The Taiwan Brain Trust think tank yesterday said it would keep an eye on the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) handling of the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) ill-gotten assets when the DPP administration is sworn into power in May.
“Taking care of the KMT’s ill-gotten party assets is not only an important move in realizing transitional justice, but it also clears an obstacle to Taiwan’s democratic development, for those party assets are a cancer on democracy,” said Hsu Chi-hsing (許志雄), a professor at National Chiayi University’s Graduate Institute of Public Policy, who once served as a minister without portfolio in charge of a researching the party assets issues under the former DPP administration.
He said that when former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) of the DPP was in power, people thought of handling the party assets issue as a form of political struggle, but now people have changed their ideas, as recent opinion polls showed that more than 50 percent of respondents said it should be taken care of.
Photo: Chen Chih-chu, Taipei Times
“If the new government does not pursue the issue after taking office, it is not being humble; it is being cowardly,” Hsu said.
The think tank’s founder Koo Kwang-ming (辜寬敏) and deputy executive director Lin Ting-hui (林廷輝) agreed with Hsu’s remark that the KMT’s assets have a negative impact on Taiwan’s democratic development.
“It is very shameful that a political party in a democracy would possess such a large amount of party assets and use them to buy votes during elections,” Koo said. “The government should confiscate the KMT’s assets.”
Lin compared party assets with drugs, saying that athough having party assets may make it easier for the party in elections, it has a negative impact on democracy in the end.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods