The president's son-in-law is detained on suspicion of insider trading. His wife is accused of receiving free vouchers from an upscale department store. A senior official is investigated for taking kickbacks on a lucrative construction project.
It's been a bad couple of months for President Chen Shui-bian (
Chen is mainly known abroad for his efforts to push the envelope on Taiwanese independence, and distance the nation politically and culturally from China.
But at home, Chen is increasingly viewed as a throwback to the worst of the Nationalists, a self-interested politician bent on improving his lot -- and that of his family -- at public expense.
He now registers approval ratings in the 20 percent range -- the lowest in his six years in office -- and when the next presidential elections are held in 2008, his Democratic Progressive Party is widely expected to be defeated.
Its replacement would be none other than the same nationalists who in a half century of uninterrupted rule earned a well deserved reputation for greasy palms and overflowing bank accounts.
But KMT Chairman and prospective presidential candidate Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) insists those days are gone, promising a new era of cleanliness and probity in public life.
Skeptics wonder if Ma can follow through on his promise. They ask if the same Chinese political culture the KMT brought to the overwhelmingly ethnic Chinese population of Taiwan in 1949 isn't itself prone to graft.
After all, they say, in China corruption is a way of life, an inescapable part of relations between the people and their rulers.
Political scientist Emile Sheng (盛治仁) of Soochow University rejects this point of view. He says the case of Singapore -- the Southeast Asian city state with a majority Chinese population and an enviable reputation for clean government -- proves that Chinese societies and political integrity can easily coexist.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
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POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the