The use of the TaiMed Biologics Inc case in the lead-up to the Jan. 14 presidential and legislative elections by President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) inner circle has been called Ma’s Watergate. However, it is much more serious than that.
Ma pretended that he was innocent prior to the election, but the appointment of Christina Liu (劉憶如) as minister of finance and Lin Yih-shih (林益世) as Cabinet secretary-general was a blatant attempt to interfere in the judicial process as it relates to the TaiMed case.
Watergate started with the activities of members of former US president Richard Nixon’s inner circle arranging a break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters to steal documents. The burglars were caught in the act. Nixon made the situation worse by trying to halt the investigation and destroy evidence implicating White House officials. Had he not done so, suspicions about his involvement might not have been raised, and he might never have been forced to resign under threat of impeachment.
However, Nixon had then-presidential counsel John Dean who squealed, whereas Ma’s former secretary Yu Wen (余文), has protected his master.
His attempts to destroy evidence unsuccessful, Nixon later sought to fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox, who refused to end the investigation. His insistence that Cox be fired forced the resignations of attorney general Elliot Richardson and deputy attorney general William Ruckelshaus, in what was later called the Saturday Night Massacre. It made impeachment a near certainty, had he not resigned.
In the TaiMed case, members of Ma’s inner circle, including members of the current Cabinet and senior members of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislative caucus, conspired to break the law, blatantly altering confidential documents.
This was a hundred times more serious than the actions that led to the Watergate scandal. The Democratic Progressive Party produced the original documents to prove that they had been altered, but once again the Ma machine worked its wonders. A special investigative team was set up to look into the matter, but appeared to disregard the forgeries out of hand.
Even though Ma himself was not involved in altering the documents or in destroying evidence, he was well aware that Liu stood accused of forgery and that the case was still under investigation, yet he still chose to re-appoint her and Lin. This suggests he was confident the investigative team would return a not-guilty verdict.
Watergate had its own heroes — individuals and institutions that did their duty and held to their convictions about what was right and just. There was “Deep Throat,” the informant; the Washington Post, which stuck with the investigation; Cox, who refused to let himself be intimidated by pressure to stop the investigation; and Richardson and Ruckelshaus, who both resigned rather than sack Cox, as Nixon had asked them to do. All of these men held firm in the fight against the abuse of power by the government, maintaining the independence of the judiciary and the integrity of US democracy.
Ma has not been found guilty of corruption for his role in the alleged forging of documents by Yu; he has managed to continue as an incompetent president thanks to alleged forgeries made by Liu; and now that he has been re-elected, he is attempting to interfere with the independence of the judiciary. He wants to turn Taiwan into a land where there is no right or wrong, where there is no fairness or justice.
Shortly after his election victory Ma said more work was needed on judicial independence. Those who voted for him should perhaps engage in some reflection of their own.
James Wang is a media commentator.
Translated by Paul Cooper
China’s recent aggressive military posture around Taiwan simply reflects the truth that China is a millennium behind, as Kobe City Councilor Norihiro Uehata has commented. While democratic countries work for peace, prosperity and progress, authoritarian countries such as Russia and China only care about territorial expansion, superpower status and world dominance, while their people suffer. Two millennia ago, the ancient Chinese philosopher Mencius (孟子) would have advised Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) that “people are the most important, state is lesser, and the ruler is the least important.” In fact, the reverse order is causing the great depression in China right now,
We are used to hearing that whenever something happens, it means Taiwan is about to fall to China. Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) cannot change the color of his socks without China experts claiming it means an invasion is imminent. So, it is no surprise that what happened in Venezuela over the weekend triggered the knee-jerk reaction of saying that Taiwan is next. That is not an opinion on whether US President Donald Trump was right to remove Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro the way he did or if it is good for Venezuela and the world. There are other, more qualified
This should be the year in which the democracies, especially those in East Asia, lose their fear of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) “one China principle” plus its nuclear “Cognitive Warfare” coercion strategies, all designed to achieve hegemony without fighting. For 2025, stoking regional and global fear was a major goal for the CCP and its People’s Liberation Army (PLA), following on Mao Zedong’s (毛澤東) Little Red Book admonition, “We must be ruthless to our enemies; we must overpower and annihilate them.” But on Dec. 17, 2025, the Trump Administration demonstrated direct defiance of CCP terror with its record US$11.1 billion arms
The immediate response in Taiwan to the extraction of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro by the US over the weekend was to say that it was an example of violence by a major power against a smaller nation and that, as such, it gave Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) carte blanche to invade Taiwan. That assessment is vastly oversimplistic and, on more sober reflection, likely incorrect. Generally speaking, there are three basic interpretations from commentators in Taiwan. The first is that the US is no longer interested in what is happening beyond its own backyard, and no longer preoccupied with regions in other
RSS