The latest drama within the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) has certain members calling for an end to infighting and saying that the party needs to heal itself after last month’s electoral defeats. They seem to be forgetting the need to reform the party to address the reasons behind the losses.
In a meeting on Feb. 5, the KMT Central Standing Committee voted to allow independent Legislator Fu Kun-chi (傅崐萁) to be reinstated as a member of the party.
On Monday, former KMT secretary-general King Pu-tsung (金溥聰), former KMT Youth League head Lin Chia-hsing (林家興) and lawyer Kuang Bo-teng (匡伯騰), among others, held a news conference expressing their reservations about the decision and saying that it would be better left until after the party elects new committee members and a new chair on March 7.
King’s intervention clearly struck a nerve with KMT Deputy Secretary-General Alex Tsai (蔡正元), who on Monday night questioned on Facebook what King had against Fu. He asked if Fu’s image was problematic and wondered how it would stack up against those of other KMT members, including former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and himself, who he claimed were both victims of charges cooked up by the Democratic Progressive Party.
The next day, Lin Hsing-er (林杏兒), head of the KMT Department of Youth Affairs, appealed for calm at another news conference, urging younger party members not to get involved in infighting.
The obvious tension between King and Tsai involves power struggles that stretch back more than a decade. When King was more active in Taiwanese politics, he was regarded as Ma’s right-hand man. Ma was instrumental in kicking Fu, who had only recently joined the KMT from the People First Party, out of the party in 2009, ostensibly for registering as an independent in the Hualien County commissioner race after the KMT declined to nominate him as its candidate.
However, behind all of this was Ma’s attempt to emasculate the KMT factions that were helping cultivate the local power bases and vested interests bolstering the image of corruption that Ma had vowed to expunge. Fu was representative of this strong local factionalism. It is not for nothing that he earned the epithet “King of Hualien.”
Lin asked what was wrong with the KMT gaining another legislative seat by bringing Fu in from the cold. Tsai had made the same point the night before and accused King of stirring up tensions within a party still licking its wounds after sound electoral defeats.
Lin was possibly being naive; Tsai was definitely being disingenuous, coldly pragmatic and strategic, but also shortsighted and unwise. He might want to draw a parallel between Fu and his narrative of a “wronged” Ma and himself fighting politically motivated prosecutions, but Fu is a convicted criminal, and Tsai knows it. Fu has been involved in several instances of insider trading dating back to before 2000, and he has served time in prison. The Hualien District Prosecutors’ Office charged him with tax evasion as recently as October 2017.
Kuang questioned why, at a time when the party is trying to persuade Taiwanese that it is serious about reform, its first move would be to reinstate some one as controversial as Fu, just because it would be advantageous to have one more legislator on its side.
The KMT did not lose the elections because it lacked unity; its divisions go way back. The reason it lost is that the electorate believed it to be out of date and out of touch. Nothing in the above would suggest it has learned its lesson.
Rather than try to regain people like Fu, it might want to lose dinosaurs such as Tsai.
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