Political parties

When the Labor Party held a protest against the US-led strikes on Afghanistan on Oct. 20 at CKS Memorial Hall in Taipei about 20 people showed up. Some were in the crowd as part of the half dozen other groups that helped to organize the march.

For the Labor Party (勞動黨), the turn out was standard. A similarly small crowd joined the party's demonstration and flag burning in front of the American Institute in Taiwan two weeks earlier.

"People may shake their heads, but that's not going to stop us from going out onto the street to make our point," said Lin Shu-yang (林書揚), vice chairman of the staunchly unificationist and socialist Labor Party.

Getting the message out and doing so as loudly as possible, and ideally getting on TV in the process, is the primary objective for most of Taiwan's small fringe parties, which face a quixotic battle for exposure. Few people are aware that, along with the DPP, KMT, PFP, New Party and the Taiwan Solidarity Union, there are 92 other official political parties and groups which nominate candidates in national and local elections in Taiwan. Dozens will be taking part in the elections on Dec. 1.

Some have names that seem hopelessly confining, such as the China Old Veterans Unification Party (中國老兵統一黨) or the Chinese Minorities Justice Party (中國少數民族正義黨), and many are single-person operations, like the China Women's Party (中國婦女黨) headed by Wu Hsin-ren (吳心人). Other parties are suspected of serving merely as fronts for tax evasion, because parties, as organizations that exist ostensibly to serve the public interest, are not taxed.

On the margins

Though the number of parties is high, the figure is deceptive, according to Chuang Kuo-hsiung (莊國雄), section chief of the Department of Civil Affairs at the Ministry of the Interior (MOI), the office which oversees the registration of political parties.

Chuang suspects that a large number of the parties no longer exist and simply have not gone through the process of official de-registration. To do so requires an observer from the MOI as a witness to attend an official party conference to announce the dissolution of a party, and in many cases, Chuang said, there are no people left in the party to hold a conference. Parties are automatically de-listed, however, when they do not propose candidates in two successive rounds of elections, a period which can last up to eight years.

There are currently scores of active parties with platforms that cover the spectrum of social, political and economic ideologies from the Natural Law Party (自然法黨), the Farmers' Party (農民黨), the Taiwan Independence Party (建國黨, TIP), to the Chinese Taiwan Aboriginal Democratic Party (中國台灣原住民民主黨).

The majority of parties registered with the MOI in 1989 immediately following the lifting of martial law, which had forbidden the founding of all rival political entities to the KMT.

When the Political Organization Law was amended, the only regulations limiting the registration of political parties were two articles that prohibited the founding of parties of which the express purpose of the organization is formal independence for Taiwan or the establishment of communism in Taiwan. But even these two articles are ignored 11 years after their implementation. "Basically, anything goes," Chuang said.

Pointing to the flurry of political activism in the late 1980s, MOI records show that 52 political parties were founded in 1989 and 1990 alone. Other events, such as the run-up to the 1996 elections, saw a spike in the founding of parties as well, including the Natural Law Party, the Green Party (綠黨) and the TIP.