Last week we saw that three well-known figures -- Academia Sinica President Lee Yuan-tseh (
The problem is that there are very few real issues on which the opposing camps appear to disagree. The pan-blue camp used to be passionately opposed to a referendum law, opposed to changes in the Constitution and opposed to the "one country on each side of the Taiwan Strait" definition of Taiwan's relationship with China. Now it has passed the Referendum Law (公民投票法) and reversed itself on the other two issues.
On other issues the pan-blues have always wanted what the DPP wants -- for example, to introduce a proper senior citizen pension system -- but they wanted to be in power when this happened so they could get the credit for it. So the differences between the two camps as far as those "real issues" go are almost nugatory.
For instance you can have a revised constitution with Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Lien Chan (
This means the election campaign has to be fought at the margins. In particular, since everyone is pledged to do roughly the same thing, the most important issue becomes the one of trust. Which team do you trust to do the things they are pledged to do and avoid the temptations that power will put in their way? In this sense, the mudslinging in the campaign is not a distraction from core issues; it is in fact central to the choice that Taiwan's electorate has to make. Whom do you trust?
On the one hand you have a president who used to be one of the best-paid lawyers in Taiwan, is now moderately well-off by the standards of Taiwan's bourgeoisie and who has sacrificed much greater wealth for a role in the democratization movement -- a role, by the way, that led to a politically motivated attempt to kill him which left his wife in a wheelchair. You have a vice-president who has been a democracy activist for decades and about whom there has never been any suggestion of financial impropriety. And you have a party notorious throughout its existence for hovering on the verge of being broke.
What is the alternative? A presidential candidate, himself a career bureaucrat and the son of another, who refuses to account for how his family came to have a fortune estimated even by its friends to be NT$7 billion and by others at nearly three times this already huge sum. A vice-presidential candidate who refuses to tell the truth about why he transferred NT$240 million of the money the KMT put into his family's bank accounts and didn't return the money when he left the party several years later -- a man who by the way has a vicious record as an apologist for KMT assassinations and as a leader in a cultural pogrom against the Hoklo language, more commonly known as Taiwanese. And you have a party that has been found by the state's highest watchdog to have stolen over 400 pieces of property worth hundreds of billions of NT dollars and that refuses to surrender the proceeds of its robbery.
In this election these are the issues. There is no greater question than whether Taiwan is or is not to be run by thieves. Lee, Lin and Wang have to be reminded that you can't empty a cesspool without causing a bad smell.
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