The Ill-gotten Party Assets Settlement Committee yesterday issued an ultimatum to the National Women’s League, saying that if talks between the committee, the league and the Ministry of the Interior fail to produce substantial results before Dec. 26, the committee would deal with the league as it does Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) affiliates.
The committee criticized the league for postponing negotiations on an administrative contract that is to be signed between the committee and the league, which would set out penal measures if the league’s chairpersons are found to have hidden assets.
The deadline for concluding negotiations was last month, but was extended by a month after league chairwoman Cecilia Koo (辜嚴倬雲) reportedly threatened to withdraw the window for negotiation, allegedly due to her reluctance to give up control of the assets personally entrusted to her by league founder Soong Mayling (宋美齡).
“Over the past few months, the committee has exercised patience and extended goodwill to settle disputes and facilitate reconciliation, but discussions over the National Women’s League must not be allowed to drag on indefinitely,” the committee said.
“If the negotiations fail to yield substantial results by Dec. 26, when a committee meeting is to be held, the committee is to make its decision according to the law,” it added.
The purpose of transitional justice is not to persecute, but to establish historical facts behind a nation’s transition from an authoritarian regime to a democracy, thereby bolstering democracy, it said.
The committee thanked the ministry — the league’s governing body — for mediating between it and the league since July.
A source close to the matter said that the main contributing factor behind the deadlock is the league’s unbridled decisionmaking process, which has caused the league’s members to repeatedly overturn agreements.
Koo is furious over the clause that aims to punish league chairpersons over asset-hiding and has requested that the clause be changed so that punishments would be assigned to the league as a whole, rather than to individual chairpersons, the source said.
In related developments, the committee yesterday said that new evidence that Broadcasting Corp of China (BCC, 中廣) is a KMT-run enterprise has come to light.
The committee released results of its ongoing investigation into BCC, which showed that Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) in a September 1960 KMT Central Committee meeting gave the company instructions to step up psychological warfare against China.
BCC officials during the meeting advised the KMT administration to renew the company’s mission, the committee said.
“Newspapers and other media cannot compare to broadcasting when it comes to fighting a psychological war. The party should review and correct its current broadcasting policy,” the committee’s investigation report showed Chiang as saying.
Chiang had also in a 1963 Central Committee meeting instructed that the KMT’s renewal of its contract with the BCC should ensure that all of the company’s expenses are covered by the government, as it “was assisting in government affairs by waging psychological warfare against China and broadcasting propaganda to the world,” the report said.
The report cited a passage from the book 60 Years of BCC, which said the company vowed to “be loyal to the party-state and to contribute to society.”
“Let us not forget that we are a party-run cultural company. We must fight for the KMT’s outstanding cause and the Three Principles of the People it practices,” it said.
In Highlights of the BCC, published in 1978, the company said it “had never forgotten that it is a model enterprise operated by the party,” the report said.
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