President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) groundbreaking 10-minute telephone call to US president-elect Donald Trump might not have been an official exchange, but it was still the highest-level communication between Taiwan and the US since the US broke off diplomatic relations with Taiwan in 1979. While it does not signify a change in US-China relations, it was nevertheless a landmark event, and it allowed the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) to score a point as the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) flounders in internal confusion and chaos.
KMT Vice Chairman Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) and former minister of health Yaung Chih-liang (楊志良) recently joined non-governmental organizations in organizing a national campaign opposing the import of food products from five prefectures close to the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster and promoting a referendum on the issue, but KMT Central Policy Committee director Alex Tsai (蔡正元) publicly opposed Hau by informing all party organizations that the party has not initiated a call for such a referendum.
Although Alex Tsai later said that he would be happy to see a referendum on the issue, he added that the party does not have the resources to promote it and it does not intend to ask each KMT legislator to collect a certain number of signatures to support it. He also said the party would welcome any support from individual legislators for a referendum, and denied that he was opposing Hau. Still, Hau is a vice chairman of the party and his actions should be representative of the party’s stance. If that is no longer true, the KMT is clearly facing an internal communication problem, and it might even be at risk of splintering. With the exception of KMT Chairwoman Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱), it seems other top leaders are no longer representative of the party’s stance.
There are also signs that since the KMT was returned to opposition, the party’s top leaders and its legislative caucus have been working at cross purposes, and so the party has not been able to concentrate its firepower. Even the party’s think tank, the National Policy Foundation, wants to separate itself from the legislative caucus, and sources within the party say the think tank is being blocked by the caucus and that the two are now essentially strangers to each other. The think tank used to participate in caucus meetings, but it no longer does.
As Alex Tsai is no longer a legislator, the party leadership and its legislative caucus have been bickering over who should be the “top party whip,” and after Hung met with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), Alex Tsai was asked to leave the caucus meeting halfway through the proceedings. Alex Tsai therefore no longer attends the caucus meetings, which are instead attended by KMT Culture and Communications Committee director Chow Chi-wai (周志偉), and sometimes by just a Central Policy Committee member. The think tank has also incurred the caucus’ wrath by sending its vice director to attend caucus meetings, which the caucus said was “disrespectful.”
At a caucus meeting one month ago, KMT Legislator Huang Chao-shun (黃昭順), displeased that the think tank representative was not of sufficient stature and that the think tank did not provide sufficient “firepower,” said that in the future, she had better take things into her own hands, and since then, the think tank has not sent any representatives to caucus meetings. In practice, the think tank has been seen mainly as a haven for retired politicians and its reports are rarely used by the legislative caucus.
Ever since Hung took over as party chair, internecine conflict has been a constant problem, and after the party amended its “peace platform,” party bigwigs, including former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), have come forward to express dissenting opinions. It is becoming increasingly clear that the party is falling apart.
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