In a bid to show just how squeaky clean he is — as opposed to the “dirty” former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) and, by association, the “corrupt” Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) — President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) unveiled the latest brainchild of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT)-led government: the Agency Against Corruption (AAC).
This is a rich twist to Taiwanese politics, given that the KMT is one of the most corrupt political parties ever to exist. It is a little bit like the Cosa Nostra in Sicily forming its own bureau to make sure nobody breaks the law.
Ma does not want to give up on a winning strategy. After all, juxtaposing his clean-cut, good-guy image against Chen’s money-grubbing ways was one of the myths that Ma and the KMT created to get into the Presidential Office in 2008.
It is a good thing that the Taiwanese government has a body dedicated to rooting out corruption amongst civil servants, but are the head of the KMT and his subordinates going to be able to restrain themselves from using the AAC to attack their political opponents? If their past three years in power show us anything, the answer is “not likely.”
In all likelihood, the AAC will become the AADPPC, or the Agency Against DPP Corruption, especially in the lead-up to January’s presidential election. Although Ma said at the AAC’s inauguration that adequate evidence proving corruption must be shown before it can bring a case, this is not very hard to do given the murky rules surrounding the use of the special budgets for any elected official and a cultural attitude of cutting corners in Taiwanese government circles — for example, using any old receipt to claim expenses, something even Ma has been implicated in.
In a thinly veiled threat, Ma said that coming under investigation would severely damage the reputation of a civil servant and make his or her spouse afraid to go to work and their children afraid to go to school. This amounts to communal punishment, and it can easily be meted out to those who disagree with the president politically.
Let’s look at what has happened in the lead-up to the presidential election: Just before the end of the DPP’s primary, the Supreme Prosecutors’ Office Special Investigation Panel (SIP) announced that it was investigating the disappearance of thousands of documents during the former president’s administration, saying that it could possibly indict former premier Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌), then in the running for the DPP presidential nomination. Then, just as DPP Chairperson and presidential candidate Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) was to unveil her campaign office, the SIP indicted former president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) on charges of embezzling state funds and money laundering, conveniently just after Lee said that Ma must be voted out of office.
Just how determined is the Ma government to stamp out corruption? Recent moves regarding the rampant and ongoing practice of vote buying are telling. From December 2008 to May last year, 26 local officials belonging to the KMT were indicted around the nation for vote buying. How did the government reward Hsin Tai-chao (邢泰釗), the chief prosecutor at the Kaohsiung District Prosecutors’ Office, who is credited with being Taiwan’s leading prosecutor against the practice of vote buying? He was transferred to Kinmen Island. That shows real determination.
Now, Ma unveils a government body whose entire purpose is to investigate and indict corrupt officials. With his government’s track record, you can expect to see a whole list of officials connected with the DPP indicted on dubious grounds in the next few months.
The conflict in the Middle East has been disrupting financial markets, raising concerns about rising inflationary pressures and global economic growth. One market that some investors are particularly worried about has not been heavily covered in the news: the private credit market. Even before the joint US-Israeli attacks on Iran on Feb. 28, global capital markets had faced growing structural pressure — the deteriorating funding conditions in the private credit market. The private credit market is where companies borrow funds directly from nonbank financial institutions such as asset management companies, insurance companies and private lending platforms. Its popularity has risen since
The Donald Trump administration’s approach to China broadly, and to cross-Strait relations in particular, remains a conundrum. The 2025 US National Security Strategy prioritized the defense of Taiwan in a way that surprised some observers of the Trump administration: “Deterring a conflict over Taiwan, ideally by preserving military overmatch, is a priority.” Two months later, Taiwan went entirely unmentioned in the US National Defense Strategy, as did military overmatch vis-a-vis China, giving renewed cause for concern. How to interpret these varying statements remains an open question. In both documents, the Indo-Pacific is listed as a second priority behind homeland defense and
Every analyst watching Iran’s succession crisis is asking who would replace supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Yet, the real question is whether China has learned enough from the Persian Gulf to survive a war over Taiwan. Beijing purchases roughly 90 percent of Iran’s exported crude — some 1.61 million barrels per day last year — and holds a US$400 billion, 25-year cooperation agreement binding it to Tehran’s stability. However, this is not simply the story of a patron protecting an investment. China has spent years engineering a sanctions-evasion architecture that was never really about Iran — it was about Taiwan. The
After “Operation Absolute Resolve” to capture former Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, the US joined Israel on Saturday last week in launching “Operation Epic Fury” to remove Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his theocratic regime leadership team. The two blitzes are widely believed to be a prelude to US President Donald Trump changing the geopolitical landscape in the Indo-Pacific region, targeting China’s rise. In the National Security Strategic report released in December last year, the Trump administration made it clear that the US would focus on “restoring American pre-eminence in the Western hemisphere,” and “competing with China economically and militarily
RSS