It has been almost 10 months since Ma Ying-jeou (
Compared with the crisis-torn Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), currently the KMT looks as pure as the driven snow. But upon closer inspection, events over the past few months have proved that Ma has merely been paying lip service to his campaign promises.
Ma's major pledge during the battle for the chairmanship was that he would clean up the party. And despite his "clean election" pledge and promises not to endorse candidates with black-gold convictions, the chairman has stumped for a number of questionable candidates.
During December's local election campaign, Ma seemed to steer clear of corrupt Taitung County commissioner candidate Wu Chun-li (
Now, Keelung Mayor Hsu Tsai-li (
And in the KMT's Taipei mayoral primary, during which the chairman has supposedly stayed neutral, two candidates dropped out of the race because of alleged favoritism toward Ma's protege and former deputy mayor Yeh Chin-chuan (
Turning to party assets, Ma came to power determined to rid the party of the property it gained through illegal ownership transfers during the KMT party-state era, but apart from selling one or two prominent sites for billions of NT dollars and keeping the profits, this issue has not been settled.
Conveniently for Ma, all this and the fact that his reform program has gotten nowhere is being overshadowed by the DPP's own corruption crisis.
Despite promises that it would conduct clean government, it appears the DPP is as full of people eager to fill their pockets as previous KMT regimes.
The DPP leadership could do worse than to force any members with skeletons in their closet to come clean as soon as possible, because it seems that KMT legislators like Chiu Yi (
The trickle-down effect of these scandals is just prolonging the agony and also helps to divert attention from the KMT's own shortcomings.
And as Ma and his half-hearted efforts at party reform have shown, a year is a long time in politics and the public have extremely short memories. If the DPP can make a clean break with all these allegations and start anew, there may be just enough time for it to salvage the 2008 presidential election.
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
Ursula K. le Guin in The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas proposed a thought experiment of a utopian city whose existence depended on one child held captive in a dungeon. When taken to extremes, Le Guin suggests, utilitarian logic violates some of our deepest moral intuitions. Even the greatest social goods — peace, harmony and prosperity — are not worth the sacrifice of an innocent person. Former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), since leaving office, has lived an odyssey that has brought him to lows like Le Guin’s dungeon. From late 2008 to 2015 he was imprisoned, much of this
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and