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
Taiwan might just give up. That’s the argument Simon Shuster made in The Atlantic’s October issue. The US is unreliable, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) leadership is aligned with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and Taiwan does not have the military capability to defend itself in a prolonged war without help. What hope does Taiwan have? Quite a bit more, in fact, than Shuster lets on. Shuster points to genuine problems. The first Donald Trump administration had a mostly positive record on Taiwan policy. It regularized the arms sales process, enhanced the military-to-military relationship, and treated Taiwan more like a normal
A Facebook post by Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (蔣萬安) earlier this month achieved record levels of engagement — although perhaps inadvertently. In it, he attacked Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator and Taipei mayoral candidate Puma Shen (沈伯洋) for an op-ed published in 2014 discussing drug harm reduction policies. In attempting to stir up fear with talk of community centers, drugs and needles, Chiang’s comment section exploded. More than 100,000 comments poured in within the first two hours; more than 330,000 after the first 12; and more than 400,000 by noon the following day. Rather embarrassingly, many commenters made a point
Southeast Asian food delivery platform Grab Holdings Ltd in March applied to acquire Delivery Hero SE’s Foodpanda operations in Taiwan, with the Fair Trade Commission (FTC) scheduled to announce its decision on Oct. 27. On the surface, the deal is a business merger — but in substance, it involves personal data, national geospatial information and digital sovereignty. It cannot be assessed solely in terms of market share and price competition. Grab has extensive and long-standing connections to Chinese capital. In 2015, Chinese ride-hailing firm Didi Chuxing and China Investment Corp, a sovereign wealth fund, invested in Grab. Grab invested in Chinese autonomous-driving
With the Taipei mayoral election quickly heating up, Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an’s (蔣萬安) campaign team has finally started to get serious this month, but a major mudslinging initiative and several sloppy mistakes have drawn a larger wave of public criticism, while sporadic municipal issues continue to crop up, raising concerns about whether the city government’s wheels are coming off. Just a few months ago, Chiang of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) was widely expected to win handily in Taipei, traditionally a political stronghold for the KMT and with no major third-party candidates this year. KMT supporters regarded him as a frontrunner
RSS