The ways in which the Control Yuan and the Examination Yuan are defined in the Constitution are rather unusual, but must be understood in the historical context.
The Examination Yuan might seem archaic and even at odds with the nation’s needs: It is in fact based on the most long-standing and comprehensive system for selecting government officials in the world.
The Chinese imperial examination system is a thing of the past, but the independent power to oversee civil service examinations as enshrined in the Constitution cannot be understood isolated from the context of the old system, which was used to select government officials over a massive expanse of territory for well over 1,000 years.
The Control Yuan inherits powers from the Chinese imperial censor system, yet is invested with more powers and a higher status to serve as a check-and-balance institution on potential abuses of power by the Legislative Yuan.
Overall, the way the two branches are integrated in the constitutional framework, for the most part, is positive, but their continued existence must depend on whether they are fit for their purpose in modern times. This is something that cannot really be said for the Control Yuan.
For several decades of one-party rule, the concept of separation of powers among the five branches of government was laughable.
The executive branch was monopolized and the Control Yuan entirely toothless, while the legislature, during the years when the Temporary Provisions Effective During the Period of the Communist Rebellion (動員戡亂時期臨時條款) were in force, was little more than a rubber stamp for the government’s whims.
The problems that the Judicial Yuan accumulated over time go without saying, and the Examination Yuan, originally supposed to select officials for the “whole country,” was bereft of the reason for which it was intended.
The current state of the government branches is the results of the democratization process, having emerged scarred by life under authoritarian rule.
Whether or not the Control Yuan should remain has not so much to do with the way the system was designed, but with the fact that it had no real purpose during the period of one-party rule.
An institution that drains the state coffers, but has not served its intended purpose for decades naturally has no place in today’s democratic Taiwan.
Simply put, to cohere with democratic principles, the governing authorities are duty-bound to effect the transformation or direct abolition of these institutions through constitutional amendments.
Unfortunately, when Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus whip Lin Wei-chou (林為洲) demands their abolition, the KMT has once again demonstrated that it has lost all of its core values: Were the two independent branches of government not part of the system devised by their party icon Sun Yat-sen (孫逸仙), a founder of the Republic of China?
Is the KMT not supposed to defend the integrity of the system of five branches of government?
The reason the KMT supports the Control Yuan’s abolition is perhaps because it sees that the majority of Taiwanese do not believe it serves any purpose.
However, the public sees the root cause of its malaise in the corrosive legacy of the period of KMT authoritarian rule.
The KMT owes Taiwanese an apology for the current state of the Control Yuan.
However, the KMT wants the public to believe that the reason it is calling for its abolition is the nomination of former Presidential Office secretary-general Chen Chu (陳菊) to be Control Yuan president, providing high-sounding, but vacuous objections — such as the accusation that the post was offered to her as a political reward and that her appointment would lead to the establishment of a police state apparatus — that by some convoluted logic require the abolition of the two institutions in their entirety.
It is this kind of behavior that Taiwanese should be worried about, not whether or not the Control Yuan and Examination Yuan should be abolished.
Cheng Mu-Chun is an adjunct assistant professor at Tamkang University’s history department.
Translated by Paul Cooper
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