What an intriguing coincidence.
After years of pan-blue-camp stonewalling in the legislative Procedure Committee over the arms purchase bill, American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) Chairman Raymond Burghardt visits Taiwan in the month before legislative elections and meets, among other leaders, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) presidential candidate Ma Ying-jeou (
Within the week, the KMT-dominated committee relents and sends the arms bill to the legislative floor, a move almost equivalent to passing the legislation.
We were not privy to the conversation between Ma and Burghardt, but the timing of the two events -- combined with Burghardt's lecturing of President Chen Shui-bian (
The US cannot be blamed for preferring one presidential ticket over another -- or one party dominating the legislature and not the other. But here is a question that US officials can ask themselves: Is the long-term damage that can be inflicted on Taiwan's national -- and regional -- stability and core democratic structures and practices from one-sided intervention worth the short-term political gain?
When Burghardt criticized Chen -- however undiplomatic his wording -- even Chen supporters could see beyond the reproachful tone. They could appreciate that Burghardt probably meant well, even if certain superiors at the State Department and the White House decidedly do not.
What these allies might not appreciate is the lack of parity in Washington's dealings with the KMT. Chen, for all his faults, has been scapegoated for most of his time as president over the obstructiveness of not only Beijing apparatchiks but also pro-China elements in the pan-blue camp.
And because most US officials are serenely ignorant of Taiwanese domestic politics and do not read Chinese, they do not understand that the balance of KMT efforts in the legislature has been to grind the Chen administration to a halt -- even while directly insulting the US -- and to hell with ordinary people caught up in the circus.
The pan-blue camp continues to smear government agencies as partisan without so much as a logical argument or evidence. The latest agency to take another hit is the Central Election Commission, described by KMT Chairman Wu Poh-hsiung (
The US has been steadfast in its silence over the KMT's agenda of discrediting administrative systems. It therefore must be asked if anyone among serving US officials other than AIT Director Stephen Young has requisite understanding of these problems.
It would have been gratifying if Burghardt had publicly warned Ma and Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (
But no. None of this is publicly accountable.
We can only pray that this is not the kind of governance and leadership that Washington would wish for Taiwan -- or tolerate in the name of expediency.
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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