During the second provisional session of the summer recess that began last week, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT)-dominated legislature pushed through a number of controversial proposals, including the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) and an amendment to the Civil Servants Election and Recall Act (公職人員選舉罷免法). This latter move froze the boundaries of legislative electoral districts for the next decade and deserves serious scrutiny.
The amendment invalidates an announcement made by the Central Election Commission (CEC) in May that the number of legislative seats in Greater Tainan and Greater Kaohsiung would be increased and decreased by one respectively for the next legislative election.
Although the KMT said that the amendment, which was initiated by KMT Legislator Lee Fu-hsing (李復興) from Kaohsiung, was meant to stabilize electoral districts, it could just as easly be interpreted as improper interference in the workings of the nation’s supposedly independent top electoral body.
The CEC proposed the adjustment in response to the planned mergers of Kaohsiung, Tainan and Taichung cities and counties, in accordance with Article 4 of the Amendment to the Constitution, which stipulates that the distribution of legislative seats should be in proportion to the population of special municipalities, cities and counties.
As the population of Greater Tainan may reach 1.8 million after December’s merger, while that of Greater Kaohsiung will become 2.7 million, it makes perfect sense for the CEC to re-demarcate electoral districts to ensure residents are fairly represented.
The freeze not only makes the seat adjustment stipulated by the Constitution impossible for a decade, but also in effect suspends the CEC’s authority to rearrange legislative electoral districts, as empowered by the Organic Act of the Central Eelection Commission (中央選舉委員會組織法), which was pushed through by the KMT in May last year.
In light of this, one cannot but ask whether the KMT’s decision to push through the amendment was motivated by its own political interests.
The KMT holds six of the nine legislative seats in Kaohsiung City and County, but none in Tainan — a traditional Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) stronghold.
In terms of turnout for the last legislative election in 2008, the KMT received 30.5 percent of the vote in Tainan County — about 25 percentage points fewer than the DPP — while in Tainan City, the KMT lost to the DPP by 1 percent.
In Kaohsiung City and County, the KMT had a 5 percent lead over the DPP.
Given these figures, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the KMT had much to lose if the commission had gone ahead with its planned re-adjustment of seat allocations.
On Saturday, KMT caucus whip Lin Yi-shih (林益世) and five other KMT Kaohsiung legislators accused the DPP caucus of sacrificing the rights of Kaohsiung residents by threatening to file an application for a constitutional interpretation of the amendment.
Needless to say, those legislators conveniently forgot to mention that Tainan residents have the right to be as well represented in the legislature as their counterparts in other parts of the nation.
Instead of passing a controversial amendment that was dubbed “a life-saving bill for Kaohsiung legislators,” the legislature should have spent more time deliberating how to ensure residents from different cities and counties are best represented in that body.
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
In the intricate ballet of geopolitics, names signify more than mere identification: They embody history, culture and sovereignty. The recent decision by China to refer to Arunachal Pradesh as “Tsang Nan” or South Tibet, and to rename Tibet as “Xizang,” is a strategic move that extends beyond cartography into the realm of diplomatic signaling. This op-ed explores the implications of these actions and India’s potential response. Names are potent symbols in international relations, encapsulating the essence of a nation’s stance on territorial disputes. China’s choice to rename regions within Indian territory is not merely a linguistic exercise, but a symbolic assertion
More than seven months into the armed conflict in Gaza, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to take “immediate and effective measures” to protect Palestinians in Gaza from the risk of genocide following a case brought by South Africa regarding Israel’s breaches of the 1948 Genocide Convention. The international community, including Amnesty International, called for an immediate ceasefire by all parties to prevent further loss of civilian lives and to ensure access to life-saving aid. Several protests have been organized around the world, including at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and many other universities in the US.
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