With President Chen Shui-bian's (
Those who wonder what prompts this gloominess need look no further than last Wednesday when Hochen Tan (賀陳旦) was named to replace Mao Chi-kuo (毛治國) as the head of Chunghwa Telecom. Mao was kicked upstairs to become an adviser to the Cabinet on the formation of a national communications commission, something which is intended to take over the practical regulatory function of the Government Information Office -- the allocation of broadcast spectrum or telecom bandwidth -- while dropping the GIO's quasi-censor role.
Our quarrel is not with Mao's replacement as such, but with the fact that it had to be another crony of Chen's -- Hochen has no experience in running a large telecom company, but has been the head of Taipei City's Bureau of Transportation during Chen's tenure as mayor. His appointment is clearly political and it is simply a repeat of what has happened to so many other state-owned companies over the past three years -- China Shipbuilding and Taiwan Sugar being the most obvious examples.
In its defense the government might say that it is simply doing no more than its predecessor. But what disappoints is that the DPP was supposed to be different. It was not supposed to use its powers of patronage over the state-run enterprises to fill them with politically loyal placements.
It's not an earth-shattering event. It is just another example, and one easily overlooked, of how this government has become a serial promise breaker. And such promise breaking has become almost the defining characteristic of this government. What we see far too often are traditional KMT practices only with new faces with different loyalties in control. But the practices themselves, harmful as they are to the nation's development, simply remain.
We should have guessed that this was so from Chen's "five no's." At the time, many people said that these were a welcome concession to moderation. Actually they were a revelation that the DPP government intended to adopt the machinery of the KMT's fantasy ROC and run it virtually unchanged. As they have!
The DPP can get away with this, or thinks it can, only because for the green camp voter, what is the alternative? Hardly the KMT-PFP Pushme-Pullyou -- suggested campaign tune Stephen Sondheim's Send in the Clowns, though they would prefer The East is Red (東方紅). The sad thing is that, for those who actually care about Taiwan rather than fantasize about becoming part of a Chinese superpower -- concerning which George Orwell's Notes on Nationalism well repay rereading -- there really is no alternative.
As a result, the DPP treats its disillusioned loyalists rather as the US Democrats treat African-Americans -- don't bother much about them because they have nowhere else to turn. The result is, of course, not that those loyalists will vote DPP anyway, but that they will do what African-American voters have been doing in increasing numbers -- staying home and not voting.
It's hard, then, for any green-camp supporter these days to look at the DPP and KMT and not feel like the animals in the final scene of Animal Farm as they look through the window at the pigs and men having their party: "The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."
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