On Monday last week, Hsinchu Mayor Ann Kao (高虹安) left Taiwan for Japan, while Hsinchu Deputy Mayor Tsai Li-ching (蔡麗清) was suddenly “asked to resign.”
Given that deputy mayors are supposed to handle municipal affairs when mayors are outside of the country, this has caused a stir.
A city government functions with a mayor and deputy mayors, so that the absence of the mayor does not cause disruptions. What is confusing in the case of the Hsinchu City Government is that Kao, while she was away, announced that the deputy mayor would be changed.
This might have caused Tsai — who departed a few days later — to lose interest in her government work and would have made it impossible for her to supervise employees as an “about to resign” deputy mayor.
With Kao away, the city government would have been in a state of limbo.
Kao’s handling of personnel affairs is extremely irresponsible. She simply did what she wanted, despite the disruption to the functioning of the city government.
Some suspect that the announcement of Tsai’s resignation had something to do with the Hsinchu Baseball Stadium case, which has upset Kao.
Another reason might be that Tsai had to resign so that Kao could get out of a corruption lawsuit she faces.
Tsai was recruited by Kao only a few months ago, but the deputy mayor had not made any major mistakes. Even though Tsai has not made a great contribution as deputy mayor, she has worked for the city for some time.
She was asked to leave without even the consolation of being allowed to resign of her own volition — a move that can only be described as ruthless.
However, Kao’s actions are not surprising. After all, she reportedly deducted expenses from her assistants’ payrolls and asked them to put their overtime pay into a “providence fund.”
Her mean attitude toward her assistants is exactly the way she treated her deputy mayor, demonstrating what kind of person she is.
Huang Wei-ping works in public service.
Translated by Emma Liu
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
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,
“I compare the Communist Party to my mother,” sings a student at a boarding school in a Tibetan region of China’s Qinghai province. “If faith has a color,” others at a different school sing, “it would surely be Chinese red.” In a major story for the New York Times this month, Chris Buckley wrote about the forced placement of hundreds of thousands of Tibetan children in boarding schools, where many suffer physical and psychological abuse. Separating these children from their families, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) aims to substitute itself for their parents and for their religion. Buckley’s reporting is
Last week, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), together holding more than half of the legislative seats, cut about NT$94 billion (US$2.85 billion) from the yearly budget. The cuts include 60 percent of the government’s advertising budget, 10 percent of administrative expenses, 3 percent of the military budget, and 60 percent of the international travel, overseas education and training allowances. In addition, the two parties have proposed freezing the budgets of many ministries and departments, including NT$1.8 billion from the Ministry of National Defense’s Indigenous Defense Submarine program — 90 percent of the program’s proposed
RSS