President Chen Shui-bian (
He said persisting with a flawed policy would do the most damage to reform efforts.
In Tainan, Chen tried to persuade farmers to abandon their protest planned for Saturday, in which organizers have claimed more than 100,000 people will march through the streets of Taipei.
"The adjustments in policies do not mean we have flinched nor that reform is being reversed. [But] when strong opposition results from the reform, the government has to show strength to examine itself, to check if the communication is sufficient and whether the supplementary measures are adequate," Chen said.
Chen's remarks came one day after former president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) lambasted the DPP's governance following the Cabinet's unexpected decision on Sunday night to suspend regulations placed on the credit units of farmers' and fishermen's associations.
Lee said during an interview with a weekly magazine that "most officials in the DPP are inexperienced, knowing only how to campaign, but nothing about how to rule the country."
The former president has been at odds with the DPP since September, when the Cabinet introduced the regulations on how to overhaul the credit departments with high levels of non-performing loans.
Lee criticized the government for declaring policies before they were thoroughly researched. As a result, the ex-president supported the government's decision to suspend the reforms.
He said the DPP had finally taken seriously his warning that it risked losing power if the people lacked trust in the government.
"[The government] is willing to change now that it realizes the severity of the situation," he said.
Chen's popularity has plunged to its lowest level since his inauguration, according to local Chinese-language newspaper reports.
The president has gone to great lengths during the past few days to limit the damage to his government by talking to the media and farmers and fishermen in the countryside.
He said at the opening ceremony of an international conference on the development of the civil-service system yesterday that leaders had to slow down at crucial moments when reform plans encounter difficulties.
The task for the government is to court maximum support from people and seek to reduce the social cost caused by reform so that goals can be achieved eventually, Chen said.
He acknowledged reform of grassroots cooperatives would be problematic and should be reviewed, because "we sometimes under-estimate the difficulties of reform, or over-simply the understanding of reform."
Chen said there is price to pay for reform and the government should accept the pain and side effects, yet "we have to review our strategy and reform measures if the side effects threaten the livelihoods of the underprivileged."
The president pledged his resolve to reform, saying the government will not cringe or shirk its responsibility in the face of longstanding corruption.
In a meeting with hundreds of representatives of farmers' and fishermen's associations in Tainan, Chen apologized for the misunderstandings caused by the reform measures and appealed to the representatives to rethink their plan to march tomorrow.
As a son of a farmer himself, the president said he had not forgotten his background, nor was he ungrateful, adding that he hoped the representatives would not give him a hard time.
Dubbing agriculture "the root of Taiwan," Chen said he knew the importance of agricultural development.
He said reform would be without value if people were under the impression that reform initiatives were introduced to wipe out the credit departments of the farmers' and fishermen's associations.
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