Six people from several political parties are being investigated as part of a major corruption probe by the Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office. Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Su Chen-ching (蘇震清) and his office director Yu Hsueh-yang (余學洋) are among those who were detained.
President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) accepted when Su’s uncle, Su Jia-chyuan (蘇嘉全), offered to resign as Presidential Office secretary-general.
Su Jia-chyuan said that he was resigning because of the many occasions on which others had sought to tarnish his name, together with the involvement of a family member in a corruption scandal, which were unwanted distractions for the president.
However, the situation is more complicated than that.
The Su family is important to the DPP because of its deep connections with business and the Pingtung community. For example, these connections enabled the Su family to wrest control of the Pingtung Irrigation Association from the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT).
Su Chen-ching’s uncle has been his benefactor throughout his political career.
Su Chen-ching stood in this year’s legislative election, when the number of Pingtung seats was reduced from three to two and while he was accused of buying shares under somebody else’s name in the Cheng Mei Materials Technology Corp (誠美材料) scandal. This made him ineligible for the DPP’s legislator-at-large list, so he informed the party that he might run as an independent.
Su Jia-chyuan’s wife, Hung Heng-chu (洪恒珠), threatened to challenge the seat as an independent unless the party allowed Su Chen-ching to run — the party acquiesced.
The Su family in Pingtung has become its own party faction.
Local factions and political families monopolize local political resources and seek to influence the central party, while representatives of these factions and families in the central party leadership divert the party’s political and economic resources to their hometowns.
It is corrosive for democracy if any political post is held for a long time by an individual or a family. This is especially true if the family has been involved in numerous scandals. Su Chen-ching is not only implicated in the Pacific Sogo Department Store corruption case, he has the dubious honor of being the legislator accused of receiving the most money.
His family relationship with Su Jia-chyuan establishes a link between him and Tsai. Tsai has had a history of close cooperation with Su Jia-chyuan, who was made party secretary-general the year after Tsai accepted the party chairmanship in 2008.
Even though Su Jia-chyuan lost narrowly to former Taichung mayor Jason Hu (胡志強), Tsai immediately reinstated him as secretary-general and included him as a vice-presidential candidate when she ran for the 2012 presidential election.
This was all part of the party reform introduced to pull the DPP out of the hole it had fallen into by 2008. After Tsai became president, she continued to rely heavily on Su Jia-chyuan. Their close connection, coupled with his relationship with his nephew, shows how the scandals of political families can be headaches for central party leadership.
If the DPP wants to stay in power after Tsai’s term ends, it must set up an anti-corruption mechanism. The DPP should know better than most how long it takes for a party to rid itself of being labeled “corrupt.”
Tsai’s calls for moral discipline, but her admonitions are inadequate. It is only through harsh punishment that the party can restrain the influence of rampant political families.
Wei Jia-yu is a postgraduate student who holds a master’s degree in international relations from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.
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