It is curious that so much has been said of the much vaunted "second stage of constitutional reforms," especially as we have had six -- or is it seven? -- rounds already in the past 15 years, while the hard work of implementing the set of reforms that passed on Tuesday is very far from being completed. In fact, the trouble is only just about to begin.
The problem revolves around the changes in the electoral system whereby the current 28 multi-member districts are to be changed into 73 single-member ones. Little thought has been given as to how this is to be carried out, and only now are the various players in the upcoming dram beginning to rehearse their parts.
The two principal ways of organizing electoral boundary drawing are epitomized by British and US practices. In the British system a special body -- the Boundary Commission -- is charged with drawing fair electoral boundaries. The commission is rigorously impartial, an impartiality upheld by its own code of practice, the long tradition of impartiality of the UK civil service as a whole, and public and parliamentary oversight. The commission looks at a vast array of data -- from census returns to commuting patterns -- and holds public enquiries to carry out its task. Its results are respected across the political spectrum.
In the US system, on the other hand, electoral boundaries are usually drawn up by the governing party in the state legislature. Creative drawing to favor politically partisan ends has turned the House of Representatives into an affront to democracy -- Pyongyang on the Potomac, as The Economist memorably called it. Of its 425 seats, fewer than 30 and perhaps as few as 13 have any chance of changing hands in an election.
Currently in Taiwan, the authority for drawing boundaries rests with the Central Election Commission, which has, in its turn, asked the city and county-level commissions to make recommendations. The problem here is that the pan-blues contest that the CEC has been too willing to do the bidding of the ruling party to be considered an impartial arbiter. It doesn't matter that this is a pan-blue canard against an honorable body. As long as a goodly proportion of the electorate -- misguided though they might be -- believes it, the system's credibility is damaged. And this is not something that a weak democracy such as Taiwan's can really afford.
The alternative, however, is almost too obscene to contemplate: that the legislature itself does the redrawing. It has been suggested, by both the People First Party and the Taiwan Solidarity Union, that the legislature convene a special committee to oversee the task. After the partisan farce of the March 19 Shooting Investigation Special Committee, it is impossible to imagine the legislature capable of carrying out the task in an acceptable way. Nevertheless it is quite possible that the pan-blue controlled legislature might pass a law giving itself the power to do this -- using its accusations of CEC partisanship as justification.
The Democratic Progressive Party appeared earlier this year to be in favor of some kind of special commission appointed by the president to conduct the boundary changes. The problem is that any committee which did not have representatives from the political parties on it would always be accused by those parties of acting in a partisan manner against them. Yet to include party representatives will lead to the usual horse-trading and booty-sharing we are so uncomfortably familiar with.
What we need is something like the British system. But such a system can only exist in an environment where there is a certain amount of trust in the system. Such trust has been willfully destroyed by the pan-blues in the past 15 months, much to the long-term detriment of Taiwan's democratic system.
The best system has been put out of reach. Now the debate has to be about what second-best might be acceptable.
As strategic tensions escalate across the vast Indo-Pacific region, Taiwan has emerged as more than a potential flashpoint. It is the fulcrum upon which the credibility of the evolving American-led strategy of integrated deterrence now rests. How the US and regional powers like Japan respond to Taiwan’s defense, and how credible the deterrent against Chinese aggression proves to be, will profoundly shape the Indo-Pacific security architecture for years to come. A successful defense of Taiwan through strengthened deterrence in the Indo-Pacific would enhance the credibility of the US-led alliance system and underpin America’s global preeminence, while a failure of integrated deterrence would
The Executive Yuan recently revised a page of its Web site on ethnic groups in Taiwan, replacing the term “Han” (漢族) with “the rest of the population.” The page, which was updated on March 24, describes the composition of Taiwan’s registered households as indigenous (2.5 percent), foreign origin (1.2 percent) and the rest of the population (96.2 percent). The change was picked up by a social media user and amplified by local media, sparking heated discussion over the weekend. The pan-blue and pro-China camp called it a politically motivated desinicization attempt to obscure the Han Chinese ethnicity of most Taiwanese.
On Wednesday last week, the Rossiyskaya Gazeta published an article by Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) asserting the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) territorial claim over Taiwan effective 1945, predicated upon instruments such as the 1943 Cairo Declaration and the 1945 Potsdam Proclamation. The article further contended that this de jure and de facto status was subsequently reaffirmed by UN General Assembly Resolution 2758 of 1971. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs promptly issued a statement categorically repudiating these assertions. In addition to the reasons put forward by the ministry, I believe that China’s assertions are open to questions in international
The Legislative Yuan passed an amendment on Friday last week to add four national holidays and make Workers’ Day a national holiday for all sectors — a move referred to as “four plus one.” The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), who used their combined legislative majority to push the bill through its third reading, claim the holidays were chosen based on their inherent significance and social relevance. However, in passing the amendment, they have stuck to the traditional mindset of taking a holiday just for the sake of it, failing to make good use of
RSS