Seemingly worried that outsiders might not know how divided its ranks really are, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) keeps putting on performances that highlight its internal contradictions.
As the party’s presidential candidate last year, Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱) — also known as the “Little Red Pepper” (小辣椒) — was defeated by the KMT’s local factions and replaced by then-KMT chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫). However, she has made a big comeback, sending the factions sprawling by getting elected as KMT chairwoman.
CALL FOR REFORM
From a positive point of view, Hung’s election shows that the KMT has become more democratic, but from a negative perspective, the KMT has gone back to its true face. For the public, that is actually a good thing, because they have had enough of being bamboozled by a KMT made up to look like something different.
Hung’s investiture ceremony was filled with calls for reform and unity, but it all seemed rather despondent and tatty. Some party members have quit. Some say there are still a lot of members who are not happy about Hung.
Five pro-localization members of the party’s Central Standing Committee were absent from its first meeting under the new party leader. Chu, the previous party chairman, made a brief appearance.
Only former KMT chairman “Grandpa” Lien Chan (連戰) stepped up to the pulpit to preach about some old themes.
Grandpa Lien cannot stop sulking about having lost two presidential elections. He still blames the March 19 shooting of then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) and vice president Annette Lu (呂秀蓮) for dousing his imperial dream in 2004.
He has not explained how his 2000 election campaign had spent NT$12 billion (US$370.3 million at current exchange rates) or how much money went up in smoke in his 2004 campaign.
Lien called on the KMT not to bow its head before unjust things, but to “say what should be said and do what should be done.”
He has got to be kidding.
How many unjust things has the KMT done in Taiwan? How much state property has it swallowed?
People are calling for transitional justice, but the KMT continues to desperately resist it. Is that what Lien calls “doing what needs to be done?”
Grandpa Lien said the KMT should take the path of ordinary people and stand alongside them. What he said sounds very “democratic,” but Hung and her clique have disparaged such ideas as being a “populist” tendency in the KMT.
Has Grandpa Lien forgotten what happened last year, when the public urged him not to go and stand like a subordinate beside Chinese President “Uncle” Xi Jinping (習近平) to review Beijing’s military parade commemorating the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II? Why did he turn a deaf ear to the public’s call on that occasion?
‘ONE CHINA’?
Just as the KMT was inaugurating its new chairwoman, an opinion poll published by the Mainland Affairs Council showed that 72.7 percent of respondents do not agree with the idea that “both sides of the Taiwan Strait belong to one China.”
However, Hung and her gang are keen on pushing the so-called “1992 consensus” and “one China, same interpretation” (一中同表), which go completely against what most people want. Her “Chinese” Nationalist Party has no intention of standing alongside ordinary people.
James Wang is a media commentator.
Translated by Julian Clegg
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