The China Youth Corps maintains close links to the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) in its operations and personnel management, Ill-gotten Party Assets Settlement Committee sources said yesterday.
The committee is to hold a second round of hearings on Tuesday next week to determine whether the China Youth Corps is an affiliate organization of the KMT.
When asked to comment, Committee Chairman Lin Feng-jeng (林?正) said the corps has been beholden to the KMT in personnel appointments and operations since its founding by the KMT reform committee.
“Though the corps later registered itself as a civic group, the pattern of its financial and purpose-related operations were essentially unchanged,” he said.
“The corps did not sever its relationship with the KMT. This is made quite clear by fact that former corps president Jeanne Li (李鍾桂) reported to the KMT Central Standing Committee,” Lin said.
The KMT established the corps in 1952 as an instrument to indoctrinate the youth and the corps remained under the Ministry of National Defense’s control until 1969, said another committee member, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
“The reality is that the China Youth Corps has been an organization directly controlled by the KMT, in spite of being a public organization in name,” the committee member said.
“Although the corps changed its status to a civic group in 1989, it is strange that the KMT did not transfer its control over the corps to other parties. The corps did not adopt a private enterprise’s organization and its assets were not sold in any significant way,” the committee member added.
If the committee finds the corps to be a KMT affiliate, its holdings will be investigated to see which assets were obtained improperly during the KMT’s single-party rule, Lin said.
The hearing is expected to produce a record of the corps’ real-estate holdings and a history of use and changes of ownership, Lin said.
The corps owns more than 30,000m2 of land in 53 plots with a total value of NT$697 million (US$23.11 million at the current exchange rate), according to a 2007 report by the Executive Yuan’s task force on party assets.
The corps also owns 98 buildings with a combined floor space of 100,000m2 nationwide, including at scenic areas and in high-end urban districts, the report said.
More than half of the buildings are on public land, it said.
During its initial years, the corps usually built structures on public land. After the 1990s, it usually rented public lands and has returned some of the plots to the government over the past decade, Lin said.
While Central Motion Picture Corp (中影) and Broadcasting Corp of China (中廣) have benefited from selling the properties they obtained from the public to private parties, this does not seem to be the case with the China Youth Corps, Lin said.
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