Conflicts of opinion within the Cabinet have recently sparked furious debate around two contentious issues — whether to have a moratorium on capital punishment and whether to raise National Health Insurance (NHI) premiums. When looked at closely, these issues are both tests of Taiwan’s ability to break out of the old political mould.
The issue of capital punishment is not one that directly affects the Taiwanese public in general, given that not many people have relatives or friends on death row. On the other hand, it is not very far removed from ordinary people’s lives, either, in that it involves the public perception of whether a halt to executions would cause a significant rise in crime, which would threaten the lives and livelihoods of ordinary people, their families and friends.
This could be reduced to a formula following a purely economic logic: abolishing capital punishment = higher crime rates = a higher chance that I might be victim of a crime. Behind this rational economic equation there lies another value premise, which is the notion that it is reasonable to deal with one form of violence — that perpetrated by criminals — with another violent act — the death penalty. In other words, faced with the unrelenting violence of the urban jungle, we need to respond to it with another form of violence — the violence of the state.
Although the first equation appears valid, there is another formula that is also persuasive: the judicial system has used capital punishment = crime rates keep rising anyway = a higher chance that I might be victim of a crime.
In other words, from the 1984 killing of Hua Nan Bank assistant manager Lin Yung-chuan (林永泉) by the Hu Kuan-pao (胡關寶) gang to the 1997 kidnapping and murder of Pai Hsiao-yen (白曉燕) by Chen Chin-hsing (陳進興) and his associates, the death penalty was in existence, and the rules of the game — that the state suppresses violence with violence — remained unchanged, yet there was no decrease in the number of serious crimes.
Admittedly, some people might suspect that, if the state’s modus operandi of countering violence with violence were removed, the incidence of serious crimes would increase even further. Nevertheless, the point that capital punishment has failed to effectively deter serious crime remains valid.
The state’s reliance on the use of violence as the final solution to “social problems” is also often the cause of a lack of spontaneity on the part of the public. A highly commercialized society does not necessarily lead to the atomization and fragmentation of relations between people — theories related to social capital have already proved this point. Isolation and a lack of concern between people are usually the root causes that generate social problems. This may have something to do with the factor of egocentric social relations in traditional Chinese culture.
In an industrialized and commercialized society, the influence of the clan or extended family has long weakened, and the nuclear family is now the only source of support for many people. If even this pillar of support is absent, and a person also gets little or no support from society or social groups, then that individual may have no option but to turn to various underground channels in the urban jungle.
That is why I absolutely cannot view crime as 100 percent a matter of personal responsibility. The satisfaction of getting rid of the offender can only be the product of a revenge mentality and an “out of sight, out of mind” attitude.
Telephone interviews conducted by the public opinion survey center of the Chinese-language United Daily News newspaper on March 10 indicated that 74 percent of the public are in favor of capital punishment. At the same time, on the current controversy over NHI premiums, 67 percent of people approve of the NHI scheme, but only 11 percent support the Department of Health’s proposal for raising NHI premiums. This reflects the prevalent attitude to public policy among most Taiwanese people, which is one of getting a free ride.
I don’t mean to denounce “mainstream public opinion” in Taiwan. After all, it was not formed overnight, and neither can it be turned around at a moment’s notice. Still, if political figures are content to just go with the flow of public opinion with a view to getting elected, that is not the mark of a far-sighted statesman. In fact it makes our politicians look more like a bunch of poodles wagging their tails at the public.
George Nee is a doctoral candidate in the Political Science Department of National Chengchi University. This piece was originally published in the Taiwan Lih Pao Daily.
TRANSLATED BY JULIAN CLEGG
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