If anyone had harbored hope that Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Johnny Chiang (江啟臣) was to bring about much-needed reform to his party, those hopes have now been dashed.
The pathetic publicity stunt of the KMT’s short-lived “occupation” of the Legislative Yuan on Sunday and Monday last week failed on so many levels, it is difficult to know where to start.
Seeing Chiang at the scene was disappointing and raises the question of why he allowed it to happen. The farce began when KMT legislators barricaded themselves into the legislative chamber. However, they were kicked out only 19 hours later, just in time for lunch, by Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) legislators who wanted to get on with the business of government.
The reason given for the action was the KMT caucus’ opposition to President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) Control Yuan nominees, including former Presidential Office secretary-general Chen Chu (陳菊) for its president. The KMT was attempting to call out the DPP for hypocrisy, as the latter had pushed hard for the abolition of the Control Yuan when in opposition. The DPP might still wish the Control Yuan to be abolished, but such an initiative would require constitutional amendments. While it still exists, Tsai is constitutionally obliged to nominate members, and opposition parties are constitutionally required to participate in the confirmation process.
Chiang, of course, is well aware of this. He is not ignorant of the party’s constitutional duties. The stunt in the legislative chamber merely shows the KMT leadership to be patronizing the electorate. If the KMT were so committed to abolishing the Control Yuan, it should propose a draft constitutional amendment, as a responsible opposition party might do. If the KMT were so opposed to Chen as the nominee for Control Yuan president, it could demonstrate effective opposition by, for example, conducting a public opinion poll on her suitability for the position.
The New Power Party (NPP) did. The poll showed that less than half of respondents thought Chen was a good choice.
There is plenty of time to make the case. Chen’s nomination is not to be reviewed until Tuesday next week, and the final vote is slated for Friday next week. This schedule was ironed out on Monday, after the KMT legislative caucus ended its shenanigans.
Perhaps the most embarrassing and wrong-footed aspect of the whole affair was the pretension that it could be compared with the Sunflower movement. The students who occupied the legislative chamber in March and April 2014 represented a groundswell of disaffected young voters who felt they had no recourse but to make a grand gesture. They demonstrated their resolve by holding out until they had secured promises in response to well-defined demands.
By comparison, last week’s stunt left the KMT looking ineffectual, disorganized and weak.
When it lacks a majority, the KMT often reverts to political theater. It did this to some effect during the pension reform debates in Tsai’s first term. It knew the reforms to be necessary and that its core supporters would lose out, so it leveraged the optics of fighting the reforms while knowing they would pass, allowing the KMT to blame it on the government.
The Control Yuan’s nominations are nowhere near as emotive or contentious an issue. Was this occasion worth the theater? What was Chiang thinking?
Discerning voters can surely see through the facade, and the KMT already risks losing the trust of voters to emerging and apparently more effectual opposition parties such as the NPP. Perhaps he was attempting to assuage party hardliners mortified by his suggestion that the so-called “1992 consensus” should be regarded as just a historical fact, which is virtually a heresy to the old guard.
Taiwanese democracy deserves a more mature, serious and effectual main opposition party.
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
After “Operation Absolute Resolve” to capture former Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, the US joined Israel on Saturday last week in launching “Operation Epic Fury” to remove Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his theocratic regime leadership team. The two blitzes are widely believed to be a prelude to US President Donald Trump changing the geopolitical landscape in the Indo-Pacific region, targeting China’s rise. In the National Security Strategic report released in December last year, the Trump administration made it clear that the US would focus on “restoring American pre-eminence in the Western hemisphere,” and “competing with China economically and militarily
RSS