While it is inevitable that incumbent officials have more advantages than their rivals when it comes to campaigning, the amount of resources the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government is throwing into its nominees’ campaigns in the Nov. 29 nine-in-one elections is still astonishing.
In Taiwan or elsewhere in the world, incumbent candidates are typically able to promote themselves through advertisements paid for by the government, and this is usually a gray area that can be tolerated by most people. However, the actions of the KMT in the Taipei mayoral race have gone far beyond the boundaries of this tacit consent.
Over the weekend, when the KMT candidate Sean Lien (連勝文) and independent candidate Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) attended the Taipei Hakka Yimin Festival, organized by the Taipei City Government, Lien was able to stand or walk alongside Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌), and was formally introduced by the master of ceremonies. Ko was relegated to the back of the parade, and was asked to keep his distance for “administrative neutrality” purposes — although the differing treatment of Lien and Ko was already a violation of the administrative neutrality that city officials were so eager to defend.
President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) last week attended a groundbreaking ceremony for the Taipei Mass Rapid Transit System’s Minsheng-Xizhi Line that was cohosted by Hau and New Taipei City Mayor Eric Chu (朱立倫). However, it turned out that the construction of the new line has not yet been approved by the central government.
Earlier this month, Ma, accompanied by Minister of Transportation and Communications Yeh Kuang-shih (葉匡時), attended a groundbreaking ceremony for the Tamkang Bridge that is to connect New Taipei City’s Tamsui (淡水) and Bali (八里) districts. The bridge could reduce the travel time between the districts by 30 minutes as well as help to solve the traffic jams that have plagued Tamsui residents for many years.
However, the event proved to be another “fake” groundbreaking, as the New Taipei City Government has yet to obtain the land needed for the bridge.
Faced with criticism from lawmakers yesterday over the public relations stunts, Yeh said that he was aware of the realities, adding that he “would not encourage” such ceremonies.
These illusions therefore, are not simply violations of administratively neutrality, they are frauds committed by the president, the minister, the mayors and other officials. They are proof that the KMT is putting all its efforts and spending taxpayers’ money to promote its own candidates through biased acts and deception.
During Ma’s first presidential campaign, his team put out TV advertisements criticizing former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) for inaugurating new freeways section by section, so that there would be several ceremonies to remind voters of his government’s achievements. However, at least under Chen’s administration, the freeways sections were actually completed afterwards.
What we have seen from the KMT administration in recent days are Potemkin constructs, which are as far removed from the reality as most of its economic and foreign policies.
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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