For a president who has to attend to a myriad of state affairs every day, playing mahjong or getting wasted all day long is absolutely unacceptable. According to media reports, Kaohsiung Mayor Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜), who has thrown his hat into the ring for the presidential election next year, appears to have a formidable record of clacking mahjong tiles and getting drunk during the years when he served as a legislator and subsequently as the head of Taipei Agricultural Products Marketing Corp.
To show that he has turned over a new leaf after becoming mayor, in a Facebook post, Han said that since taking office late last year, he has not played mahjong or gotten drunk again, as if he was following the advice of the classic Chinese proverb: “Live as though everything of the past dissolved yesterday, and all of the future begins today.”
A man’s son may hide, but in the end the truth will come out. After a photograph surfaced showing the two families of Han and his mayoral campaign spokeswoman, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Hsu Shu-hua (許淑華), allegedly playing mahjong together during the Lunar New Year Holiday at the Club Med Bali resort in Indonesia, Han’s claim of not having played the game after becoming mayor was refuted straightaway.
The photograph effectively disproves one of Han’s claims, but to prove whether Han has gotten drunk since taking office is another matter, and much more difficult to establish.
One photograph alone is enough to make people haggle ceaselessly over the clear liquid that Han was drinking: Was it sorghum liquor — also known as kaoliang — a sports drink, or just water? The photograph does not prove that Han was drinking alcohol.
How about a video recording of Han wagging his head? Aren’t there many drunkards who get so paralytic that they can barely stand up, but nonetheless still mumble that they are not drunk at all?
Even if a video clip recorded with a smartphone were to come to light that showed Han drinking a mysterious liquid, it would hardly prove Han was drunk — unless he actually said these words out loud: “I am drunk.”
How about settling the issue by using the accusations made by former Kaohsiung County commissioner Yang Chiu-hsing (楊秋興), who has been given the cold shoulder since Han won the mayoral election? Yang said that Han had to be carried back home every time after his each of his five or six visits to Liouguei District.
When Yang was of no further use for Han, the former drifted farther away from the center of power after the election. Even with Yang’s description of his inebriation, Han can still get away with it easily by dismissing the accusations as something that happened in the past before he took office, rather than an ongoing phenomenon.
However, there is no smoke without fire; people who pass by will leave their footprints behind, and what they have said always gets recorded.
At an event protesting the government’s pension reforms two years ago, Han publicly said that civil servants would “goof around as much as possible and milk [their] jobs for all they are worth” after the bill was forced through the legislature.
Han’s “colorful” private life, with his insatiable desires for liquids, has been also been exposed by his fellow legislative companion Chen Hung-chang (陳宏昌). Woe to the KMT, which has become so degraded that they have nominated such a figure to run for the presidency.
Chang Kuo-tsai is a retired associate professor at National Hsinchu University of Education and a former deputy secretary-general of the Taiwan Association of University Professors.
Translated by Chang Ho-Ming
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