A few days ago, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus instructed its legislators to boycott the regular assessments carried out by Citizen Congress Watch (CCW) and told them not to provide the group with information.
KMT caucus whip Lin Hung-chih (林鴻池) said the reason for boycotting the group was that it had initiated a campaign to recall legislators who supported allowing imports of beef containing traces of leanness-enhancing feed additives. Lin said the boycott initiative showed that the group was not fair and impartial.
This kind of move is nothing new for CCW. In 1998, when the group started assessing the performance of members of the Seventh Legislature, the KMT issued a stern order not to cooperate with the assessments and it did not stop there. KMT lawmakers filed a string of legal complaints aimed at ruining the organization’s credibility, in some cases seeking civil damages as a means of forcing it into submission.
What was the outcome of that?
CCW is an alliance formed by more than 40 civic groups, each of which has been through too many fights to be so easily intimidated.
More importantly, in the course of so many legal hearings, the law courts have examined the standards and procedures employed by the organization in its assessments from start to finish, as well as finding out who takes part in the process and how CCW announces its findings.
Judges have seen for themselves that everything CCW does is open, transparent, fair and not biased in favor of any political party, and that it has never intentionally slandered any legislator.
As a result, all the legislators who sued CCW either withdrew their complaints or lost in court. Is this not a clear refutation of what Lin said?
Actually, nobody is less qualified than Lin to criticize CCW, given that in his campaign for re-election in January, he kept citing that he had taken first place in CCW’s assessments of lawmakers’ performances to prove that he was worthy of voters’ confidence.
Now that he is party whip, it is funny to see Lin slapping himself in the face by turning around and criticizing CCW.
On the other hand, maybe he has no choice but to go along with less conscientious legislative colleagues who come in near the bottom in CCW’s assessments and are afraid of being shown up as poor performers in the eyes of voters.
We would respectfully advise those in charge of the KMT caucus that the right way of going about things would be to encourage the party’s legislators to try and get a good score in the CCW’s assessments.
Doing so would help restore the public’s faith in representative democracy. Taiwan faces a lot of thorny issues at the moment, but the long-suffering public has the impression that those in government are not competent to deal with them.
If the ruling party’s legislators fail to speak out on behalf of their constituents and instead spend their time trying to undermine people’s faith in the CCW, they will only end up being held in even greater contempt.
As to the matter of US beef, it is wrong to think that when civic groups have the courage to speak out on public issues, it means that they are taking sides with one party or another.
Let us not forget how, on Jan. 1, 1999, CCW mobilized 3,000 people to surround the Legislative Yuan in protest against the freezing of the Public Television Service’s (PTS) budget and ill-advised amendments to the Public Television Act (公共電視法).
The KMT whip at the time was Lin Yi-shih (林益世), but where is he now? The one-time rising star is embroiled in allegations of corruption and has been expelled from the party. Disputes over the PTS are still going on today.
Is it not about time for the KMT caucus to own up to its mistakes?
Ku Chung-hwa is a standing board member of Citizen Congress Watch.
Translated by Julian Clegg
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) trip to China provides a pertinent reminder of why Taiwanese protested so vociferously against attempts to force through the cross-strait service trade agreement in 2014 and why, since Ma’s presidential election win in 2012, they have not voted in another Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate. While the nation narrowly avoided tragedy — the treaty would have put Taiwan on the path toward the demobilization of its democracy, which Courtney Donovan Smith wrote about in the Taipei Times in “With the Sunflower movement Taiwan dodged a bullet” — Ma’s political swansong in China, which included fawning dithyrambs