Opinion polls continue to show low support for President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九). Many media outlets and political commentators have accused him of ingratiating himself with the public, but shirking responsibility in an empty political show.
The Presidential Office’s spokesperson rejects such claims, saying the government is working hard and that the criticism is “unacceptable.” Ma and his cohorts obviously don’t understand where all the complaints are coming from.
If Ma wanted to understand, it would be easy. Let’s look at how the government handled the Typhoon Morakot disaster last August and how it handled Thursday’s earthquake.
When Morakot hit, the government’s disaster relief center didn’t know what was going on. Top officials went on with their daily lives, Ma told local fire brigades to send life boats — not what was needed in the disaster area — and the military didn’t mobilize any troops. No one knew how to deal with the situation in the annihilated Siaolin Village (小林), the Ministry of Foreign Affairs turned down offers of foreign aid, disaster relief and reconstruction was delayed and when visiting the disaster area several days later, an annoyed Ma met victim complaints with a testy: “I’m here now, aren’t I?”
So it is not very surprising that public discontent boiled over.
Then, when a magnitude 6.4 earthquake struck Jiasian Township (甲仙), Kaohsiung County, on Thursday morning, followed by a magnitude 5.7 aftershock in the afternoon, causing panic, the military organized a relief effort in just 18 minutes. Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) quickly called local governments for an update and the disaster prevention center promptly kicked into gear, with Ma visiting the area after only a few hours, demanding that hillsides be reinforced to prevent landslides before the next heavy rainfall.
The result?
Neither local residents nor the media had any major criticism of the government’s handling of the situation.
Why the difference in the government’s approach?
During the Morakot disaster, the government treated the situation lightly and in a haphazard manner, reacting in the wrong way to public complaints and saying the wrong things. It was the first time we saw the Ma administration — which claimed to be “prepared and ready” — in action and it was the turning point for Ma’s popularity.
After those lessons, the government didn’t dare treat Thursday’s earthquake lightly; every concerned agency snapped to attention and did what it was supposed to do, showing that the government’s disaster prevention efforts are finally back on track.
Ma has reacted to his dropping popularity and the KMT’s consecutive defeats at the ballot box by replacing the Presidential Office spokesperson, members of the Cabinet and certain people in high-ranking party positions with people from his presidential campaign team, and has responded quickly to public and media criticism to avoid misunderstandings that are perceived as truths.
This is the wrong reaction.
The government doesn’t suffer from a lack of publicity; what it lacks is the correct policies and their forceful implementation in order to provide tangible improvements to the lives of the public. The economy may look brighter, but with employment still hovering just under 6 percent and no sign of dropping, and with industry moving abroad, it hasn’t yet recovered. Many unemployed have no income. Households are suffering and the misery index remains high, so why should the public give the government the thumbs-up or vote for the ruling party?
Only when Ma understands that the public cares less about what politicians say than what they do, will he see that the criticism is fair. If he doesn’t, he will meet with more defeats further down the road.
Donald Trump’s return to the White House has offered Taiwan a paradoxical mix of reassurance and risk. Trump’s visceral hostility toward China could reinforce deterrence in the Taiwan Strait. Yet his disdain for alliances and penchant for transactional bargaining threaten to erode what Taiwan needs most: a reliable US commitment. Taiwan’s security depends less on US power than on US reliability, but Trump is undermining the latter. Deterrence without credibility is a hollow shield. Trump’s China policy in his second term has oscillated wildly between confrontation and conciliation. One day, he threatens Beijing with “massive” tariffs and calls China America’s “greatest geopolitical
Ahead of US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) meeting today on the sidelines of the APEC summit in South Korea, an op-ed published in Time magazine last week maliciously called President William Lai (賴清德) a “reckless leader,” stirring skepticism in Taiwan about the US and fueling unease over the Trump-Xi talks. In line with his frequent criticism of the democratically elected ruling Democratic Progressive Party — which has stood up to China’s hostile military maneuvers and rejected Beijing’s “one country, two systems” framework — Lyle Goldstein, Asia engagement director at the US think tank Defense Priorities, called
A large majority of Taiwanese favor strengthening national defense and oppose unification with China, according to the results of a survey by the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC). In the poll, 81.8 percent of respondents disagreed with Beijing’s claim that “there is only one China and Taiwan is part of China,” MAC Deputy Minister Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) told a news conference on Thursday last week, adding that about 75 percent supported the creation of a “T-Dome” air defense system. President William Lai (賴清德) referred to such a system in his Double Ten National Day address, saying it would integrate air defenses into a
The central bank has launched a redesign of the New Taiwan dollar banknotes, prompting questions from Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislators — “Are we not promoting digital payments? Why spend NT$5 billion on a redesign?” Many assume that cash will disappear in the digital age, but they forget that it represents the ultimate trust in the system. Banknotes do not become obsolete, they do not crash, they cannot be frozen and they leave no record of transactions. They remain the cleanest means of exchange in a free society. In a fully digitized world, every purchase, donation and action leaves behind data.
RSS