The Presidential Office announced on Friday that first lady Wu Shu-jen (
The controversy shows that the public imposes a high moral standard on the president and his family. It should not be forgotten that the president and his family are not legally obligated to place their assets or property in trust. President Chen volunteered to do so, and that was a laudable move. He set a precedent that should be followed by all future presidents in the absence of a law making that move mandatory.
However, the current uproar over Wu's mutual fund demonstrates that the placement of assets in trust is not enough to satisfy the public. Today's voters demand the elimination of any conflicts of interest or potential for insider trading by the president and his family. This means that even though the first lady may have done nothing to compromise her integrity, voters don't want there to be any door left open for unethical and immoral conduct.
They are right to impose such a high ethical standard. After all, though Chen and his family may have integrity, the same may not be true of his successors. But in the absence of relevant laws or standards to follow, there are ambiguities and uncertainties about what should be considered "improper" conduct. At least, that is the case until an issue becomes the center of public attention and criticisms pour in. By then, the damage has already been done.
For example, should the trust fund manager or trustee be allowed to actively manage and invest assets and properties placed in trust? Theoretically, it wouldn't seem to be improper if the president and the first lady left decisions regarding fund management and investment activities entirely up to the trustee.
However, can the general public genuinely believe in the independence of the trustee? That doesn't seem likely in this country, whose long history and culture of under-the-table dealings have made voters extremely cynical. Complicating the situation is the fact that financial institutions, including the management company that held the first family's assets in trust, are highly regulated by the government.
There is also the question of whether investments in mutual funds should be considered speculative investment activities -- and so be banned when assets and properties are placed in trust. Everyone knows that mutual funds invest in a wide variety of stocks and bonds. Every mutual fund is then in turn open to investment by the general public. In other parts of the world, it would be hard to imagine that the professional independence of a mutual fund manager would be questioned just because important political figures were among the fund's many investors. But that's exactly what has happened in Taiwan.
Imposing a high moral standard on the first family is a good thing. However, one cannot help but hope that the same standard be applied to other politicians as well.
A series of strong earthquakes in Hualien County not only caused severe damage in Taiwan, but also revealed that China’s power has permeated everywhere. A Taiwanese woman posted on the Internet that she found clips of the earthquake — which were recorded by the security camera in her home — on the Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu. It is spine-chilling that the problem might be because the security camera was manufactured in China. China has widely collected information, infringed upon public privacy and raised information security threats through various social media platforms, as well as telecommunication and security equipment. Several former TikTok employees revealed
Two sets of economic data released last week by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) have drawn mixed reactions from the public: One on the nation’s economic performance in the first quarter of the year and the other on Taiwan’s household wealth distribution in 2021. GDP growth for the first quarter was faster than expected, at 6.51 percent year-on-year, an acceleration from the previous quarter’s 4.93 percent and higher than the agency’s February estimate of 5.92 percent. It was also the highest growth since the second quarter of 2021, when the economy expanded 8.07 percent, DGBAS data showed. The growth
At the same time as more than 30 military aircraft were detected near Taiwan — one of the highest daily incursions this year — with some flying as close as 37 nautical miles (69kms) from the northern city of Keelung, China announced a limited and selected relaxation of restrictions on Taiwanese agricultural exports and tourism, upon receiving a Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) delegation led by KMT legislative caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅崑萁). This demonstrates the two-faced gimmick of China’s “united front” strategy. Despite the strongest earthquake to hit the nation in 25 years striking Hualien on April 3, which caused
In the 2022 book Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, academics Hal Brands and Michael Beckley warned, against conventional wisdom, that it was not a rising China that the US and its allies had to fear, but a declining China. This is because “peaking powers” — nations at the peak of their relative power and staring over the precipice of decline — are particularly dangerous, as they might believe they only have a narrow window of opportunity to grab what they can before decline sets in, they said. The tailwinds that propelled China’s spectacular economic rise over the past