It may have been a bit of an exaggeration last week when Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) presidential candidate Frank Hsieh (謝長廷) said that ever since the DPP first came to power in 2000, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), suddenly in opposition, at every turn "set the public against the [DPP] government."
But he wasn't that far off the mark.
It is undeniable that on numerous issues of paramount importance to the welfare of this country, from national defense appropriation budgets to a Central Election Commission ruling on the voting system to be used in next year's elections, the KMT has acted -- in and out of the legislature -- in ways that undermined the authority of the democratically elected central government and thereby flouted the laws that hold this nation together.
Strangely, despite the roguish nature of the KMT, the party and its leadership have met with scarce criticism from the public and, even more perturbing, from the DPP government itself. As a consequence, the less the KMT has been called to account for its conduct unbecoming a democracy, the more daring its challenges to the law and the system have become.
This bodes terribly ill if the KMT were to win the presidential election. As an opposition party for the past seven years, the KMT has had to keep up the pretense of being part of a democratic system, lest it risk being sidelined or, worse, its actions spark civil unrest.
So the KMT has adopted the language of democracy and, especially around election time, has danced the dance.
But given its historical baggage, its affiliations with the far-from-democratic Beijing and its track record as the opposition, it is clear that if it were to regain power, the veneer of acceding to democratic principles would be replaced by what still lies at the core of the party: authoritarianism.
If, while in opposition, a party cannot respect democratic principles and due process, how can we expect that, once in power, its regard for the constellation of views that constitute a democracy will suddenly reactivate? Let's not kid ourselves: If the KMT were to come to power and were to continue applying its vandal's mindset to governance, the nation's politics would be pushed back many years -- possibly to a time when being a member of the opposition was a dangerous thing.
Democracy is a frail creature. It is not something that reaches an endpoint and then congeals into a fixed state. Rather, it is fluid, a gradient on the spectrum of political systems. Over time, depending on circumstances and who is in power, nations slide back and forth along that spectrum.
It is so fragile that in certain situations -- following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, for instance -- even "mature" democracies like the US, Britain, Canada and Australia undermine their own great democratic accomplishments. Some, like the last two, do not even need to have been attacked to drastically alter their systems, trump their checks and balances, clamp down on their media and adopt means that have more in common with Orwellian nightmares than democracies worthy of the name.
Next year's vote will be more than just about which party comes to power. It will be about whether Taiwan continues along the road of democracy or takes a sudden turn and careens dangerously toward authoritarianism.
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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