Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) really has a lot of fans. The weekend of March 16-17, he went to the Taipei Expo Park to promote Lalashan (拉拉山) peaches. When he arrived people crowded around him, wanting to shake his hand. A couple of fans took the opportunity to pucker up and give him a kiss, while others were shouting they love him. One woman was over the moon because she kissed his hand. This is the kind of thing you only expect to happen to the most popular entertainers.
However popular politicians may be, they cannot enjoy the adulation that singers and actors do, but Ko is an exception. He is a political novice, but his popularity has reached a level that other politicians can never expect to achieve.
Ko is not particularly handsome, but public opinion is that he is super-attractive. The reason for this is the current climate suits him very well, and he has been very fortunate. As soon as he took office, he put five major cases of government malpractice under his surgeon’s knife.
Although no judicial procedures have been initiated so far, people are convinced that Ko is tackling some very big cases and they are applauding his efforts with enthusiasm. People’s lives are tough these days, and they are particularly sensitive about collusion between bureaucrats and business.
This prevailing mood makes Ko a gallant knight in the eyes of the public.
If truth be told, the general public do not know the details of these five malpractice cases, but are nonetheless convinced that Ko has uncovered some major cases of graft.
These cases are connected with President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), who was Taipei mayor from 1998 to 2006. Ma’s public support rating has remained below 10 percent in a long series of opinion polls, and no matter how hard he tries to explain and argue his way out, people will still not believe him.
Taichung Mayor Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) is also playing the role of graft-buster, and the public are no clearer about malpractice cases in Taichung than those in Taipei. The difference is that Taichung’s graft cases have nothing to do with Ma, so they have not attracted the same public interest. Only in Taipei has the mayor been elevated to the status of a hero.
However, too much applause can easily go to one’s head, and it may encourage Ko to see all municipal policy from a graft-busting point of view and use these methods to govern the city.
For example, recently he proposed using security cameras to spot illegally parked vehicles and impose fines on their owners. This would be in order to reduce costs, rather than paying a police officer to patrol an area where there is a lot of illegal parking.
He would prefer to use graft-busting methods to stop illegal parking, so he came up with this spy-and-fine plan. However it was an unpopular idea that was not supported by councilors.
The place where Ko has really gone astray is using graft-busting methods to handle city governance, putting the emphasis on punishment, whereas an administrative leader’s emphasis should really be on prevention. From a preventive point of view, it is well worth paying a police officer to patrol an area and prevent illegal parking. So why does Ko focus on punishment and forget about prevention?
Taipei’s latest innovation is to slap parking tickets on vehicles that are found parked on red lines late at night. Of course most people are against this policy, but Ko insists on enforcing it. His rationale is that illegal parking is just as illegal at night as it is during the day.
Ko’s graft-busting mind-set is getting out of hand. He is forgetting that government regulations were mostly put in place to serve the public, not to restrict them. The point of painting red lines on major roads is to serve the public by clearing obstructions so that traffic can flow freely.
It seems Ko has not considered whether there is a traffic jam problem late at night. As chief of an administration, he should take a more human view of things.
Every department takes measures to prevent malpractice and the more it invests in prevention, the less likely malpractice is to occur.
However, the point is that an executive chief is in a different position from that of judicial departments. No executive chief is going to spend tens of thousands of dollars to prevent only a thousand dollars’ worth of corruption, but for judicial departments money is no object when it comes to fighting graft.
Judicial departments handle things in a mechanical fashion. When they deal with judicial cases, they must follow the letter of the law, and they cannot change the law based on personal likes and dislikes.
Executive departments, on the other hand, have to consider human nature. They should think about how to serve the public and, without breaking the law, strive to make people’s lives as convenient as possible.
Chen Mao-hsiung is an adjunct professor at National Sun Yat-sen University and chairman of the Society for the Promotion of Taiwanese Security.
Translated by Julian Clegg
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