After spending the past few weeks preoccupied with a campaign to recall President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) that was a complete waste of time and resources, the Legislative Yuan finally decided to get down and do some real work.
On Friday, the last day of the special legislative session and the last chance for legislators to prove that they can do such work, lawmakers passed an amendment to the Statute Governing Preferential Treatment for Retired Presidents and Vice Presidents (
After the amendment was unanimously approved, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus whip Pan Wei-kang (
Who can forget the emotional plea by pan-blue politicians over the past few weeks demanding Chen's recall because they resented "having to support Chen for the rest of his life"? That piece of vitriol obviously referred to the life-long monthly benefits and subsidies extended to former heads of state -- though now reduced -- that will be made available to Chen after he steps down. The immediate passage of the amendment after efforts to recall Chen failed was obviously a personal attack. The other deliberate target was former president Lee Teng-hui (
Friday's move should make the pan-blues happy and encourage them to take a break, even for just a short time, from the highly confrontational recall campaign. After all, they must be given something because it is obvious they are not going to be left empty-handed. This calculation was surely on the minds of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and the Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU) when they voted for the amendment.
Another reason for the DPP and the TSU's support was to distance themselves from Chen, who is now a lame-duck president and a highly tarnished political figure with little credibility.
Still, it is saddening to see that the legislative process can be so easily manipulated by factors that are so clearly personal, self-serving, irrational and underhanded. Perhaps the truly troublesome thing about Friday's legislative adventure was not so much the fact that benefits were slashed, but that the original allocations were indeed excessive and needed to be adjusted.
None of the pan-blue lawmakers seem to have considered that the reduced benefits and subsidies may one day be equally applicable to a pan-blue president. After all, KMT Chairman Ma Ying-jeou (
Perhaps this is the biggest problem with Taiwan's politicians: No one seems to consider the interests of the nation as a whole. Ultimately, they will leave a political system to future generations that bears this stamp.
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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