Lien Chan
Yes it does. It explains why the pace of change has been disappointingly slow -- and this fact is in no way diminished by the fact that it also serves the interests of the Chen administration. Chen explains that the slow progress resulted not only from the fact that many of the incomers to high office were inexperienced -- Taiwan has, of course, not cultivated the kind of personnel rotation between government office, think tanks and academia that we see in the US, for example, which provides any incoming government with a sympathetic pool of expertise on which it can draw.
Included in the new administration's problems is the fact that there was simply no mechanism for a transition. The outgoing KMT had no program for honorably handing over the reins of power -- and in the wake of its shock electoral defeat, it had no inclination to make the DPP's life easy.
It is interesting to speculate -- Chen's book does not do so -- how many of the 500 days of the DPP's administration, which the book is supposed to record, have been effectively wasted by the chaos that came with the handover.
And it is not just that the effectiveness of Taiwan's government was reduced by the nature of the handover, the very security of the state was endangered in a number of ways. As the book points out, Taiwan's intelligence on China collapsed as agents suddenly refused to work for the DPP. Taiwan's security services were in a state of near mutiny. Some elements of the military were dangerously undecided on whether to serve a DPP government. Even now the armed forces are in a sense approaching an ideological crisis and undergoing a massive re-indoctrination campaign, led by the chief of the general staff, on the issue of for whom and for what should they fight.
The problem here is that the line between the political fortunes of the KMT and the ROC state barely existed in the past. To work for one was to work for the other. There was no distinction between the national good and the good of the party.
The sad thing is that this lesson has not been learned yet. Two trends from the past still encumber Taiwan's politics: Perhaps it will take generational changes in the KMT to see the emergence of a leading group used to fighting elections to win political power rather than brown-nosing their way to the top through the party machinery. Perhaps it will also take decades to change the institutions of state, where civil service standing would no longer be tagged to KMT party status. Only when these two trends have been dealt with, will the pernicious influence of the last 50 years be thoroughly excised from Taiwan's politics.
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