With 20,000 candidates vying for more than 11,000 government posts and council seats, the sheer scale of the upcoming nine-in-one elections is quite unprecedented. From that perspective, it might seem very complex, but seen from another angle it is really quite simple: Wherever you turn, the central issue is safety.
Without safety, you have nothing. Three successive food safety scandals have brought about a sense of crisis that has yet to end. Then there are the plans to slyly continue construction of the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant in New Taipei City’s Gongliao District (貢寮). The nation also has the threat of the ongoing Ebola outbreak casting a shadow over it. It could hit Taiwan in a few years or in just a few weeks. Surely nobody is foolish enough to say that it will never come this way.
Faced with such threats, Taiwan sorely needs talented people who are both compassionate and capable of keeping this country safe. History is full of stories of “cometh the hour, cometh the man.” When a crisis arises, hopefully somebody will step up to the plate and save the day.
Taiwanese have no great ruler to take charge, but we do have the vote, and for this brief moment, voters can make a difference.
The series of food safety scares has — to some extent — diverted attention from opposition to nuclear power. It was the hunger strike launched by veteran democracy campaigner Lin I-hsiung (林義雄) in April, combined with massive electoral pressure, that forced President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) to halt construction work on the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant.
However, this morphed into a halt on work without a halt on construction, along with a pledge to hold a referendum to decide whether the plant would go into operation. These are the government’s two big ruses for going ahead with building the plant, and it can be expected that when Ma’s Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) administration has gotten through the elections, it will use the restrictive “birdcage” referendum system to throttle the public’s antinuclear sentiment.
What do I mean by “getting through” the elections? The place where the KMT most needs to win is New Taipei City, since it is home to two of Taiwan’s three existing nuclear power plants, as well as the fourth one that is still unfinished. If voters allow New Taipei City Mayor Eric Chu (朱立倫) to get re-elected, it will be a green light for the KMT to install fuel rods in the fourth plant. Chu’s statement that the power plant cannot go into operation unless its safety is assured makes it clear that he is ready to give the plant the go-ahead whenever the opportunity arises.
Chu’s character can be seen from his unwillingness to help KMT Taipei mayoral candidate Sean Lien (連勝文), who is lagging well behind his main rival in opinion polls. Chu is even more of a schemer than Ma was in his youth.
In those days, Ma presented himself as clean and upright, often drawing a line between himself and his party. However, nowadays he is totally in love with the party, because the power he enjoys as KMT chairman is a powerful aphrodisiac. No doubt Chu has his eyes on the chairmanship and is drooling at the prospect. The lesson to be learned from this is that if you have ever been fooled by Ma, you should beware of being fooled again by Chu.
Resisting nuclear power is a Herculean task. Cometh the hour, cometh the man. Only candidates representing parties that have been opposed to nuclear power all along can be trusted to remove the threat of a nuclear disaster. Unlike referendums, the approaching elections are not confined in a birdcage. Kicking Chu out of office would be the clearest “no” vote on the nuclear power issue, and it is the only way to deflect the KMT’s sly scheme to go on building the fourth nuclear power plant.
Moving on to the Ebola threat, the Hollywood film Outbreak portrays the terror that the Ebola virus could bring about. In the movie, the US government takes drastic steps to stop the virus from spreading, including sealing off a town and planning to drop a fuel-air bomb on it, incinerating thousands of people. It may sound far-fetched, but viruses are capable of mutating into more virulent strains, so who can say that such things will never happen? The Ebola virus is classified as a level-4 biohazard — the most dangerous category. Clearly it is even more virulent than SARS, which is only classified as level-3.
Cometh the hour, cometh the man. Ebola will present a tremendous challenge for whoever has to deal with it. The only thing that Lien has going for him is his ability to take the money he already has and make even more money out of it. How would he shape up in a fight against Ebola? One can only imagine.
Christian Fan Jiang is deputy convener of the Northern Taiwan Society’s Legal and Political Group.
Translated by Paul Cooper and Julian Clegg
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