Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) presidential nominee Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱) has said that her party is “not that malign,” it is simply “clumsy” and has done “good things,” although it “has not communicated them well.”
Hung’s words reveal that the KMT is once again back to playing rotten tricks: The party clearly knows it is both rotten and malign, but wants to evade the major issues and simply call itself “clumsy.”
The KMT has nothing to sell, it can only admit it is clumsy and call the opposition “malign.” The party is trying to sound a compassionate note with the electorate, but President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) has already used this trick to create the false dichotomy of a clumsy president or a “bad egg.” In reality Ma is no fool, yet he absolutely is a bad egg.
The narcissistic Ma clearly believes he is being clever by rushing through changes to the high-school curriculum guidelines before he leaves office next year. It is a return to party-state brainwashing, for the purpose of facilitating a handover to China and its supporters. The curriculum is designed to intensify the antagonism between the pan-blue and pan-green camps, to assist Beijing in its meddling in next year’s elections. This is the malign act of a malign individual.
Ma’s nefarious scheme is an illegal abuse of authority; he is determined to force it through come what may. Despite Ma’s famously thick skin, even he could not provide a logical explanation that accords with democratic principles. It shows that the KMT is both rotten and malign. Ma has taken a large step toward consigning his party to the dustbin of history.
The opposition to the guideline changes has highlighted Ma’s anti-democratic approach. The president’s fellow travelers are political hatchet men who do not care about the students and whose specialty it is to push for rapid unification. They are thick-skinned people with sharp tongues who say anything, and among them are a few people with a past in organized crime. By ignoring the suggestions of KMT Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) and Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (王金平) while embracing the opposition to democracy and public justice among a few fanatics, Ma is destroying the KMT.
Hung, the so-called “Little Red Pepper,” says that the KMT will not engage in propaganda and that it is at a disadvantage in the media, but this is in fact just an expression of the dictatorial mindset of Ma, which makes him use a group of hired guns who turn right and wrong on its head and specialize in shifting focus from important issues, making it much more difficult to cover up all of the KMT’s ugliness. Today’s media workers have all suffered through the KMT’s obscurantist educational policies, and as the shameless Ma gang is trying to forcefully take the nation back in time, the party’s position in the media will only continue to deteriorate.
Education lies at the core of social reform movements, and high-school students’ opposition to the opaque curriculum changes have made people aware of Ma’s and his gang’s treachery and abuse of power. It has also irritated and upset adults who have suffered through the KMT-directed obscurantist education. It is this public awakening that will sweep the KMT onto the dust pile of history.
James Wang is a media commentator.
Translated by Edward Jones and Perry Svensson
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