President-elect Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) last campaign ad prior to the presidential election used the slogan “We are ready!”
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) was ready to win, but two weeks after that victory, Ma doesn’t seem prepared for the responsibilities he will soon shoulder.
To show his willingness to mend US-Taiwan relations, Ma said after his victory that he wanted to visit the US before his inauguration.
As Ma had not consulted with Washington over the issue, his remarks put the US in an awkward position and neither side seems to know how to handle the situation.
One of Ma’s election promises was to set up chartered cross-strait weekend flights and he wants to fulfill this promise and open the nation to Chinese tourism as soon as possible. But the deadline he has set for this— the first weekend of July — is proving difficult for the agencies that handle cross-strait contacts, the Mainland Affairs Council and the Straits Exchange Foundation. These organizations are still administered by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and Ma’s team can do nothing until he takes office.
Airline industry representatives handling aviation talks have also complained that Ma is pushing too hard and too fast for changes and thereby undermining the nation’s negotiating advantages, while the military says that plans to operate cross-strait flights out of Taipei Songshan Airport could impinge on national security.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has the upper hand on many cross-strait issues. The CCP may prove more willing to show goodwill toward Ma than to the DPP, but there will still be limitations. Beijing will not back down on blocking Taiwan from securing observer status at the WHO, even if Ma offers to use the title “Chinese Taipei.” In any case, Ma is jumping the gun on these issues and undermining the outgoing administration’s application using the name “Taiwan.”
There are many issues to deal with in cross-strait relations and there is no need for Ma to bring up the issue of sovereignty before he has even been inaugurated, especially when doing so runs counter to his election pledges.
Former National Security Bureau secretary-general Ting Yu-chou (丁渝洲) has said that Ma’s actions and remarks since the election have broken his promise to be a humble president serving the interests of the public. Several unwise statements have been particularly unhelpful.
It seems that Ma is still in campaign mode, still focusing on wooing the public with promises. But Ma must realize that the public is already holding him to presidential standards. He must exhibit a capacity for caution and strategic thinking — the smallest indiscretion could have domestic and international repercussions.
Ma’s honeymoon will be short. Those with high expectations will want to see quick and concrete results, while opponents will be waiting to pounce on his every mistake.
From now on, Ma will be under constant scrutiny from all sides. His first step should be to listen more, say less and be cautious.
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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