The Supreme Court on Tuesday handed down a final verdict on the Broadcasting Corp of China’s (BCC) eight plots of land in New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋), ruling that the BCC’s claim of ownership violated the National Property Act (國有財產法) and that the registration of the land should be returned to the Republic of China (ROC) as its rightful owner.
The ruling is significant in that it demonstrates the judicial system’s recognition that Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), which owned the BCC until 2005, had illegally possessed national property. The ruling also serves as a reminder of how President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) has so far failed to live up to his pledge as KMT chairman regarding the party’s ill-gotten assets, taken over from the Japanese colonial government after the KMT fled China and took control of Taiwan after World War II.
When Ma first took the helm of the party in August 2005, he promised to clean up the KMT’s assets by 2008, stating that the KMT’s guiding principle was “to handle controversial assets through judicial means and disposing of legally obtained assets via selling, donation or putting them into trusts.”
However, that so-called “guiding principle” was skewed to begin with as, according to the KMT’s own logic, most of its assets were obtained legally; not to mention that what was considered “legal” under the KMT’s authoritarian regime at the time might not be legal under the standards of today’s democracy.
The public has nonetheless been lenient toward the KMT, choosing to ignore the question of how Ma’s so-called “legally obtained assets” came to be in the KMT’s hands in the first place. The public instead patiently waited to see whether Ma would honor his pledge to make a clean break with the past on the ill-gotten assets issue.
However, the nation has been let down. Nine years have passed, yet not only has Ma failed to make good on these pledges, but the party under his leadership has actually moved to accelerate the liquidation of its assets, particularly in his early days as KMT chairman.
The acceleration of the dispossession of the KMT assets in recent years no doubt also makes it harder for the government to repossess them.
The public’s disgust was further aroused when the Ministry of the Interior’s latest political party asset report in June suggested that the KMT registered total assets of NT$26.8 billion (US$897 million), which earned the party NT$981.52 million in interest last year, 63 percent of the party’s NT$1.549 billion in total revenue for the year.
The unfair playing field for the nation’s political parties is evident, as the report showed the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), on the other hand, had a revenue of NT$440 million last year, while the Taiwan Solidarity Union had a revenue of NT$73 million and the People First Party had a revenue of NT$39 million. In other words, the KMT, through its ill-gotten assets, not only seized the property of Taiwanese, but also used it as a foundation to unfairly dominate its political competition.
When Ma first assumed the KMT chairmanship nine years ago, he also promised to facilitate the passage of the Political Party Act (政黨法). However, since Ma was elected to the Presidential Office in 2008, there has been little movement on the proposed act, nor progress on the drafted act on the disposition of assets improperly obtained by political parties (政黨不當取得財產處理條例).
Ma has often trumpeted himself as a person “with the highest morals,” but how are his actions in line “with the highest morals” and how can he claim to have a clear conscience when he cannot even honor his own promise to turn the KMT into a zero-asset party?
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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