President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) must have thought that by going overseas he would be able to get away from his troubles. He must have been disappointed, as everywhere he goes there are protesters. Landing in New York on a stopover before a tour of Paraguay and the Caribbean, he was met with overseas Taiwanese holding banners and shouting out their grievances. Being beset with protests at every turn seems to be the Ma administration’s fate.
Since his 2008 landslide victory, Ma’s popularity ratings have consistently fallen and now stand at about 17 percent, making him one of the least popular presidents this nation has had.
The main reason for his lack of popularity is his government’s terrible record, which features a flailing economy, high unemployment rate and ineffectual policies, exacerbated by a string of forced demolitions of homes under the dubious pretext of development.
Ma likes to brag about how he has lowered cross-strait tensions and how Taiwan has not lost diplomatic allies on his watch. However, his cross-strait successes derive from his continual kowtowing to Beijing in his acceptance of the “one China” principle.
The Ma administration regards the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) as one of its greatest achievements, but the latest figures suggest that the benefits the agreement have brought are falling far short of expectations, seeing as the economic situation is worse than before it was signed.
With the signing of the cross-strait service trade pact, the government once again failed to do its homework and ignored the impact the agreement will have on Taiwanese industries.
Ma’s success with Taiwan’s allies is due to his diplomatic truce policy. Under this policy, China no longer needs to waste resources wooing countries with which Taipei has diplomatic relations, while Ma has to take generous gifts on his trips to maintain these ties.
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) holds a majority in the legislature, but despite this complete control over government, nothing Ma does seems to work. This is mainly due to his refusal to communicate with other political parties and civic groups, or even his own party. Decisionmaking is concentrated in a small group of people within his administration, resulting in policies that are out of touch and ineffectual.
Former Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) has extended Ma an olive branch, suggesting that he convene a national affairs conference. The suggestion was a good one, but, once again, Ma immediately changed the idea of a conference to individual meetings between leaders of the KMT and opposition parties.
Meanwhile, attention has been diverted to whether stopping the construction of the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant in New Taipei City’s (新北市) Gongliao District (貢寮) should be a prerequisite for the meetings or simply an agenda item. Because of this diversion, the idea of a national affairs conference will likely just fizzle out.
Ma’s reluctance to convene the conference is due to his unwillingness or inability to communicate on policy matters with the other parties, academic experts or civic groups. He has said that meeting opposition leaders separately at the Presidential Office would be sufficient. His proposal fell through, leading to divisions within the DPP and upsetting the party’s internal cohesion.
Perhaps Ma really does think the conference idea is not the best way to address his administration’s predicament. Nevertheless, it is astounding that, in a democratic country, a president who has been in power for five years has yet to meet, shake hands with, or talk to the leaders of the main opposition party in either an official or public forum.
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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