Former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) may not be flavor of the month with the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and its supporters since his admission two weeks ago that his wife wired millions of US dollars to overseas bank accounts, but he is sure to be extremely popular over at Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) headquarters at the moment.
News of Chen’s financial troubles has come at just the right time for the ruling party because it enables the KMT to divert attention from increasing discontent with President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) less-than-stellar start to his term.
Dealing with low approval ratings is one thing, but after just 100 days in office, Ma has already seen his dream of economy-boosting cross-strait flights turn into a nightmare: Uni Air this week canceled its Kaohsiung-Guangzhou route because there weren’t enough passengers. Moreover, Chinese ambassador to the UN Wang Guangya’s (王光亞) letter to the world body last week seems to have torpedoed the good ships Flexibility and Pragmatism, doing irreparable damage to Ma’s UN plan, while quite possibly sinking his “modus vivendi” strategy at the same time.
Throw in rising inflation, the under-performing stock market — which has fallen around 2,000 points since May 20 — and the plummeting housing market, and one could be forgiven for questioning the authenticity of Wednesday’s United Daily News poll that gave Ma a 47 percent approval rating.
Yet we still see little or no news about Ma’s policy disasters or how the optimism brought to many by March’s electoral result has turned to despair more quickly than anyone could have imagined possible.
Instead, we are treated to round-the-clock coverage of the latest unfounded rumors about Chen, repeated footage of the former first family leaving and arriving at various locations, interviews with the latest crackpot to shout obscenities outside Chen’s apartment and detailed analysis of the kind of candy former first lady Wu Shu-jen (吳淑珍) likes.
Keeping Chen in the headlines is the reason why the KMT’s attack dogs, led by Legislator Chiu Yi (邱毅), have been trying to link the alleged money laundering to every controversial incident during Chen’s eight years as president. Doing so keeps the story alive and keeps Ma’s amateur efforts at administration off our screens.
First we heard the money could be connected to the Papua New Guinea diplomatic debacle, then it was the second phase of financial reform, and now, with those avenues exhausted, that old favorite, the SOGO department store takeover, has resurfaced once again.
What will be next, the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant, perhaps? That would surely keep Chen in the limelight long enough to diffuse any serious coverage of Saturday’s protest against Ma and the KMT’s spineless policy of cross-strait surrender.
Chen’s daughter Chen Hsing-yu (陳幸妤) may have hit the nail on the head when, cornered by the press a couple of weeks ago, she screamed that the KMT wants to get rid of her and her family because “Chen Shui-bian is their No. 1 enemy.”
But the KMT needs to be careful what it wishes for, because once its nemesis disappears off the political radar, as he inevitably will, it will struggle to find a suitable replacement on which to focus its attacks.
If that happens, then perhaps the KMT’s lackluster governance and undermining of Taiwan’s sovereignty may finally get the kind of media attention that these issues deserve.
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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