It would be the greatest of ironies if the commissioners of Nantou and Taichung counties were responsible for Lien Chan's (
Neither has political sympathies in common with the corporatist streak of the KMT represented by Lien, which is why they make convenient scapegoats. The central government has attempted to blame both commissioners for glitches in distributing earthquake relief funds. Some KMT mayors such as Chiang Lien-fu (
Now, go back to the end of 1996 and the National Development Conference, which was called to reach a consensus between the KMT and the DPP on constitutional reform. One of the principles agreed to was that elections of township mayors should be stopped. The reason was simple. Most of what ails Taiwan's political system such as factionalism, vote buying and the influence of organized crime has its roots in the townships. It is at this level that corruption is greatest. It is at this level that cozy links thrive between the towns' political bosses who need votes and the gangsters who organize the buying of them in return for a blind eye being turned to their illegal enterprises and some nice little contracts for their legal ones. The calculation the major parties made was that to clean up Taiwan politics you must first break the hold of these local political factions on the townships, and the way to do that is to abolish the easily rigged elections for mayors and councils at this level, and have a central or county government-appointed administrator run the areas.
The most remarkable thing about this proposal was that the KMT should ever have agreed to it. The townships are overwhelmingly KMT-controlled and it is the KMT which benefits from the vote-buying that takes place at this level. At the time, senior KMT strategists had two responses to this. One was that the local factions are KMT in name only, allied to the ruling party simply because it controls the purse strings. The other was that, yes, the KMT was likely to feel pain, but it had to be endured if Taiwan's politics was ever to be cleaned up. The proposal never became reality, because National Assembly members relied too much on the local factions for their own election.
So, two years ago, KMT policy makers were prepared to admit that the township governments were, in their present form, so corrupt that they should be abolished. And now Lien Chan thinks that perhaps the massive amounts of money involved in earthquake relief should be channeled directly to these same organizations.
Could Lien have an ulterior motive? After all, this is central Taiwan we are talking about, the heartland of James Soong's (
Monday was the 37th anniversary of former president Chiang Ching-kuo’s (蔣經國) death. Chiang — a son of former president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), who had implemented party-state rule and martial law in Taiwan — has a complicated legacy. Whether one looks at his time in power in a positive or negative light depends very much on who they are, and what their relationship with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is. Although toward the end of his life Chiang Ching-kuo lifted martial law and steered Taiwan onto the path of democratization, these changes were forced upon him by internal and external pressures,
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