Taiwan is at risk of sinking beneath the waves — of hypocrisy. The tainted oil scandal, coming on the heels of the gas pipeline explosions in Greater Kaohsiung — and just over a year after a string of similar food scandals — has left both the government and the public reeling, as consumers across the nation and abroad question which food and beverage products they can trust.
Taiwanese worked hard for many years to make the “Made in Taiwan” label one that merited respect, not derision, one that represented quality goods, not shoddy merchandise.
Now it appears that Taiwanese goods, especially foodstuffs, risk being lumped in with the “Made in China” junk label, though, thankfully, they are still less toxic.
Even as government officials and consumers struggle to determine the extent of the tainted oil web of manufacturers, importers and exporters, the drumbeat for accountability has begun. Minister of Health and Welfare Chiu Wen-ta (邱文達) on Thursday said that he is too busy trying to resolve the tainted lard scandal and assuage public fear to think of resigning. He has come under pressure to step down, just as former minister of economic affairs Chang Chia-juch (張家祝) did after the pipeline blasts.
However, it is the height of hypocrisy to pretend that the resignation of one minister or bureaucrat is enough to atone for any scandal or disaster. One person did not create these problems and one person cannot resolve them.
The tainted oil scandal and the Kaohsiung disaster are the result of decades of complacency and putting business ahead of public welfare. Decades of cozy government and corporate collusion, decades of acting as if a facade of tough-sounding laws and regulations would be enough when enforcement was known to be lax and the punishments meted out to violators amounted to no more than a slap on the wrist, decades of allowing producers and businesses to set up quality control associations and other self-regulating mechanisms.
These were also the decades of the development of a bureaucratic culture that penalizes those who ask questions, that cultivates a fear of decisive action: Accountability is something to be passed on, not accepted and certainly not sought.
Hypocrisy has become so commonplace, so widely accepted, from the top down, that it barely rates a mention, as evidenced by other events this week.
President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) on Wednesday announced 11 nominees for Control Yuan membership, in place of earlier nominations that failed to win the Legislative Yuan’s approval in July. Calling for the legislature to quickly approve the nominees, Ma said the posts must be filled or else the Control Yuan would not be able to function normally.
The nation survived without a functioning Control Yuan for four years because Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers refused to accept then-president Chen Shui-bian’s (陳水扁) nominees. Only after Ma took office were KMT lawmakers suddenly able to see the need for the fifth branch of government.
Also on Wednesday, Taiwanese and Chinese negotiators began a ninth round of talks on a goods trade pact. However, the talks were cloaked in such secrecy that the location was not announced, a move that even Beijing has not tried with the negotiations. The cloak-and-dagger approach took the government’s usual opaque handling of cross-strait matters to a whole new level — or depth — even though Ma and Cabinet officials have been promising for more than a year, in response to public outrage over the cross-strait service trade pact, to handle cross-strait talks more transparently.
Hypocrisy has become the norm in Taiwan. It has been rewarded in the ballot box and in corporate accounting. Until the public is willing to make it clear that hypocrisy is no longer tolerable, it must accept the blame it is so eager to apportion to others.
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