A veil has been drawn over the world’s media. Last weekend’s half-million strong protest against China and the administration of President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) barely rated a mention in major outlets. Instead, a trifling incident in Tainan involving a flatfooted Chinese delegation and poor security measures was blown out of proportion by local and international media and the government. Prosecutors are leading the charge and champing at the bit to kill a few chickens and scare a few monkeys — the chickens being the elderly and excitable hacks from the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and the monkeys those who dare oppose government policy on China.
Foreign commentators could be forgiven for seeing reports of another mass rally on the streets of Taipei and yawning. After all, such protests are not uncommon and almost never result in violence or significant disruption. In this case, however, the DPP protest marked the beginning of the end of Ma’s grace period as an engineer for cross-strait rapprochement. The tide has turned, and the nervousness of the Ma administration as it battles fiscal incompetence and ideological banality reflects this.
Mediocre governments, like mediocre individuals, revert to what they know best when placed under pressure, even if this is the opposite of what is required to change the situation to their advantage.
In the case of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and its proxies in the judicial system, this amounts to narrowing the gap between party and state so clumsily and risibly that ordinary people detect weakness and malice — and grow more nervous.
Consistent with the KMT’s legislative agenda, the government and judicial officers are politicizing agencies to the point where their neutrality should be called into question. The protests that will follow Chen Yunlin (陳雲林), chairman of China’s Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait (ARATS), are threatening to tap dissatisfaction over these developments, and could result in a deterioration that Ma manifestly does not have the skill to handle.
In other words, courtesy of Ma’s ineptitude, it seems inevitable that cross-strait detente was going to arrive hand in hand with civil unrest.
The irony of all this, of course, is that Ma was Washington’s preferred candidate. Yet the US seemed oblivious that the KMT government was going to have to deal with concerted opposition to its policies — and in the same manner as the ancien regime.
Representations have already been made to the US State Department about increasing abuse of speculative powers by local prosecutors and their disgraceful manipulation of the media. What kind of reception they will receive is hard to predict. On the one hand, the State Department boasts an admirable mechanism of global human rights analysis that culminates in an indispensable annual report. On the other, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has been tarred by the Bush administration’s attacks on fundamental judicial processes in the Guantanamo Bay debacle.
The likely scenario is that American Institute in Taiwan Director Stephen Young will have a few quiet words with President Ma or Premier Liu Chao-shiuan (劉兆玄) after the ARATS visit is over.
By that time, it may be too late. There is evidence that politicized members of the community are girding for something more dramatic. If this turns out to be the case, the State Department and the AIT might refer to an American classic of political thought, Civil Disobedience — referred to on this page in yesterday’s edition — before speaking out. There they might find insights into the entitlements of an unhappy citizenry in the face of a government that undermines civil liberties and the spirit of the law.
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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