On Wednesday evening at National Chengchi University (NCCU), which was founded by former president Chiang Kai-Shek (蔣介石), the unexpected attendance of a high-level Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) official turned an uneventful forum on the issue of ill-gotten party assets into a heated debate.
The forum was organized by the pro-independence student organization NCCU Wildfire Front, which has made a name for itself with repeated calls to remove a statue of Chiang from campus grounds.
The highlight of the forum was to be a 90-minute speech by former KMT spokesman Yang Wei-chung (楊偉中), who was appointed to serve on the Executive Yuan’s Ill-gotten Party Assets Settlement Committee after his criticism of the KMT got him expelled from the party in June.
However, only a few minutes into Yang’s speech, KMT Administration and Management Committee deputy director Lee Fu-chuan (李福軒), who is in charge of the party’s finances, showed up uninvited at the classroom where the forum was being held.
Setting aside Lee’s apparent lack of manners as demonstrated by his repeated interruption of Yang’s speech whenever he saw the need to refute his comments, the KMT official’s rhetoric underscored the party’s continued reluctance to rid itself of illicit party assets — something it should have done a long time ago — and its attempts to shift public attention from the issue.
Lee clung to the KMT leadership’s usual stance on the committee’s efforts to recover assets acquired by the party through illegitimate means after it retreated to Taiwan: that it was carrying out a political purge against the KMT at the expense of the livelihood and welfare of the party’s personnel.
Lee said that the KMT sought to downsize the party to trim its exorbitant personnel costs, which, according to a document provided by KMT Central Policy Committee director Alex Tsai (蔡正元), set the party back about NT$787 million (US$24.9 million) between January and last month alone.
The KMT’s personnel costs seem even more preposterous when it is considered that its legal sources of income — membership fees and government grants — totaled about NT$567 million in the same period.
“Laying off employees requires money. How could we possibly do that after our bank account was frozen by the committee?” Lee said at the forum, countering Yang’s argument that it is the KMT’s responsibility as an employer, rather than that of the committee, to make structural changes to prevent the party from incurring losses.
The KMT sought to use the paycheck conundrum, which stems from its refusal to adopt changes, and outdated political rhetoric — such as “political purge,” “abuse of power” and “green terror” — to blur the focus of the party assets issue.
The committee’s main task is to return ill-gotten assets obtained by the KMT during its authoritarian rule to their rightful owners and create a relatively level playing field for all political parties in Taiwan, which is vital to deepening democracy in the nation.
Even the KMT workers’ union issued a statement earlier this month urging the party to refrain from making its employees’ salary and pension problems the focal point of the party assets issue.
As Yang told the forum, the KMT has missed far too many opportunities to get rid of its ill-gotten assets.
However, it is not too late for the KMT.
If the party comes to its senses and cooperates with the committee, it would win applause from its disappointed supporters and perhaps even from young voters who deem the KMT’s demise as the only way to bring Taiwan closer to a progressive democracy.
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