On Jan. 4, a group of lawmakers and city councilors, including Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Liu Shyh-fang (劉世芳), held a news conference supporting independent Kaohsiung City Councilor Huang Jie (黃捷) of Fongshan District (鳳山), who faces a recall vote on Feb. 6.
Wang Hao-yu (王浩宇) of the DPP was resoundingly recalled as Taoyuan city councilor on Monday. Few voices had come out in his support, not even Liu’s during the news conference.
Wang was not a local figure, having gained most of his profile from his online activity, and had done little to cultivate a local base, a fact manifest in the nickname he had earned himself: “city councilor at large.”
Through his controversial comments, he infuriated other political parties, big and small, and earned particular notoriety for ill-advised online statements about late Kaohsiung City Council speaker Hsu Kun-yuan (許崑源) after Hsu tragically died on the evening of the successful recall of former Kaohsiung mayor Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜), comments that sparked calls for Wang’s own recall.
Wang should have been more careful, not least because the DPP support in his constituency of Jhongli District (中壢) is weaker than the support for the pan-blue camp. His colorful comments and absence from his duties were, in the end, too much for the voters in Jhongli. No matter how much online support he had among the populace at large, it was the local constituents who he had to face in the recall vote, without a local base cultivated through many years of hard work in and for the community to rally behind him, not to mention the activists and leaders of parties that he has offended with his wayward words.
In these, his sins mirrored many of Han’s.
None of the things that Wang got wrong, nor any of the reasons for which he was summarily ousted, apply to Huang, whose own recall was initiated in retribution for her perceived role in Han’s ouster. This is why the recall motion against her is expected to fail: She has shown herself to be an effective, hard-working councilor, cultivating trust in an area that is more pro-green than pro-blue.
However, that does not mean that there are no concerns about the recall system in its current form.
Amendments to the Civil Servants Election and Recall Act (公職人員選舉罷免法) in 2016 reduced the threshold for initiating the process. This has enabled recall motions of several high-profile politicians, including then-legislator Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) of the New Power Party in 2017 and Han last year. Huang Kuo-chang’s unsuccessful recall, and Han’s successful one, show that the system is not entirely flawed.
At the same time, in a city or county council constituency, the number of votes required for a successful recall is small, and rival parties have access to time and resources to sully the name and reputation of a targeted politician, causing damage that will long outlast the recall vote.
The system is also open to abuse by aggrieved activists or opposition politicians attempting to pull down elected officials with whom they disagree. Wang’s comments got him into deserved trouble, but the idea that a politician can be targeted for saying something unpopular — which nevertheless needs to be said — or something that does not cohere with their party line, is detrimental to an open democracy.
Neither does the individual proposing or promoting the recall risk having their image tarnished in the same way as the target.
There are good reasons to promote direct democracy over representative democracy, but the system needs to be stable and not open to abuse.
The results of the recall votes against Huang Kuo-chang, Han and Wang were examples of the mechanism working as it should; Huang Jie’s will be a test of whether it needs to be scrutinized.
Two sets of economic data released last week by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) have drawn mixed reactions from the public: One on the nation’s economic performance in the first quarter of the year and the other on Taiwan’s household wealth distribution in 2021. GDP growth for the first quarter was faster than expected, at 6.51 percent year-on-year, an acceleration from the previous quarter’s 4.93 percent and higher than the agency’s February estimate of 5.92 percent. It was also the highest growth since the second quarter of 2021, when the economy expanded 8.07 percent, DGBAS data showed. The growth
In the intricate ballet of geopolitics, names signify more than mere identification: They embody history, culture and sovereignty. The recent decision by China to refer to Arunachal Pradesh as “Tsang Nan” or South Tibet, and to rename Tibet as “Xizang,” is a strategic move that extends beyond cartography into the realm of diplomatic signaling. This op-ed explores the implications of these actions and India’s potential response. Names are potent symbols in international relations, encapsulating the essence of a nation’s stance on territorial disputes. China’s choice to rename regions within Indian territory is not merely a linguistic exercise, but a symbolic assertion
More than seven months into the armed conflict in Gaza, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to take “immediate and effective measures” to protect Palestinians in Gaza from the risk of genocide following a case brought by South Africa regarding Israel’s breaches of the 1948 Genocide Convention. The international community, including Amnesty International, called for an immediate ceasefire by all parties to prevent further loss of civilian lives and to ensure access to life-saving aid. Several protests have been organized around the world, including at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and many other universities in the US.
Every day since Oct. 7 last year, the world has watched an unprecedented wave of violence rain down on Israel and the occupied Palestinian Territories — more than 200 days of constant suffering and death in Gaza with just a seven-day pause. Many of us in the American expatriate community in Taiwan have been watching this tragedy unfold in horror. We know we are implicated with every US-made “dumb” bomb dropped on a civilian target and by the diplomatic cover our government gives to the Israeli government, which has only gotten more extreme with such impunity. Meantime, multicultural coalitions of US