With the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) taking office on Friday next week, it is worth remembering that the party’s biggest promise to the electorate was to bring about social justice.
On Friday last week, the legislature reviewed a bill to amend the Act on the Recusal of Public Servants Due to Conflict of Interest (公職人員利益衝突迴避法), which would ban public servants from serving in key positions at non-profit organizations and set limitations on their spouses, as well as first and second-degree relatives.
The proposal, which aims to revise multiple articles in the act, has drawn criticism from several legislators for being too strict.
It has been approved by President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) administration and passed on to newly elected legislators for review.
The DPP has always said that it is the party most capable of safeguarding social justice.
However, when its own interests come under attack, the party holds back on justice.
During the early years of the Qing Dynasty, the Chinese government was the richest in the world, but government officials were still poorly paid.
At the time, anyone who wanted to serve as an official and also wanted to be rich was likely to become a corrupt official.
A typical example was Heshen (和珅), who started out as an honest officer, but turned corrupt as he gained power, eventually becoming the most notoriously corrupt official in Chinese history.
Unlike Chinese officials during the Qing Dynasty, today’s government officials are envied for their income and benefits, with those directly appointed by the president being especially well-paid.
The sizeable incomes should be enough to ease their thirst for money and help the government find talented people with integrity.
An example of such an official is Hu Shih (胡適), who often paid expenses that were hard to categorize out of his own pocket when he served as ambassador to the US. Free from greed, he never took advantage of his position and remained a poor, law-abiding official throughout his life.
Nowadays, many officials are corrupt, despite their high incomes, and if any of them has tens of billions of New Taiwan dollars in their bank account, they have acquired it through corrupt dealings, unless, of course, they have their own printing press.
The biggest problem in politics is the common expectation that official positions should lead to wealth. Even officials who are not corrupt often think they can use their privileges to become wealthy.
The most widely adopted means to do so is to join a public or private enterprise after leaving the political stage, where their political connections are useful in helping them to become rich.
The most astonishing thing about this scenario is that if these people return to politics, they are often welcomed with open arms, and praised as being selfless and for giving up high-paying jobs to be a public servant.
However, the truth is that they have a good chance of making even more money if they return to work for the government. While they are not corrupt in the traditional sense, they build their wealth just as fast as the ones who are.
It is only reasonable to ask public servants, their spouses and close relatives to give up the opportunity to become rich. If they are unwilling to do so, there is always the option of not becoming a public servant at all.
Chen Mao-hsiung is a retired National Sun Yat-sen University professor and a member of the Northern Taiwan Society.
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