It is everyone’s duty to protect the country. No one is an outsider. Of course, it is the same for political parties. People should make an effort to educate themselves. The government should also support and work with people to restore normalcy in the country. Our country is ours to save.
Our country is facing external threats. Chinese warplanes have made constant incursions around Taiwan. A Chinese-owned cargo vessel allegedly damaged an undersea cable near Taiwan’s northeastern coast earlier this month. In October last year, three Taiwanese members of the I-Kuan Tao (一貫道) religious group were arrested in China.
Our country has also been infiltrated from within. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) lawmakers, acting as agents of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), are as ferocious as pit bull terriers. They use their legislative power to override the government.
They amended a law to allocate more funding for local governments rather than the central government, leaving the general budget in jeopardy. They passed a bill on pension reform for police to raise the maximum income replacement ratio. They proposed changes to the Chinese spouse law to reduce the period required to obtain Taiwanese citizenship. They raised the threshold to recall elected officials. They proposed budget cuts for national defense. There are countless examples of their attempts to destroy our country.
People have come forward — 3,000 teachers, indigenous youth in Hualien County and the younger generation who grew up in the military dependents’ villages in Taichung. Numerous Taiwanese are furious. Their passion has been ignited.
We, as masters of the country, must exercise our right to recall. Recalling KMT legislators is necessary to prevent Taiwan from being annihilated by the CCP. It is the only way to protect our country. The ruling Democratic Progressive Party is duty-bound to spare no effort to support the mass recall movement.
Recalling KMT legislators has become a national movement. A single spark can start a prairie fire. KMT and TPP lawmakers are plunging the country into chaos by pushing through draconian laws in the legislature. Their vicious acts would only encourage the public to take part in the recall petition.
Residents of Hualien County residents are not afraid of KMT caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁), a longtime “King of Hualien.” Other cities and counties would only see more seething discontent.
The DPP government should support civic groups that organize the recall movement by allowing civil servants to provide assistance at mobile stations and service centers to help people sign recall petitions.
My patriotic friends and I cannot join the petition, as we do not have KMT legislators in our electoral districts. Neither do residents in Chiayi, Tainan, Kaohsiung and Pingtung. This does not make us love Taiwan less than anyone else. We willcontribute our money and labor to supporting the mobile stations, thereby transforming this mass recall movement into something historic and to be proud of within Taiwan’s democratic movement.
Lin Chin-kuo is a business manager at a technology company.
Translated by Fion Khan
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
As Taiwan’s domestic political crisis deepens, the opposition Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) have proposed gutting the country’s national spending, with steep cuts to the critical foreign and defense ministries. While the blue-white coalition alleges that it is merely responding to voters’ concerns about corruption and mismanagement, of which there certainly has been plenty under Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and KMT-led governments, the rationales for their proposed spending cuts lay bare the incoherent foreign policy of the KMT-led coalition. Introduced on the eve of US President Donald Trump’s inauguration, the KMT’s proposed budget is a terrible opening
RSS