From the gas pipeline explosions in Greater Kaohsiung on July 31 and Aug. 1 to the unfolding waste oil scandal, Taiwan’s reputation is taking a real battering. The Shanghai municipal government has required all Taiwanese food products to be taken off the shelves, and other Chinese provincial-level cities are preparing to follow suit. We know we are in trouble when even China, which practically invented knockoffs and dodgy practices, is drawing the line when it comes to Taiwanese foodstuffs.
People are calling on officials — from local to central government, including the premier and the president — to resign. And so they should. After all, these officials have proven negligent, failing even to guarantee citizens the right to freedom from fear that the government is constitutionally beholden to do.
The problem is endemic to the system. There are no exceptions in government today, and it is all because the electorate have tolerated this, allowing this abomination of a government, this collection of officials with a distinctly odd way of looking at things. We can only blame ourselves. Activists and social movements proclaim the need to bring down the government, and yet the government ends up with more power and bigger budgets.
Whenever disaster strikes, governments are allocated special budgets, while negligent officials eschew responsibility, using taxpayers’ money to vent their own frustrations and enmities. How does this make sense?
The problem originates in the system by which elected public officials, government officials and civil servants are created. From the president at the top all the way down to contracted staff, it is hard to find someone who thinks like you and me. President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), for example, has served two terms as Taipei mayor, and is now in his second term as president, but political pundit Nan Fang Shuo (南方朔) nailed it when he said that Ma was a man obsessed, and that he should really seek treatment to be able to function properly. And yet Ma is the most powerful man in the country.
As the nine-in-one elections draw near, the candidate that seems the most normal is Neil Peng (馮光遠), who is running for Taipei mayor and is no stranger to controversy in his day job. The others, who usually come across as civilized and refined, have not emerged too well from the grueling election process. Not many have been able to retain their normality.
All I want is to be able to vote for a normal person, but how does one identify who is “normal”? I have a friend who made a wrong turn somewhere and ended up working in government. Less than six months into the job, my friend told me that, without exception, each and every one of the career civil servants who had passed the Examination Yuan tests was not quite right in the head and was guaranteed to mess up anything they were given to do. The only solution would be to outsource or to contract the tasks out, or find temps to do the work instead.
I once chanced upon several Food and Drug Administration (FDA) officials buying breakfast at a food stall outside the legislature. I asked them how they could tell whether it was safe to eat the egg rolls served there. They laughed and said that I was just like everyone else, and that one would not get ill by eating this stuff, no matter how unhygienic it was.
When he assumed the post of FDA director-general, Yeh Ming-kung (葉明功) told a press conference that he avoids eating oily, salty food at home. Reading between the lines, we are now in the midst of a pork lard scandal, but may look forward to revelations about soy sauce, salad oil and peanut oil among others.
All Cabinet officials and career civil servants have a doctorate. Whenever one of these innocuous, reliable professors comes into the light, nobody questions their field knowledge. The problem lies in their mentality and their lack of common sense. Knowledge is a great thing, but it can be misapplied. Our mothers brought us up by dint of common sense on how to raise a child. The vast majority of mothers cannot boast a doctorate, and yet they did perfectly well by us.
It is not specialist knowledge that keeps society together, it is a consensus forged through common sense. When these officials are forced out of office, they retreat to a university teaching position. This is how the connivance between politics and academia in Taiwan is bred, and it is also how the universities produce more academics and officials with a strange mindset.
With all the dodgy food products on the market, which company does not have ISO 9000, ISO 14000, ISO 22000, HACCP, GMP or CAS accreditation? What do these letters and code numbers actually mean in Taiwan? Most people think national accreditation is a guarantee of quality, but the awarding of these codes is all kept in the family. Civil servants neglect their obligations, and after they retire they not only milk the public purse with perks like the 18 percent preferential interest rate on their pensions, they continue to act as parasites by becoming chairperson of an accreditation body.
Behind all these inspections and accreditation awards lie official corruption and academic connivance, together with a skewed mindset. Shady forces are undoubtedly at work in how accreditations are awarded.
Jay Fang is chairman of the Green Consumers’ Foundation.
Translated by Paul Cooper
The Chinese government on March 29 sent shock waves through the Tibetan Buddhist community by announcing the untimely death of one of its most revered spiritual figures, Hungkar Dorje Rinpoche. His sudden passing in Vietnam raised widespread suspicion and concern among his followers, who demanded an investigation. International human rights organization Human Rights Watch joined their call and urged a thorough investigation into his death, highlighting the potential involvement of the Chinese government. At just 56 years old, Rinpoche was influential not only as a spiritual leader, but also for his steadfast efforts to preserve and promote Tibetan identity and cultural
Former minister of culture Lung Ying-tai (龍應台) has long wielded influence through the power of words. Her articles once served as a moral compass for a society in transition. However, as her April 1 guest article in the New York Times, “The Clock Is Ticking for Taiwan,” makes all too clear, even celebrated prose can mislead when romanticism clouds political judgement. Lung crafts a narrative that is less an analysis of Taiwan’s geopolitical reality than an exercise in wistful nostalgia. As political scientists and international relations academics, we believe it is crucial to correct the misconceptions embedded in her article,
Sung Chien-liang (宋建樑), the leader of the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) efforts to recall Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Lee Kun-cheng (李坤城), caused a national outrage and drew diplomatic condemnation on Tuesday after he arrived at the New Taipei City District Prosecutors’ Office dressed in a Nazi uniform. Sung performed a Nazi salute and carried a copy of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf as he arrived to be questioned over allegations of signature forgery in the recall petition. The KMT’s response to the incident has shown a striking lack of contrition and decency. Rather than apologizing and distancing itself from Sung’s actions,
US President Trump weighed into the state of America’s semiconductor manufacturing when he declared, “They [Taiwan] stole it from us. They took it from us, and I don’t blame them. I give them credit.” At a prior White House event President Trump hosted TSMC chairman C.C. Wei (魏哲家), head of the world’s largest and most advanced chip manufacturer, to announce a commitment to invest US$100 billion in America. The president then shifted his previously critical rhetoric on Taiwan and put off tariffs on its chips. Now we learn that the Trump Administration is conducting a “trade investigation” on semiconductors which
RSS