During a recent Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Central Standing Committee meeting, President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), said in response to the bribery scandal surrounding former Executive Yuan secretary-general Lin Yi-shih (林益世) that “regardless of how many people are involved in the case and regardless of rank, prosecutors and investigators must undertake a thorough investigation and use this case as an opportunity to get rid of all corruption.”
This all sounded nice and dignified, but he was in fact just saying what people wanted to hear, using empty phrases that are impossible to realize.
Do prosecutors really have the ability to conduct a thorough investigation?
If someone else had not come forward to try and keep themselves out of prison, would prosecutors have ever found out about Lin? Also, how could one simple sentence from Ma’s lips allow us to rid all corrupt elements?
During the meeting, all of those legislators and high officials sat in front of Ma, some publicly criticizing Lin, even though they are exactly like him.
However, can Ma tell the difference? Will prosecutors be able to clarify everything?
Legislators are habitually corrupt, but when have prosecutors ever investigated a legislator?
There was former Legislative Yuan speaker Liu Sung-pan (劉松藩) and former KMT legislator Ho Chih-hui (何智輝), but both of them fled the country.
Ma also said that “we must do everything in our power to defend the value of incorruptibility,” reiterating again something that is almost impossible to accomplish.
The president will actually only do anything to consolidate his own power and will make sure all of his KMT political allies get all the power they can, until corruption reigns freely and incorruptibility disappears without a trace.
If Ma had been just a tad more careful, he would never have chosen to promote this political clown Lin in the first place. Ma was reckless in choosing Lin and now it is impossible to clean up the mess.
Ma continued his lecture by saying that this crisis should be used as an opportunity to clean up the government and the political system and he said it in such a way that it sounded like the crisis was already over.
Ma claims he is clean and not corrupt, but he won the presidency after taking advantage of former president Chen Shui-bian’s (陳水扁) corruption scandal and has never really been serious about creating an effective system for cleaning up the house and ridding it of corruption and inefficiency.
Ma has failed to do anything aside from dreaming up slogans about building an incorruptible government.
Ma has held several top posts, serving as minister of justice, minister of the Research, Development and Evaluation Commission, chairman of the Mainland Affairs Council, mayor of Taipei, chairman of the KMT and finally as president, so he should have a thorough understanding of how the legislature works and the corruption of legislators should be ingrained in his mind.
By now, then, he should have a comprehensive plan for legislative reform as well as plans for the regulation of legislators’s behavior, but he has no such plans. Instead, he is turning a blind eye to corrupt legislators just to consolidate his own position and power.
After listening to the recording of Lin soliciting bribes, Ma’s only response was to say that it was all “unbelievable and unthinkable.” However, what really is unbelievable and unthinkable, is an inept president only capable of lecturing and shouting slogans.
Chiu Hei-yuan is a research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Sociology.
Translated by Kyle Jeffcoat
On May 7, 1971, Henry Kissinger planned his first, ultra-secret mission to China and pondered whether it would be better to meet his Chinese interlocutors “in Pakistan where the Pakistanis would tape the meeting — or in China where the Chinese would do the taping.” After a flicker of thought, he decided to have the Chinese do all the tape recording, translating and transcribing. Fortuitously, historians have several thousand pages of verbatim texts of Dr. Kissinger’s negotiations with his Chinese counterparts. Paradoxically, behind the scenes, Chinese stenographers prepared verbatim English language typescripts faster than they could translate and type them
More than 30 years ago when I immigrated to the US, applied for citizenship and took the 100-question civics test, the one part of the naturalization process that left the deepest impression on me was one question on the N-400 form, which asked: “Have you ever been a member of, involved in or in any way associated with any communist or totalitarian party anywhere in the world?” Answering “yes” could lead to the rejection of your application. Some people might try their luck and lie, but if exposed, the consequences could be much worse — a person could be fined,
On May 13, the Legislative Yuan passed an amendment to Article 6 of the Nuclear Reactor Facilities Regulation Act (核子反應器設施管制法) that would extend the life of nuclear reactors from 40 to 60 years, thereby providing a legal basis for the extension or reactivation of nuclear power plants. On May 20, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) legislators used their numerical advantage to pass the TPP caucus’ proposal for a public referendum that would determine whether the Ma-anshan Nuclear Power Plant should resume operations, provided it is deemed safe by the authorities. The Central Election Commission (CEC) has
When China passed its “Anti-Secession” Law in 2005, much of the democratic world saw it as yet another sign of Beijing’s authoritarianism, its contempt for international law and its aggressive posture toward Taiwan. Rightly so — on the surface. However, this move, often dismissed as a uniquely Chinese form of legal intimidation, echoes a legal and historical precedent rooted not in authoritarian tradition, but in US constitutional history. The Chinese “Anti-Secession” Law, a domestic statute threatening the use of force should Taiwan formally declare independence, is widely interpreted as an emblem of the Chinese Communist Party’s disregard for international norms. Critics
RSS