President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) popularity rose slightly last month to 26.6 percent, according to the latest poll by the Chinese-language Global Views (遠見) magazine, an increase of 2.8 percent from a month earlier.
Despite the increase, last month’s figure means that Ma’s approval ratings have remained below 30 percent for 19 consecutive months, since just four months into his term — a disastrous run by any standards.
When Ma swept to power with almost 60 percent of the vote in March 2008, he inherited a functioning democracy and an economy that could almost run on autopilot. The global financial crisis aside, it is hard to fathom how he could have made such a mess of things and how his popularity could fall so far, so fast.
True, the Ma administration has made many serious foulups, including the bungled handling of the melamine-tainted milk scare, Typhoon Morakot rescue and relief efforts and US beef imports.
Nevertheless, memories are short in politics and now that these issues are mostly in the past, one would think his popularity would show at least some signs of returning to a more respectable level.
Instead, it remains even lower than one could imagine, given that the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) can usually rely on a hardcore support level of around 40 percent of the electorate.
Despite this, the president remains in denial. In a recent interview, Ma put his dismal approval ratings down to his efforts at “reform.”
It’s hard to fathom what reform he was referring to, but if rewarding incompetence — former premier Liu Chao-shiuan (劉兆玄) and former National Security Council secretary-general Su Chi (蘇起) were presented medals after stepping down in disgrace — counts as reform, then the reform efforts are going well.
Try as he might to find excuses, Ma continues to ignore the 500kg gorilla in the room, and the most likely explanation for his current plight is his cross-strait policy.
Since his inauguration, Ma has plunged Taiwan headfirst into China’s bosom.
Whatever Taiwan’s problem, China is the answer, if the Ma administration is to be believed. In his dealings with Beijing, Ma has effectively turned Taiwan into a vassal state of China. This is perfectly illustrated by the WHA observership arrangement — Taiwan gets rewarded with an annual invitation so long as it does nothing to upset Beijing.
Given China’s record of skullduggery and reneging on agreements, Ma should know better than to place all of Taiwan’s eggs in one basket. However, under Ma, Taiwan has placed all of its eggs and even those yet to be laid in China’s untrustworthy hands.
If cross-strait policy is in fact the reason for his unpopularity, then Ma is not willing to admit it, but the fact that Global Views this month chose to omit its regular poll on subjects such as the government’s plan to sign the controversial economic cooperation framework agreement (ECFA) with China indicates that this may well be the case.
Still, Ma pushes on blindly with the ECFA plan, hoping to rush through signing it within the next two months. Given his ability to ignore the warning signs, an ECFA looks like it will be signed on time, but should Ma lose his re-election bid in 2012, he will have no one but himself to blame.
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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