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.
In the past month, two important developments are poised to equip Taiwan with expanded capabilities to play foreign policy offense in an age where Taiwan’s diplomatic space is seriously constricted by a hegemonic Beijing. Taiwan Foreign Minister Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) led a delegation of Taiwan and US companies to the Philippines to promote trilateral economic cooperation between the three countries. Additionally, in the past two weeks, Taiwan has placed chip export controls on South Africa in an escalating standoff over the placing of its diplomatic mission in Pretoria, causing the South Africans to pause and ask for consultations to resolve
An altercation involving a 73-year-old woman and a younger person broke out on a Taipei MRT train last week, with videos of the incident going viral online, sparking wide discussions about the controversial priority seats and social norms. In the video, the elderly woman, surnamed Tseng (曾), approached a passenger in a priority seat and demanded that she get up, and after she refused, she swung her bag, hitting her on the knees and calves several times. In return, the commuter asked a nearby passenger to hold her bag, stood up and kicked Tseng, causing her to fall backward and
In December 1937, Japanese troops captured Nanjing and unleashed one of the darkest chapters of the 20th century. Over six weeks, hundreds of thousands were slaughtered and women were raped on a scale that still defies comprehension. Across Asia, the Japanese occupation left deep scars. Singapore, Malaya, the Philippines and much of China endured terror, forced labor and massacres. My own grandfather was tortured by the Japanese in Singapore. His wife, traumatized beyond recovery, lived the rest of her life in silence and breakdown. These stories are real, not abstract history. Here is the irony: Mao Zedong (毛澤東) himself once told visiting
When I reminded my 83-year-old mother on Wednesday that it was the 76th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, she replied: “Yes, it was the day when my family was broken.” That answer captures the paradox of modern China. To most Chinese in mainland China, Oct. 1 is a day of pride — a celebration of national strength, prosperity and global stature. However, on a deeper level, it is also a reminder to many of the families shattered, the freedoms extinguished and the lives sacrificed on the road here. Seventy-six years ago, Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong (毛澤東)
RSS