Sat, Jun 21, 2008 page8

• EDITORIAL: A portrait of bipartisan hypocrisy

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  Taiwan-Japan tensions over the Diaoyutai islets and cross-strait negotiations have helped to obscure the tedious controversy over green cards, foreign citizenship and residence that has been impacting on government officials and elected representatives.

  This obscuring process is welcome, if only because the silliness of it all has been made more apparent.

  For decades now Taiwan’s government — regardless of the party in power — has been trying to sell itself as a potential Asia-Pacific hub for various services or industries. This is a natural direction to take, though the execution has frequently failed to live up to the impressiveness of the sales pitch.

  Being a hub for anything requires an understanding of how the rest of the world works, as well as the ability to come to administrative terms with professional mobility and the complexity of global markets.

  It is difficult to detect any of these positive elements in the argument over officials who allegedly possess foreign residency or work permits.

  The Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) presidential candidate, Frank Hsieh (謝長廷), started this embarrassing ball rolling with a poorly thought out — indeed, self-destructive — campaign strategy that sought to tarnish President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九). The thesis was that a presidential candidate who had or might still have a US green card could not fulfill the functions required of him by the Constitution.

  It was a ridiculous argument, though this in itself did not preclude its effectiveness as a political weapon. Unfortunately for the DPP, voters rejected Hsieh’s attempts to label Ma as unpatriotic and Hsieh was left looking foolish after failing to learn from his lazy, unsuccessful run for Taipei mayor.

  The irony now is that this same argument has been revitalized in a formal witch hunt — with bipartisan support — for officials and politicians who took up residency or employment in other countries before returning to Taiwan to work in the government or as an elected representative.

  The latest person to be dragged through the mud is National Security Council Secretary-General Su Chi (蘇起). A DPP legislator yesterday accused Su of retaining a valid green card, though the Presidential Office was quick to respond by saying the card ceased to be valid in the late 1980s.

  But the biggest catches in this executive review have been officials who hold current — and possibly conflicting — status as dual nationals, the kind of people that Next Magazine delights in “exposing.” One of those is KMT Legislator Diane Lee (李慶安), who has been accused of having US citizenship, and therefore who would have broken the law by being elected to the legislature. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is apparently continuing a probe into her status.

  But for the most part, this drama goes to show that Taiwanese political circles are capable of bipartisan expressions of muddle-headed nationalism even when it is manifestly hypocritical and blind to the reality of professional and public life.

  Most of the people who have been caught up in this drama broke no law and have exhibited no behavior in this context that suggests their allegiance to the nation was ever under question.

  Changes to regulations inspired by this witch hunt have met a symbolic imperative and have nothing to do with good governance, as subsequent appeals for exemptions in the field of economics, for example, demonstrate all too clearly.
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