According to Lee Shen-yi (李伸一), convener of the Control Yuan task force investigating the James Soong (宋楚瑜) affair, the embezzlement, tax evasion and forgery allegations that have been levelled at the independent presidential candidate are up to the Ministry of Justice to look into; it is not the Control Yuan's place to decide whether Soong has actually broken the law. Yet surely these allegations are the root of the matter; the electorate wants to know as soon as possible if James Soong is a crook. Whether he has complied with existing regulations in filing election expense claims or failed to declare elections funds as personal assets is largely a peripheral matter, as the Control Yuan team itself has intimated.
The task force's report was, in fact, an interesting indictment not of Soong but of Taiwan's electoral practices. No candidates count campaign donations as personal wealth and almost all of them outspend their legal limits and then file expenditure reports based on highly creative accounting which are, in any case, never audited by the Central Election Commission. "Soong lied but then so does everyone else," would paraphrase the Control Yuan's findings. It is no criticism of the task force to say that this was less than we had hoped to find out at this stage but, as the task force pointed out, the Control Yuan was never the institution to investigate possible criminal activity in the first place.
What we have seen is a month's delay in pursuing the Soong case and a shifting of focus from possible criminal charges to what in the public eye are seen as far less significant matters. Since Soong still leads in the publicly released opinion polls, then the KMT government's lack of zeal in pursuing their potential nemesis would seem to be self-destructive.
Things are not, however, what they appear. This newspaper has commented before on the worthless value of most polls in Taiwan; how they are compiled by politically motivated groups to show some trend or another they consider desirable and released to influence opinion, not to reflect it. In this environment, the only polls worth paying any attention to at all are those that the KMT and the DPP do themselves for in-house consumption, the results of which are seldom officially released to the media -- though of course sources will occasionally discuss their findings. The current situation, we are reliably informed, is that both major parties are finding their presidential candidates neck and neck. Lien Chan (
Now the reason to backpedal on the Soong investigation becomes more obvious. Soong has a certain number of iron votes, most obviously veterans, also many other mainlanders. No matter how much mud is flung at him and how much of it sticks, these people will not desert his cause. But another part of the Soong camp is made up of those who responded to his call for a different kind of politics in Taiwan, people who felt nauseated by the idea of having to sip the KMT's patent cocktail of arrogance and corruption for another four years. These are people who want politics cleaned up and believed Soong when he said he could do it. Many of them currently discount the allegations against Soong as manifesting the KMT at its desperate, unprincipled worst. But proving a case against Soong is not going to make them love Lien. Probably they will resent the KMT all the more for nurturing Soong in the first place. Their defection from Soong's camp, therefore, is only likely to benefit Chen. The KMT will not recover these votes, hence its current strategy of leaving Soong's campaign crippled but still afloat, and its mysterious lack of zeal in finishing what it began.
The recent passing of Taiwanese actress Barbie Hsu (徐熙媛), known to many as “Big S,” due to influenza-induced pneumonia at just 48 years old is a devastating reminder that the flu is not just a seasonal nuisance — it is a serious and potentially fatal illness. Hsu, a beloved actress and cultural icon who shaped the memories of many growing up in Taiwan, should not have died from a preventable disease. Yet her death is part of a larger trend that Taiwan has ignored for too long — our collective underestimation of the flu and our low uptake of the
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