Since taking over as mayor of Taipei, Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) has been reviewing the city government’s collaborative construction projects such as the Taipei Dome, Taipei New Horizon, Q Square, the Syntrend Creative Park and the MeHAS complex.
Shocked at what he has discovered, Ko says he feels as though he has run up against “fraud syndicates,” while the terms of the contracts are like paying reparations and ceding territory. Companies that have been able to set up such partnerships with the Taipei City Government are pretty much limited to a handful of big corporations such as Farglory Group, Fubon Financial Holdings, Radium Life Tech and Hon Hai.
Many of these partnerships are based on the Act for the Promotion of Private Participation in Infrastructure Projects (促進民間參與公共建設法), but what the law calls “private institutions” have come to be seen as “fraud syndicates” — how have the mighty fallen. These collaborative projects are all done in the name of private participation or public-private partnerships, but the public has not thought seriously enough about what counts as “private institutions.”
Most research about state and society divides democracies into three sectors — government, business and civil society, and the public good pursued by a democratic society should be determined through communication, consultation and decisions involving all three sectors.
For a long time, Taiwan has had an authoritarian form of government, with close ties to corporations helping them to make super-normal profits. Its policy vision consists of a narrow cost-benefit analysis that engenders an alliance of political and business interests.
This kind of government has scant regard for the needs of society or for values such as justice, human rights and environmental sustainability. Eventually this must lead to a crisis of political legitimacy such as what erupted last year.
The popular participation that people hoped for following the end of martial law in 1987 was that the government could be aware of society’s needs and work more closely with it. In fact, the government’s idea of private institutions has been limited to businesses and corporations, which have come to usurp the role of society. This charade has become all the more obvious in the wake of the global tide of neoliberalism.
Governments have used the pretexts of privatization, build-operate-transfer projects and so on to shrug off unwanted responsibilities, with the result being that corporations have swallowed up many areas of public life, while important national resources have become their exclusive domains.
Worse still, the government’s advocacy of neoliberalism did not bring an end to the original authoritarian system. On the contrary, its dispossession of disadvantaged groups has gone from bad to worse, as exemplified by widespread expropriation of farmland and government orders to stop irrigating land.
Ironically, the old authoritarianism remains alongside neoliberalism, while public policy unfairly treats different social classes in different ways.
Ko deserves praise for investigating malpractice, but as he calls for transparent government and renegotiating contracts with corporations, hopefully he can change the existing system to include newly emerged social forces, giving them a formal, legally defined status.
This would create a tripartite mechanism for making policy, and fix the arbitrary nature and inadequacies of the kind of closed-door committees that have decided policy up until now, instead of using genuine popular participation to build a better future for Taiwan.
Hsu Shih-jung is a professor of land economics at National Chengchi University.
Translated by Julian Clegg
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