“Please believe that this is for real,” President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) government said a few days ago, after the Cabinet passed an amendment to the Organic Act of the Executive Yuan (行政院組織法). The government wants the public to believe that its latest round of “government restructuring” will be real reform.
To this, one might like to say: “Perhaps you are ‘for real’ this time, but does this not imply that all the reforms you talked about in the past were fake?”
Real reformers need not worry about people not believing their reforms are in earnest. Real reformers are not only capable of putting aside vested interests, they also know how to transcend pre-existing concepts and put aside the burdens of tradition. Otherwise, reform may not be able to achieve all it is meant to do. The Ma administration’s latest round of “government restructuring” is a case in point.
One might have expected government restructuring to include scrapping redundant agencies like the Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs Commission (MTAC) and the Overseas Compatriots Affairs Commission (OCAC), but these bodies have remained intact.
Mongolia has long been an independent country, and there are less than 100 Mongolians in Taiwan. There are not many Tibetans in Taiwan, either, yet we still keep the MTAC, which receives NT$160 million (US$5.5 million) of the national budget.
What is really funny is that the MTAC has more than 70 people working for it — not many fewer than the number of people they are meant to be serving. There is probably not such a laughable organization anywhere else on the planet. Of course, the reason this ridiculous organization cannot be axed is because the Republic of China that exists in Ma’s head includes Mongolia and Tibet.
Another question is whether the OCAC should be abolished or incorporated into the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA). After all, expatriate affairs are normally handled by diplomats. When the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) retreated in defeat to Taiwan, it established the OCAC to persuade Chinese people residing overseas to take its side and stop them from leaning toward Beijing. However, times are different now and this organization has become redundant, yet each year it still spends NT$1.56 billion of our national budget.
The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) should also have been absorbed into the MOFA. If we are serious in saying that Taiwan is a sovereign, independent nation, then relations between Taiwan and China should be international affairs and matters relating to China should be included in foreign diplomacy. It is true that diplomatic relations with China are extremely complex, so it would be a good idea to establish a special China affairs division within the foreign ministry. This would also be a good way of putting the idea of equality of sovereignty into practice.
The Chinese Cultural Association, originally known as the Chinese Cultural Renaissance Movement Promotion Committee, is another body that could be done away with. While it is a civic group, it still receives money from the National Treasury via the Cabinet. This organization was originally established by dictator Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) in 1966 in response to the Cultural Revolution launched by the Chinese Communist Party, and it has Chinese nationalism as its basic theme.
Nowadays, the Beijing government has taken Chinese nationalism to a whole new level, and there is no need for us to echo it from across the Taiwan Strait. The word “Chinese” disappeared from the association’s title during former president Chen Shui-bian’s (陳水扁) time in office, when it was renamed the National Cultural Association, but at the beginning of this year it quietly changed its name back again. Although the association now promises to promote Taiwanese culture, it does not really need to when the Council for Cultural Affairs is soon to be upgraded to a ministry of culture.
There is another system that has been debated for half a century and should be scrapped, and that is the Ministry of Education’s Department of Military Training Education. This department was established in the 1950s to allow another shadowy outfit, the China Youth Anti--Communist National Salvation Corps, to send military personnel onto campuses to monitor and brainwash young students. Taiwan is now a democracy, yet we still retain this remnant of Taiwan’s past days of authoritarian martial law.
Some people try to rationalize the existence of this department by saying that many military training officers are highly professional and care about their students. The problem with this is that they are confusing the individuals with the system. In ancient times, there were plenty of eunuchs who did a good job, but does that mean that the eunuch system was itself reasonable?
There are others who say that military training officers are now only responsible for keeping peace on campuses and for student counseling and that they no longer monitor or brainwash students. This is a very odd way of thinking. Are we supposed to believe that military training officers are now being used as school police or security guards?
Student counseling is taken care of by student affairs departments and psychological counseling centers in schools. Military personnel are responsible for protecting the nation from its enemies, while the police’s duty is to uphold public security.
These are totally different roles and should not be confused with one another. For a democratic nation to have military staff on its campuses is a black mark for democracy and an insult to the military.
The organizations mentioned here could and should be scrapped or integrated into other government bodies, but Chen did not manage to do so during his eight years in office. He would have done so if he could, but he was prevented because his Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) had fewer seats in the legislature than the opposition, among other factors.
No such change will take place under the Ma administration’s “government restructuring” either, but this time it is not because the president cannot make it happen, but because he does not want it to happen. It is his China-centric worldview and authoritarian attitude that are getting in the way. That being the case, we must pin our hopes on DPP Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) winning next year’s presidential election to usher in a different climate.
Lee Hsiao-feng is a professor in the Graduate School of Taiwanese Culture at National Taipei University of Education.
TRANSLATED BY DREW CAMERON
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