campaign back on track and make candidates tell us where the real beef is, too many voters will regularly refuse to vote.
The election is, after all, about choosing the wisest and the most capable candidate. Mudslinging is no way to prove superiority. The only result will be that people lose interest in the election.
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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