Last week, Transparency International Chinese Taipei published its Corruption Perceptions Index for last year. Taiwan ranked 31st in the world with 61 points, a drop of one place compared with 2015.
Although this could be regarded as an insignificant change, it might drop again, and therefore serves as a cautionary note for the importance of vigilance and a reassessment of how best to achieve clean governance.
Taiwanese need to know which policies or measures are not proving effective in the anti-corruption drive and the reason for this setback in ranking, however small.
This can be summed up in three points:
First, the anti-corruption policy as it stands goes neither far enough nor deep enough. The Ministry of Justice’s Agency Against Corruption was established more than five years ago, but for a variety of reasons, its anti-corruption efforts have been insufficiently comprehensive or far-reaching.
For example, when it was established, the agency was called upon to deal with the case of former legislator Lin Yi-shih (林益世), following which it refocused its efforts to rooting out corruption.
Over the past few years, although the agency has quietly developed its focus on anti-corruption and corruption prevention policies — and has achieved concrete results — its failure to implement a comprehensive approach has meant it has been unable to make inroads into the nation’s bureaucracy.
Although the central government and some local governments — especially the Executive Yuan and the Tainan City Government — have been taking anti-corruption reports seriously and promoting anti-corruption initiatives, these have only been piecemeal; lacking an overall strategy. This inadequate approach to fighting corruption has allowed the efforts to be resisted.
Second, there is the lack of transparency, one of the biggest reasons for corruption. The government began to promote transparency at least 10 years ago; hence the existence of so-called “sunshine” laws.
The passage of the Act on Property-Declaration by Public Servants (公職人員財產申報法) and the Political Donations Act (政治獻金法) notwithstanding, there continue to be blind spots in anti-corruption policy due to difficulties in policy implementation and the lack of transparency in other regulations.
If the government hopes to remain in line with international standards and promote open governance, it needs to do more to reinforce transparency of government information.
For example, the central and local governments mostly have open data on their Web sites. However, the information is either difficult to find or incomplete. That is, the “file management” of governments at all levels leaves a lot to be desired, which is another problem.
Third, there is the proposed public security special law. The law is reportedly still in the development stage and its main focus is counterintelligence and counterespionage.
If implemented, it could set transparency back, compromising the government ethics system and causing the nation’s international anti-corruption ranking to fall again, because if the government promotes or passes the public security special law, the ethics system might be forced to participate in the implementation of security efforts, which might lead to the return of “the second personnel office” system — or embedded “thought police” — that was repealed by former minister of justice Chen Ding-nan (陳定南).
Fortunately, the public security special law is still in the development stage. If it can be stopped in time, it will not retard anti-corruption efforts.
The nation’s fall in the anti-corruption rankings serves as a warning to the government and the public. At the same time, it also provides a good opportunity to consider and review whether there are blind spots in the government’s anti-corruption strategy.
If authorities do not revise, support and promote an anti-corruption strategy action plan, the nation’s international competitiveness and sustainable development might be compromised, regardless of how minor the drop in actual ranking position might be.
Yang Yung-nane is a professor in the Department of Political Science at National Cheng Kung University and a member of the board of directors of Transparency International Chinese Taipei.
Translated by Lin Lee-kai
The conflict in the Middle East has been disrupting financial markets, raising concerns about rising inflationary pressures and global economic growth. One market that some investors are particularly worried about has not been heavily covered in the news: the private credit market. Even before the joint US-Israeli attacks on Iran on Feb. 28, global capital markets had faced growing structural pressure — the deteriorating funding conditions in the private credit market. The private credit market is where companies borrow funds directly from nonbank financial institutions such as asset management companies, insurance companies and private lending platforms. Its popularity has risen since
The Donald Trump administration’s approach to China broadly, and to cross-Strait relations in particular, remains a conundrum. The 2025 US National Security Strategy prioritized the defense of Taiwan in a way that surprised some observers of the Trump administration: “Deterring a conflict over Taiwan, ideally by preserving military overmatch, is a priority.” Two months later, Taiwan went entirely unmentioned in the US National Defense Strategy, as did military overmatch vis-a-vis China, giving renewed cause for concern. How to interpret these varying statements remains an open question. In both documents, the Indo-Pacific is listed as a second priority behind homeland defense and
Every analyst watching Iran’s succession crisis is asking who would replace supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Yet, the real question is whether China has learned enough from the Persian Gulf to survive a war over Taiwan. Beijing purchases roughly 90 percent of Iran’s exported crude — some 1.61 million barrels per day last year — and holds a US$400 billion, 25-year cooperation agreement binding it to Tehran’s stability. However, this is not simply the story of a patron protecting an investment. China has spent years engineering a sanctions-evasion architecture that was never really about Iran — it was about Taiwan. The
In an op-ed published in Foreign Affairs on Tuesday, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) said that Taiwan should not have to choose between aligning with Beijing or Washington, and advocated for cooperation with Beijing under the so-called “1992 consensus” as a form of “strategic ambiguity.” However, Cheng has either misunderstood the geopolitical reality and chosen appeasement, or is trying to fool an international audience with her doublespeak; nonetheless, it risks sending the wrong message to Taiwan’s democratic allies and partners. Cheng stressed that “Taiwan does not have to choose,” as while Beijing and Washington compete, Taiwan is strongest when
RSS