The Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office on Wednesday announced that it had established a task force to investigate the Chinese Unity Promotion Party’s (CUPP) activities and finances.
What took them so long?
The impetus for the move was clearly the furor over an assault on Sunday last week of three National Taiwan University students, allegedly by CUPP members, after a cross-strait music festival at the school was suspended because of protests.
The prosecutors’ office said it plans to file attempted murder charges against two CUPP members over the assault, including Chang Wei (張瑋), the son of party founder and chairman Chang An-le (張安樂).
Chang An-le, better known by his Bamboo Union gang nickname “White Wolf,” is a convicted gangster who spent 17 years on the most-wanted list, “hiding” in plain sight in China, before staging a high-profile return to Taiwan in 2013 to continue what he called his “political charity work” with the pro-unification party he founded in about 2005.
“We are resolute in upholding the law and will prosecute all illegal activities,” the prosecutors’ office said in its statement announcing the investigation.
However, the office — like many of its counterparts — has been strangely lackadaisical, if not inert, in its response to CUPP activities since Chang An-le’s return four years ago.
That disquieting attitude has been apparent from the moment he stepped off an airplane at Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport — where 600 police officers and hundreds of Bamboo Union and CUPP members were awaiting his arrival — and was put into handcuffs, yet still managed to prominently hold up a leaflet promoting unification under “one country, two systems.”
Chang is suspected of inciting violence — and party members of actual acts of violence — at the 2014 Sunflower student movement protests at the Legislative Yuan; at protests by high-school students against the Ministry of Education in 2015; at protests against China’s Taiwan Affairs Office Minister Zhang Zhijun (張志軍) during his visit to Taiwan in May 2015; and intimidation of and attacks on Hong Kong democracy activists and their hosts during a visit to Taipei in January, to name only a few incidents.
Questions have long been raised about the CUPP’s finances, since it allegedly receives no membership fee income, yet has enough money to pay people to take part in its rallies and protests.
Then there are Chang’s “men in black” who turn up in large numbers to protect pro-unificationists and harass pro-democracy and pro-Taiwan supporters.
They, like Chang himself, appear less interested in the normal activities of a political party than they do in creating mayhem and encouraging unrest.
Premier William Lai (賴清德), who said on Wednesday that the CUPP would be investigated to determine if it is an organized criminal gang, said he would ask the ministries of the interior and of justice “to handle this case in earnest.”
He should not have to make such a request; it should be a given. However, it would be natural, given the nation’s political history, to suspect that after an initial hue-and-cry and headline-seeking news conferences, not much will actually happen.
After all, despite all the “anti-gang” and “anti-hooligan” crackdowns launched by successive Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) administrations over the decades, groups such as the Bamboo Union, the Four Seas Gang and others have continued to thrive through drug trafficking, extortion, prostitution and a myriad of other illegal activities.
Hopefully, the ministries and prosecutors do a more thorough investigation of the CUPP than their predecessors did with Chang An-le’s previous endeavors.
There is nothing charitable about his political activities.
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