Editorial: Lost in a sea of bureaucracy

The fate of the unfortunate sailors of the Russian submarine Kursk remains, at the time of writing, unknown. But the incident serves to remind us that Taiwan is not the only country that handles rescue missions with a less than adequate mixture of the necessary skill, haste and decisiveness. The parallel is of course with the Pachang Creek (八掌溪) incident last month.

We are not, of course, trying to suggest that throwing a rope across a river to enable four people to walk to safety across a flood emplacement is anything close to as complicated as rescuing more than 100 men from a metal tomb submerged 100m in freezing Arctic seas; the two are obviously in a different league.

What isn't so very different however, is the way the Russian authorities seem to have messed up the situation, the reasons for their doing so and the political background that gives rise to such incompetence.

Both incidents take place against a political background where decades of unrepresentative government have led to ossified bureaucracies in which keeping face and dodging responsibility are paramount and providing responsive service almost an afterthought. Economics has little to do with this. Russia's economy has been a mess for at least as long as Taiwan's has been booming. The major reason why the two countries are a shambles when it come to the effectiveness of their bureaucracies is the decades-long lack of political openness.

It's a simple equation. Politicians who are unpopular lose their jobs. To hold on to those jobs, they have to make sure that the government departments they are in charge of function -- and function well. Should a snafu come to public attention, and there is a free press to ask embarrassing questions and point accusatory fingers, then they can see their careers end overnight.

That Russia has historically been a stranger to such a political system is hardly news. And it also probably true that its condition as an economic basket case has held back reformist influences since the "downfall" of communism in 1991.

So why should Taiwan, after a decade of democratic reform, seem at times almost as shambolic as its giant near neighbor? Simply because democracy, at least for its first 10 years in Taiwan only ever meant free elections. Nobody in government ever seemed to think that their jobs were on the line, that the KMT could lose office. The China bogeyman would scare voters into submissiveness. It was a strategy that worked remarkably well and one of its by-products was that nobody in government ever had to take the concept of public service seriously. Giving the Taiwanese what a score of PhDs thought they should have was the name of the government's game. Finding out what they wanted and finding ways to give it to them, always took a back seat.

Lien Chan's (連戰) recent remark that it was the KMT which lost the presidential election rather than the DPP which won it is a truth that the DPP has yet to learn to live with. But if the DPP is going to win elections in its own right, rather than because the KMT is fratricidally split, than it has to change the basic equation of public administration in Taiwan.

Chen Shui-bian's (陳水扁) "government for all the people" should mean more than an administration which crosses party lines. It should be a government that is committed to a real ideal of public service. The DPP has to show it can govern. Perhaps it is still early days -- the government is three months old tomorrow -- but soon an outline of radical yet achievable reform of public administration must be forthcoming if this government is to achieve anything in its term of office. And if it doesn't, Chen shouldn't expect any calls for an encore.