Print

Mail

wiki links

Hsieh pans Chen over party chairmanship

Somebody just feels uncomfortable when he does not have power in his hands. ” — Frank Hsieh, Democratic Progressive Party chairman

Rife speculation that President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Chairman Frank Hsieh (謝長廷) are at odds within the DPP has been confirmed in the wake of the party’s election defeat as the rift between the two has entered the public arena.

Hsieh, who had dinner with reporters from four Chinese-language newspapers on Tuesday night, was quoted as saying that Chen was worried that if Hsieh stayed on as party chairman, he would use the position to criticize the president.

Hsieh said that it was unfair for the Presidential Office to lead the public to believe that he and Chen had agreed to let Premier Chang Chun-hsiung (張俊雄) take over as acting party chairman after the party lost the election on March 22.

If Chen wanted Chang to take over, Hsieh said the president should have asked Chang to attend the party’s Central Executive Committee meeting and request that Minister Without Portfolio Liu Shih-fang (劉世芳) file a motion proposing that Chang become acting chairman.

“Somebody just feels uncomfortable when he does not have power in his hands,” Hsieh was quoted as saying. “Chen Shui-bian was worried that I would criticize him.”

Hsieh also accused Chen of applying double standards concerning corruption charges.

Hsieh was quoted as saying that the president had asked the party to strip Hsieh’s former staffers from his Kaohsiung mayorship of party membership after they were indicted for graft, but later the DPP was left in an awkward position when Chen and his family became embroiled in corruption charges.

When asked for comment yesterday morning, Hsieh criticized the media for distributing “second-hand information from a private conversation.”

He later said that the DPP should have investigated the corruption allegations before rushing to mete out punishment.

“What I tried to say was that the party should have established procedural justice and the value of being honest and free from corruption,” he said.

An official at the Presidential Office yesterday said that the president’s state of mind could best be described by a work of calligraphy hanging in the Presidential Office.

The calligraphy reads: “You don’t have any enemies if you are kind; you don’t have any worries if you are wise.”

Meanwhile, Hsieh and his running mate Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌), who attended a party forum yesterday morning, defended the former’s proposal to allow young members who have held party membership for less than one year to vote in next month’s party leadership election.

But Su said that letting new, young members vote for chairman was not a sufficient incentive to attract new blood and that the DPP must offer a clear vision and sense of hope.

At the forum, held to mark the 10th anniversary of the death of former DPP legislator Lu Hsiu-yi (盧修一), Su said that supporters would not necessarily be won over by the party’s current introspection efforts, nor would it help for party members to pass the buck and deny their own mistakes.

While Su declined to field questions after his speech, Hsieh later told reporters that Su was not against the new measure and asked the media to refrain from “sticking in a pin whenever there is room” because it was unfair to Su.

“Don’t stab him in the back because he is not here,” Hsieh told reporters after Su had departed from the forum.

In related news, an academic said at the forum that Hsieh should have followed in the footsteps of his predecessors and resigned as party chairman to shoulder responsibility for losing the presidential election.

“I have never seen a DPP chairman refuse to step down after an election defeat,” Soochow University political science professor Hsu Yung-ming (徐永明) said.

“I wonder whether Hsieh’s decision was aimed at preventing Chen from returning to the party helm,” Hsu said.

Hsu said all the members of the Hsieh camp should have bowed out of politics after the defeat, but instead they were leading the DPP’s reform efforts.

Hsu said the DPP should see the election loss as an opportunity for serious introspection and reform, adding that the party would only suffer if a new leader did not emerge soon.

Wu Nai-teh (吳乃德), a sociology research fellow at Academia Sinica, said that the DPP’s biggest problems during its eight years of administration was “power confusion” and the lack of “moral center” and vision to guide the party’s policies.
This story has been viewed 1218 times.