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Editorial: Seeds of hope in a tired old party

Let's make an obvious comparison. In the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), Legislator Luo Wen-chia (羅文嘉) -- a member of President Chen Shui-bian's (陳水扁) "boy-scout group" -- is ready to take over the chairmanship of the Council for Hakka Affairs. In the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), on the other hand, a group of new-generation legislators, about Lo's age, still have to play the role of Red Guards. They cannot pass through the KMT's gate of power, and can only urge the party leadership to accept election failure and start anew from the outside. Seeing the KMT's feudal and reactionary nature, we can but shake our heads.

On Tuesday afternoon, over 20 members of a KMT unit known as the Chunghsing [rejuvenation] Elite Class called on the party's leadership to concede defeat in the election, give up all stolen assets and relocate its headquarters to southern Taiwan. They also demanded that party leaders at all levels step down to shoulder responsibility for the failure.

They said that, while the KMT and People First Party (PFP) lost the election by merely 29,518 votes, the alliance lost 1.5 million votes from 2000 to this year.

No one from the KMT's leadership, however, dared ask Chairman Lien Chan (連戰) to shoulder responsibility for losing two presidential elections. Instead, they call for consolidation of the core leadership, a slogan that might have worked 50 years ago. None of its leaders admit to mistakes. Lien even asked party leaders to remain in their positions to avoid making the party a laughingstock. This shows that the KMT leadership is made up of power-hungry accomplices.

We place no hope in the tired leadership of the party, far removed from public opinion. Yet, we praise the moral courage and the grassroots vision shared by the young KMT members who were brave enough to tell the leadership the truth.

Some KMT politicians do not identify with the route taken in recent years. The sole reason for their staying in the party is the organization's enormous assets, of which they may yet get a share.

Even worse, the party is not aware of its deviation from mainstream public opinion. It still waits idly in its gilded headquarters for others to show their loyalty, a behavior no different from that of the Chinese Communist Party.

Taipei is far from the grassroots in central and southern Taiwan, but longstanding policies have distorted priorities, with disproportionate attention paid to vested interests and privileged groups. Support from the north has been mistaken for national support.

Although southern Taiwan is the center of the nation's agricultural and manufacturing industries, longstanding preference for the north has seen the south sacrificed in terms of economic development. Policies have disregarded southerners, who have been looked down upon as country bumpkins by the urban north, despite the fact that they're also paying the taxes used to build the north. Small wonder that they used their votes to show their expectations of the DPP government.

We are glad to see a group of young KMT members capable of seeing through the smoke surrounding the election and finding the truth and public opinion long concealed by the north. We are glad to see an opposition party that understands Taiwan's mainstream public opinion, and we do not mean the extremist PFP. We hope the KMT will return to a moderate path, deal with its assets problem, listen to the people and return dignity to the south. This would be for the good of Taiwan's democracy.
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