Nevertheless, recent months have also seen several incidents that indicate some of these key institutions are coming under pressure.
Restrictions on protesters and police violence during the visit of Chinese envoy Chen Yunlin (陳雲林), a perceived selectiveness in corruption prosecutions, suspicious circumstances of judges’ appointments to former president Chen Shui-bian’s (陳水扁) corruption case and proposed legislation that would enable program-by-program government scrutiny of public broadcasting have raised concerns both domestically and internationally that some of Taiwan’s hard-won democratic gains may be regressing.
A series of KMT summits with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials has further raised fears of back-door dealings on crucial economic questions and of Taiwanese officials stooping to the CCP’s level of non-transparency and manipulation.
But unlike in China, these events have triggered some of the “checks and balances” mechanisms common in democracies. The media have reported extensively on these incidents and the different viewpoints regarding them. Citizens and rights groups have lodged court complaints over police violence. A student-led civil disobedience movement has grown, demanding greater freedom of assembly. Opposition legislators are critiquing the proposed public broadcasting bill in the legislature.
That is why if the current administration responds positively to these efforts, taking a more inclusive approach to governance and safeguarding fundamental democratic features of transparency and the rule of law, then Taiwan would be well-poised to deal with the economic crisis.
China, on the other hand, is likely in for a rocky ride as nothing suggests the CCP is at all prepared to have a genuinely open conversation about the country’s future with the people it rules.
Sarah Cook is an Asia researcher at Freedom House. She is visiting Taiwan for today’s launch of Freedom in the World, the organization’s annual assessment of political rights and civil liberties around the world.
RSS