The troubles President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) has experienced since he named his Control and Examination Yuan nominees has been interesting in that they not only have shown how far Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislators are willing to go to defy their president, but also for revealing the double standards that permeate the pan-blue camp.
During the previous government’s tenure, pan-blue figures and the pro-unification media lined up to criticize what it called the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) “political appointments,” criticizing former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) for using state-run company chairmanships and overseas representative positions to reward friends and loyal party figures.
As an editorial in the Chinese-language China Times put it on April 29, “The Chen Shui-bian regime filled government posts based on political considerations, and forced the entire nation to suffer the consequences.”
But since the KMT came back to power on May 20, that holier-than-thou opposition to political horse-trading seems to have evaporated.
This was apparent even before the KMT assumed office, as with the announcement in late April that former Taiwan Solidarity Union legislator Lai Shin-yuan (賴幸媛) would be appointed Mainland Affairs Council chairwoman. KMT caucus acting secretary-general Hsieh Kuo-liang (謝國樑) was quick to remind Ma that “the KMT is full of talented people” and that “they did their best to campaign for the KMT during legislative and presidential elections.”
Similar reminders were issued again last month during the diplomatic spat with Japan over the Diaoyutais (釣魚台), which led to the resignation of the pro-independence representative to Japan, Koh Se-kai (�?�). The calls to replace DPP appointees with the KMT faithful were vocal and unabashed.
The rejection on Friday of most of the pan-green-friendly candidates selected by Ma for the Control Yuan also seemed to have been carried out in disgust at Ma’s failure to reward former People First Party (PFP) members who lost their legislative seats with a suitable sinecure. In fact, several former PFP members were reportedly upset that Ma had failed to nominate PFP Chairman James Soong (宋楚瑜) as Control Yuan president.
The irony of appointing Soong — a convicted tax evader who showed nothing but contempt for the same body when summoned to explain his finances ahead of the 2000 presidential election — as president of the Control Yuan seems to have been lost on some of our more hardcore pan-blue colleagues.
Giving charge of the government body tasked with fighting corruption among elected officials and senior civil servants to someone who has enormous question marks hanging over his integrity would be lunacy.
To his credit, Ma resisted the temptation to “reward” such people in the first round of nominees, but how he reacts to the rejection of his candidates and who he nominates to fill the still-empty positions will say a lot about how he intends to rule and whether he has the backbone to stand up to those in the KMT who openly advocate cronyism.
Throughout his political career, Ma has advocated the need for integrity and clean government. The next few weeks will prove whether he has the wherewithal to stick to his guns.
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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