For all its vaunted intrinsic value, democracy means that its outcomes cannot please everybody. Such was the case on Saturday, when Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) presidential candidate Ma Ying-jeou (
But the end of the world is not upon us. Unlike what the more alarmist among us have argued, a KMT "return" to power is not coterminous with "death of democracy," nor does it mean that Taiwan is half a strait closer to being swallowed by China.
There are two principal reasons for this.
First, except for a small minority, the 7.6 million people who voted for Ma did so as Taiwanese and chose the KMT because they believed his campaign promises to improve the economy and defuse tensions with China. Those votes were cast with the hope that a KMT win would benefit them and Taiwan -- no one else. Voting is not an act of selflessness; when Americans vote for a candidate, they are not voting to, say, please Canada or Mexico. They think of themselves, their jobs, security and the future of their children. Taiwan is no different. While the outcome may please Beijing, Taiwanese did not vote to make China happy.
Second, those on the losing side of the aisle have not disappeared and their voices haven't suddenly been silenced. Despite Ma's big win, he and the members of his government will need to heed the fact that more than 5.4 million Taiwanese did not vote for them. If they ever forget that, they'll be in serious trouble, perhaps even earlier than four years from now.
Not for many years will the voice of the people have been as important as it will be when Ma assumes the presidency on May 20. Now that the legislative and the executive branches are under KMT control, the onus will be on them to deliver on the promises of accountable leadership they made during the campaign.
The KMT victory does not mean, as some have suggested, that the devil incarnate will step into office. In fact, in the past months Ma has increasingly sounded like a leader for Taiwanese and his party has some good people in it who can be counted on to put the interest of the nation first. These people must be encouraged.
Simultaneously, as Ma steps onto the international scene, he must be brought back into line if he is ever seen to be departing from his promises to serve the interests of Taiwan, and every effort must be made to ensure that the rotten elements in the KMT -- who are easily identifiable -- do not manipulate their victory to serve interests other than those of Taiwan.
Saturday's result was not a return to the authoritarian era, because democracy is now part of the nation's fabric -- and Ma must learn to navigate that environment. But democracy implies work. Hard work. And it imposes responsibilities that go far beyond showing up at the voting station on election day.
Ma won, so let's give him a chance to prove himself. But we'll be watching -- all of us.
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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