Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) is clearly a closet communist. Critics have said he should move to Beijing, but last week Ko hit back and said that in 30 years, Taiwan’s president will not hail from a poor family background. His remarks were discriminatory toward the poor, inconsistent with Taiwanese values, illogical and inconsistent with Taiwan’s democratic experience.
The Taiwanese electorate has directly elected four presidents. Former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) was a child from a poor family background, rising to affluence after graduating from university and becoming a lawyer. After taking office, Chen took pride in the tale of his rags-to-riches ascent to the nation’s highest office, and tried to encourage children from poor families to aim high. A far cry from the haughty Ko, who seemingly wishes to deny poor children the opportunity to turn their lives around.
Ko has not just displayed a degree of arrogance, he is wrong, too. Given Taiwan’s democratic experience, one can confidently predict that in the future it will be difficult for the son or daughter of a wealthy family to become president. After all, how many Taiwanese are wealthier than former vice president Lien Chan (連戰), who ran for president twice and lost both times to Chen? Lien subsequently threw money at his son Sean Lien’s (連勝文) bid for the Taipei mayoralty in 2014, but Sean lost to Ko. Some things cannot be bought.
It is difficult to understand why Ko sees attaining the presidency as the key criterion to demonstrate that a poor person has made a success of themselves. Perhaps he feels that becoming president is the ultimate mark of success in life.
However, as a new president can only be selected every four years, if every holder of the office only served the minimum four-year term, within a 30-year period, only eight people would have the chance of becoming president.
Through his remark, Ko was probably not seeking to deny his own background, as his parents were hardly poor and he does not lack for money. He was also not arguing that the cost of running in an election is prohibitively high for candidates from poorer backgrounds or that barriers exist that hinder poor Taiwanese from moving up the socioeconomic ladder. It has — and always will be — difficult for the poor to get ahead in life.
Instead, Ko’s argument was that impoverished families cannot afford a computer or a mobile phone and this makes it all but impossible for their children to free themselves from poverty.
However, at the same time Ko brags of the “digitalization” of elementary and high-school education and has said that he hopes each student will own an iPad — and if their parents cannot afford to buy one, the government will provide one for free, in addition to providing free Internet and online video teaching materials.
Computers and mobile phones are fiendishly complex tools, but the problem with Ko’s vision is simple: He wants to establish the Internet as a human right and ensure that this indispensable tool is available to all. However, if the Internet and iPads are provided to all, why does Ko believe it will be difficult for children from poor backgrounds to climb the ladder and become doctors, entrepreneurs, lawyers or accountants? Why can they not become president?
The most valuable aspect of democracy is fair competition. The disadvantaged are cared for and they are given the opportunity to rise up out of poverty.
However, in using the presidency as the sole yardstick with which to measure social mobility in a democracy, Ko is being overly dogmatic, assuming that poor children do not have any chances in life, and revealing his arrogant and confused mind.
James Wang is a media commentator.
Translated by Edward Jones
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