There are only five days to go before the Hualien County commissioner by-election and as usual it is being touted as an indicator of political fortunes in the presidential election. Is it?
Well, it is not the case that the result in Hualien is likely to be reflective of national sentiment as a whole, so whoever wins the election will gain little impetus from it for the presidential campaign. Hualien is an isolated, predominantly rural, relatively impoverished county with a low educational standard and a large Aboriginal population which has traditionally played the role of clients to the KMT -- with the result that the county has been in KMT hands for half a century. Hualien is, therefore, totally unlike the teeming cities on Taiwan's west coast -- remember one third of Taiwan's population lives within 50km of the center of Taipei.
Nevertheless the election does hold interest if only because it serves to confirm trends that will show themselves elsewhere and which have already in Taiwan's brief democratic history become leitmotifs of Taiwan's electoral politics.
On the blue camp side there is the by now traditional split of the vote between the man the KMT has selected, Hsieh Shen-shan (
The KMT's action therefore in appointing Hsieh as its candidate, something with which the PFP seems to have grumpily gone along with while some PFP heavyweights actually stump for Wu, is an indication that the KMT tiger is trying to change its stripes. We admit that we seldom give the party any credit for this. But it is fair to say that even 10 years ago there would have been no squeamishness about selecting someone with a murky record such as Wu as the candidate. The fact that the KMT resisted doing the easy -- and undoubtedly effective -- thing suggests the party is taking the idea that it must dissociate itself from its hugely corrupt past seriously. This of course creates tensions which the face-off between Wu and Hsieh illustrates.
The KMT vote being split by a renegade running as an independent has become such a common feature of elections in Taiwan that pan-blue unity is the exception rather than the rule. But this should not be taken as overly ominous for pan-blue cooperation in the presidential election. The contrast in Hualien is between a man on the ground with local connections and a murky past and an outsider imposed from above to boost the party's reform image. It is not perhaps a situation specific to Hualien, but it is a local situation in a way that the presidential election is not. Wu has nothing to lose by running as an independent. Lien Chan (
As for You Ying-lung (
With its passing of Hong Kong’s new National Security Law, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) continues to tighten its noose on Hong Kong. Gone is the broken 1997 promise that Hong Kong would have free, democratic elections by 2017. Gone also is any semblance that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) plays the long game. All the CCP had to do was hold the fort until 2047, when the “one country, two systems” framework would end and Hong Kong would rejoin the “motherland.” It would be a “demonstration-free” event. Instead, with the seemingly benevolent velvet glove off, the CCP has revealed its true iron
At the end of last month, Paraguayan Ambassador to Taiwan Marcial Bobadilla Guillen told a group of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislators that his president had decided to maintain diplomatic ties with Taiwan, despite pressure from the Chinese government and local businesses who would like to see a switch to Beijing. This followed the Paraguayan Senate earlier this year voting against a proposal to establish ties with China in exchange for medical supplies. This constituted a double rebuke of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) diplomatic agenda in a six-month span from Taiwan’s only diplomatic ally in South America. Last year, Tuvalu rejected an
US President Donald Trump’s administration on Friday last week announced it would impose sanctions on the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, a vast paramilitary organization that is directly controlled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and has been linked to human rights violations against Uighurs and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang. The sanctions follow US travel bans against other Xinjiang officials and the passage of the US Hong Kong Autonomy Act, which authorizes targeted sanctions against mainland Chinese and Hong Kong officials, in response to Beijing’s imposition of national security legislation on the territory. The sanctions against the corps would be implemented
US President Donald Trump on Thursday issued executive orders barring Americans from conducting business with WeChat owner Tencent Holdings and ByteDance, the Beijing-based owner of popular video-sharing app TikTok. The orders are to take effect 45 days after they were signed, which is Sept. 20. The orders accuse WeChat of helping the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) review and remove content that it considers to be politically sensitive, and of using fabricated news to benefit itself. The White House has accused TikTok of collecting users’ information, location data and browsing histories, which could be used by the Chinese government, and pose
RSS