Recent media reporting on the legislature has been focused on revelations about Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Wu Yu-sheng’s (吳育昇) extramarital affair, alongside key policy issues such as the importation of US bone-in beef and the signing of a memorandum of understanding with China on cross-strait financial supervision. As a member of a civic group devoted to monitoring the legislature’s performance, I feel that these stories have a common thread — they show that the legislature is becoming more and more devoid of substance.
Even when they are not caught up with love affairs and other shenanigans, our lawmakers have become completely marginalized on important policy issues. The Cabinet feels free to push policies through without even a rubber stamp endorsement from the legislature.
It must be said that lawmakers have brought themselves into disrepute. As if their image were not poor enough, they keep getting involved in scandals, and public confidence in the legislature keeps plunging. The star of the latest scandal is a sharp-tongued lawmaker who has often demanded high moral standards of others, so it came as a surprise to find out that his private life is full of material and physical desires. He likes to take attractive women out to dinner, and when he rents a car it has to be an expensive one. This is in stark contrast to the facade of an incorruptible family man that he put on to win votes.
This political culture, in which the appearance and the reality are so very different, is a smokescreen for all kinds of behind-the-scenes collusion and exchanges of favors between politicians and business interests. Muckraking media have revealed that shady relations over the dinner table are the stock-in-trade of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers. If the media dig any deeper, the whole lot of them may come tumbling down.
The most exasperating thing is that legislators get paid the same high salary whatever they do, and it turns out that their biggest concern is to look after their private relationships and pad their wallets. Who, then, is going to properly oversee the government’s budget and policies? The first big problem facing the legislature is that its members have no self-respect, so few among the public have confidence in them.
The second problem is even bigger. Since the KMT gained control of the executive as well as the legislature, the latter’s right to take part in policymaking has rapidly whittled away. Starting from the agreements reached at the first meeting between Straits Exchange Foundation Chairman Chiang Pin-kung (江丙坤) and Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait Chairman Chen Yunlin (陳雲林), which took effect automatically, Cabinet agencies, especially those concerned with national security, have come to see the legislature at most as a token body that only needs to be politely informed of government decisions.
Just the other day, the Financial Supervisory Commission went through the motions of telling legislators about the cross-strait MOU in the morning, and the agreement was a done deal that very afternoon — a classic example of the way policies get pushed through these days.
Similarly, negotiations with the US over importing bone-in beef were handled by the National Security Council, which arrogantly asserts that the protocol it signed takes precedence over domestic law. Apparently, the principle that the legislature should serve as a check and balance on the executive does not apply to Taiwan’s “elected monarchy.”
Legislators are the elected representatives of public opinion, but they have no power to block any policy the elected emperor wants to put into force. They are left with only a walk-on role, and therein lies Taiwan’s constitutional crisis.
Maybe it’s because our lawmakers have nothing much to do these days that they have so much time for pulling stunts and getting involved in scandals. Since they aren’t doing their job of speaking up for the public and the legislature has been stripped of its checks-and-balance role, perhaps it is time that legislators’ salaries were halved and a referendum held on whether the legislature should be scrapped altogether. What do you think?
Ku Chung-hwa is chairman of Citizens’ Congress Watch.
TRANSLATED BY JULIAN CLEGG
In their recent op-ed “Trump Should Rein In Taiwan” in Foreign Policy magazine, Christopher Chivvis and Stephen Wertheim argued that the US should pressure President William Lai (賴清德) to “tone it down” to de-escalate tensions in the Taiwan Strait — as if Taiwan’s words are more of a threat to peace than Beijing’s actions. It is an old argument dressed up in new concern: that Washington must rein in Taipei to avoid war. However, this narrative gets it backward. Taiwan is not the problem; China is. Calls for a so-called “grand bargain” with Beijing — where the US pressures Taiwan into concessions
The term “assassin’s mace” originates from Chinese folklore, describing a concealed weapon used by a weaker hero to defeat a stronger adversary with an unexpected strike. In more general military parlance, the concept refers to an asymmetric capability that targets a critical vulnerability of an adversary. China has found its modern equivalent of the assassin’s mace with its high-altitude electromagnetic pulse (HEMP) weapons, which are nuclear warheads detonated at a high altitude, emitting intense electromagnetic radiation capable of disabling and destroying electronics. An assassin’s mace weapon possesses two essential characteristics: strategic surprise and the ability to neutralize a core dependency.
Chinese President and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Chairman Xi Jinping (習近平) said in a politburo speech late last month that his party must protect the “bottom line” to prevent systemic threats. The tone of his address was grave, revealing deep anxieties about China’s current state of affairs. Essentially, what he worries most about is systemic threats to China’s normal development as a country. The US-China trade war has turned white hot: China’s export orders have plummeted, Chinese firms and enterprises are shutting up shop, and local debt risks are mounting daily, causing China’s economy to flag externally and hemorrhage internally. China’s
During the “426 rally” organized by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party under the slogan “fight green communism, resist dictatorship,” leaders from the two opposition parties framed it as a battle against an allegedly authoritarian administration led by President William Lai (賴清德). While criticism of the government can be a healthy expression of a vibrant, pluralistic society, and protests are quite common in Taiwan, the discourse of the 426 rally nonetheless betrayed troubling signs of collective amnesia. Specifically, the KMT, which imposed 38 years of martial law in Taiwan from 1949 to 1987, has never fully faced its
RSS