That yesterday's scuffle in the legislature came in the wake of an "anti-black gold promise" made by KMT presidential candidate Lien Chan (
More interestingly, such punch-ups have been going on for so long -- over a decade -- that people tend to overlook the fact that there has been a significant change in who is doing what and to whom.
In the past, opposition lawmakers used filibustering and sometimes violence as a tactic in their struggle for reform. A choreographed roughhouse or two served a dual purpose. First, it threatened to make the legislature unworkable, partly through stopping business in its tracks and partly by simply scaring away the geriatrics last elected in China in 1948 who, before 1992, made up the vast majority of a highly unrepresentative chamber. Second, at a time when the media was totally in the government's pocket, mayhem in the legislature was a way of getting publicity for the goals the opposition reformers were fighting for -- such as representative political institutions.
That was then. What we saw yesterday, for all its prima facie similarity, was something quite different. The brawling is now carried out by lawmakers with organized crime backgrounds as nothing more than intimidation of other elected representatives. Sometimes it has gone further. In one outrageous example a few years ago, thugs even pulled one legislator -- who had accused legislator Lo Fu-chu (
What seems remarkable to outsiders is that these thuggish lawmakers with gangster backgrounds remain in the legislature, getting elected time and time again. They are neither punished by their political parties nor effectively stopped by media criticism. That one of them has even served as the convener of the legislature's Judicial Affairs Committee is a major blow to the credibility of Taiwan law.
How did this happen? In the process of Taiwan's democratization, many people with organized crime backgrounds "bleached" themselves in elections and became politicians. According to statistics, two-thirds of gangs in Taiwan have lawmakers running on their behalf in the legislature, while one-quarter of elected public representatives have criminal records. These facts are a shame to Taiwan's democracy.
Japan and Italy also have their problems with organized crime syndicates, but the Yakuza and Mafia seldom get directly involved in politics. They can only buy off politicians through the back door. They dare not openly run in elections.
But Taiwan's mobsters can openly go into politics and apparently act with impunity. They get elected because of the deficiencies in Taiwan's voting system, and they are invulnerable because as the KMT's legislative majorities have slowly declined the ruling party needs the support of independent lawmakers -- including those with organized crime backgrounds -- to pass its legislative agenda.
As a result, the malignant tumor of "black gold" politics continues to grow.
President Lee Teng-hui (
A series of strong earthquakes in Hualien County not only caused severe damage in Taiwan, but also revealed that China’s power has permeated everywhere. A Taiwanese woman posted on the Internet that she found clips of the earthquake — which were recorded by the security camera in her home — on the Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu. It is spine-chilling that the problem might be because the security camera was manufactured in China. China has widely collected information, infringed upon public privacy and raised information security threats through various social media platforms, as well as telecommunication and security equipment. Several former TikTok employees revealed
Two sets of economic data released last week by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) have drawn mixed reactions from the public: One on the nation’s economic performance in the first quarter of the year and the other on Taiwan’s household wealth distribution in 2021. GDP growth for the first quarter was faster than expected, at 6.51 percent year-on-year, an acceleration from the previous quarter’s 4.93 percent and higher than the agency’s February estimate of 5.92 percent. It was also the highest growth since the second quarter of 2021, when the economy expanded 8.07 percent, DGBAS data showed. The growth
At the same time as more than 30 military aircraft were detected near Taiwan — one of the highest daily incursions this year — with some flying as close as 37 nautical miles (69kms) from the northern city of Keelung, China announced a limited and selected relaxation of restrictions on Taiwanese agricultural exports and tourism, upon receiving a Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) delegation led by KMT legislative caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅崑萁). This demonstrates the two-faced gimmick of China’s “united front” strategy. Despite the strongest earthquake to hit the nation in 25 years striking Hualien on April 3, which caused
In the 2022 book Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, academics Hal Brands and Michael Beckley warned, against conventional wisdom, that it was not a rising China that the US and its allies had to fear, but a declining China. This is because “peaking powers” — nations at the peak of their relative power and staring over the precipice of decline — are particularly dangerous, as they might believe they only have a narrow window of opportunity to grab what they can before decline sets in, they said. The tailwinds that propelled China’s spectacular economic rise over the past