Those who thought the intra-party squabbles that overshadowed the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) chairperson election would die down after former vice president Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) won the race by a landslide on May 20 should think again. Yet another power struggle is in full play within the party.
At about 7pm on Tuesday, just one day before the KMT was scheduled to hold the weekly meeting of its Central Standing Committee, the party’s headquarters decided to call the session off after rumors emerged that several pro-Wu committee members were plotting to put forward proposals to diminish the power and influence of outgoing KMT Chairwoman Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱).
At the center of the latest episode of KMT power games are the party’s upcoming elections of Central Committee and Central Standing Committee members on July 8 and July 29 respectively.
According to the KMT’s electoral regulations, members of the party’s 210-person Central Committee are elected by representatives from a pool of no more than 420 candidates, half of whom should be nominated by the chair and the rest by the party’s nearly 1,600 representatives.
Only Central Committee members are eligible to vie for the 32 openings in the Central Standing Committee, the party’s highest decisionmaking body. These members are also to be elected by party representatives.
Given that Wu is not scheduled to take over the KMT leadership until Aug. 20, based on the election schedule, he would not be able to nominate candidates for the Central Committee race and would therefore be unable to fill the Central Standing Committee with his own people.
For Wu, having a Central Standing Committee dominated by members siding with the leaders of other party factions is like a president leading a minority government. His policies would be blocked and authority undermined.
That is arguably the reason Wu’s camp has been pushing for Hung to transfer power earlier than scheduled, while calling foul play on the election schedule and blasting it as violating the party’s charter.
They claimed that as the new representatives are to also be inaugurated on Aug. 20, after the two elections, allowing the incumbent representatives to elect the Central Committee members “when a new mandate has been formed” is problematic.
However, the real problem is that no one seemed to have an issue with the election dates when they were announced by the KMT headquarters in December last year. Why the sudden fuss? The party representatives’ election being held on May 20 — the same day as the chairperson race — could provide an answer.
On May 20, 1,535 party representatives were elected. The Chinese-language Liberty Times (sister newspaper of the Taipei Times) quoted a member of Wu’s camp as saying anonymously on election day that because the majority of pro-Wu incumbent party representatives, amounting to about 800, were re-elected, the new KMT leader is expected to enjoy majority control in the Central Standing Committee.
Perhaps due to stupidity or naivete, Wu’s camp failed to factor in the potential effects of Hung nominating half of the Central Committee member candidates.
Regardless of the reason Wu’s camp came to realize the problem so late, as the KMT’s next chairman who has vowed to help the party regain power in 2020, the correct first step would be to refrain from bending the rules to his advantage and respect the system as it is.
Wu’s failure to do so would just go to show that the rule of law remains a foreign concept to the KMT and that it is unfit to govern a democratic nation.
Two sets of economic data released last week by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) have drawn mixed reactions from the public: One on the nation’s economic performance in the first quarter of the year and the other on Taiwan’s household wealth distribution in 2021. GDP growth for the first quarter was faster than expected, at 6.51 percent year-on-year, an acceleration from the previous quarter’s 4.93 percent and higher than the agency’s February estimate of 5.92 percent. It was also the highest growth since the second quarter of 2021, when the economy expanded 8.07 percent, DGBAS data showed. The growth
In the intricate ballet of geopolitics, names signify more than mere identification: They embody history, culture and sovereignty. The recent decision by China to refer to Arunachal Pradesh as “Tsang Nan” or South Tibet, and to rename Tibet as “Xizang,” is a strategic move that extends beyond cartography into the realm of diplomatic signaling. This op-ed explores the implications of these actions and India’s potential response. Names are potent symbols in international relations, encapsulating the essence of a nation’s stance on territorial disputes. China’s choice to rename regions within Indian territory is not merely a linguistic exercise, but a symbolic assertion
More than seven months into the armed conflict in Gaza, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to take “immediate and effective measures” to protect Palestinians in Gaza from the risk of genocide following a case brought by South Africa regarding Israel’s breaches of the 1948 Genocide Convention. The international community, including Amnesty International, called for an immediate ceasefire by all parties to prevent further loss of civilian lives and to ensure access to life-saving aid. Several protests have been organized around the world, including at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and many other universities in the US.
Every day since Oct. 7 last year, the world has watched an unprecedented wave of violence rain down on Israel and the occupied Palestinian Territories — more than 200 days of constant suffering and death in Gaza with just a seven-day pause. Many of us in the American expatriate community in Taiwan have been watching this tragedy unfold in horror. We know we are implicated with every US-made “dumb” bomb dropped on a civilian target and by the diplomatic cover our government gives to the Israeli government, which has only gotten more extreme with such impunity. Meantime, multicultural coalitions of US