Bringing down former president Lee Teng-hui (
While highlighting the escape of former National Security Bureau (NSB) chief cashier Liu Kuan-chun (
All the PFP wants is to get Lee and avenge the damage Soong suffered as a result of the Chung Hsing Bills Finance (
While visiting an offshore island, PFP Chairman James Soong (
Obviously, the person Soong targeted with the leaking of confidential information from the NSB and the FBC is Lee. In other words, all the so-called "confidential documents," whether they exist or not, are just weapons in a series of political battles.
The worship of Pao Ching-tien is a product of the imperial era, a time when there was no concept of due legal process. Soong's admiration for Pao demonstrates his lack of respect for the rule of law. Everyone in Taiwan remembers perfectly well the extent of the corruption revealed in the Chung Hsing scandal. Does Soong really think that the judicial system has declared him innocent in the matter?
With the scandal still casting a very long shadow, Soong's relentless efforts to give Lee a taste of his own medicine are clearly part of a combative political strategy. How can anyone still hold Soong up as an expert in the art of politics?
More importantly, the PFP's mission to bring down Lee indicates that there is not really any major conflict in Taiwan any more, which suggests that the ruling party can now concentrate on reviving Taiwan's economy. As the PFP focuses on this so-called scandal, the ruling party also gets a chance to clean up the government inside and out.
As for the FBC, some say that it has close relations with the KMT's military intelligence unit. If this is the case, are the alleged secret accounts and money transfers real or fabricated? Exactly how was the confidential information of account holders at the FBC leaked to the PFP?
The government must act decisively to give the people of this country and comprehensive explanation, and to get rid of the baggage left behind by the former authoritarian regime.
Chin Heng-wei is editor-in-chief of Contemporary Monthly magazine.
In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.” Moreover, the two authors observe that those who denounce such legal threats to democracy are often “dismissed as exaggerating or
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus in the Legislative Yuan has made an internal decision to freeze NT$1.8 billion (US$54.7 million) of the indigenous submarine project’s NT$2 billion budget. This means that up to 90 percent of the budget cannot be utilized. It would only be accessible if the legislature agrees to lift the freeze sometime in the future. However, for Taiwan to construct its own submarines, it must rely on foreign support for several key pieces of equipment and technology. These foreign supporters would also be forced to endure significant pressure, infiltration and influence from Beijing. In other words,
“I compare the Communist Party to my mother,” sings a student at a boarding school in a Tibetan region of China’s Qinghai province. “If faith has a color,” others at a different school sing, “it would surely be Chinese red.” In a major story for the New York Times this month, Chris Buckley wrote about the forced placement of hundreds of thousands of Tibetan children in boarding schools, where many suffer physical and psychological abuse. Separating these children from their families, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) aims to substitute itself for their parents and for their religion. Buckley’s reporting is
Last week, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), together holding more than half of the legislative seats, cut about NT$94 billion (US$2.85 billion) from the yearly budget. The cuts include 60 percent of the government’s advertising budget, 10 percent of administrative expenses, 3 percent of the military budget, and 60 percent of the international travel, overseas education and training allowances. In addition, the two parties have proposed freezing the budgets of many ministries and departments, including NT$1.8 billion from the Ministry of National Defense’s Indigenous Defense Submarine program — 90 percent of the program’s proposed
RSS