It would be flattering to New Taipei City Mayor Hou You-yi (侯友宜) to compare him to former US president Richard Nixon and underestimating him to compare him to Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District Police Chief Pete Arredondo. Hou’s series of irresponsible moves — such as withholding evidence, shifting responsibility and sheltering subordinates — proves that an old dog cannot learn new tricks.
Nixon’s Watergate scandal, Arredondo’s slow response to the shooting at a Texas school last month and the “En En incident” all involved audio recordings.
Nixon wanted to destroy 18 minutes of taped evidence against him, Arredondo could not hide the 73 minutes of emergency call recordings and Hou continues to withhold 119 audio recordings made by the parents of a two-year-old boy nicknamed En En (恩恩), who became the first child in Taiwan to die from a COVID-19-related condition. An ambulance for En En arrived 81 minutes after the first call.
However, the truth will come out. As “Deep Throat” unraveled Watergate, scandal-hungry media descended like vultures, and Arredondo has been blamed for the botched response to the school shooting. Despite Hou’s efforts to cover up the recordings and evade responsibility, he could not stop concerned citizens from uncovering the truth.
In the Uvalde incident, audio recordings revealed key evidence, and Arredondo has been suspended and could be fired.
So far, Hou, a former Criminal Investigation Bureau commissioner, has withheld evidence, lambasted a whistle-blower and rubbed salt in the wounds of the child’s family. Without a shred of evidence, he has reprimanded legislators for providing evidence.
Having been educated during the Martial Law era, Hou is adept at using bureaucratic language to muddy the waters and creating cock-and-bull stories. Those who lived under the authoritarian rule of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), are familiar with this type of response. Authoritarian police became used to prevaricating.
Hou’s authoritarian mindset led to his poor response. After all, in their view, those in power do not need to account for their actions, so there is no need to prove their innocence. When whistle-blowers come forward with evidence, the powerful accuse them of sowing confusion.
Having taken a page out of his authoritarian background, Hou would be mistaken to think he can get away with following the KMT’s corrupt habit of sweeping scandals under the rug.
James Wang is a media commentator.
Translated by Rita Wang
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan. In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new
If you had a vision of the future where China did not dominate the global car industry, you can kiss those dreams goodbye. That is because US President Donald Trump’s promised 25 percent tariff on auto imports takes an ax to the only bits of the emerging electric vehicle (EV) supply chain that are not already dominated by Beijing. The biggest losers when the levies take effect this week would be Japan and South Korea. They account for one-third of the cars imported into the US, and as much as two-thirds of those imported from outside North America. (Mexico and Canada, while
I have heard people equate the government’s stance on resisting forced unification with China or the conditional reinstatement of the military court system with the rise of the Nazis before World War II. The comparison is absurd. There is no meaningful parallel between the government and Nazi Germany, nor does such a mindset exist within the general public in Taiwan. It is important to remember that the German public bore some responsibility for the horrors of the Holocaust. Post-World War II Germany’s transitional justice efforts were rooted in a national reckoning and introspection. Many Jews were sent to concentration camps not