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.
Because much of what former US president Donald Trump says is unhinged and histrionic, it is tempting to dismiss all of it as bunk. Yet the potential future president has a populist knack for sounding alarums that resonate with the zeitgeist — for example, with growing anxiety about World War III and nuclear Armageddon. “We’re a failing nation,” Trump ranted during his US presidential debate against US Vice President Kamala Harris in one particularly meandering answer (the one that also recycled urban myths about immigrants eating cats). “And what, what’s going on here, you’re going to end up in World War
Earlier this month in Newsweek, President William Lai (賴清德) challenged the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to retake the territories lost to Russia in the 19th century rather than invade Taiwan. He stated: “If it is for the sake of territorial integrity, why doesn’t [the PRC] take back the lands occupied by Russia that were signed over in the treaty of Aigun?” This was a brilliant political move to finally state openly what many Chinese in both China and Taiwan have long been thinking about the lost territories in the Russian far east: The Russian far east should be “theirs.” Granted, Lai issued
On Tuesday, President William Lai (賴清德) met with a delegation from the Hoover Institution, a think tank based at Stanford University in California, to discuss strengthening US-Taiwan relations and enhancing peace and stability in the region. The delegation was led by James Ellis Jr, co-chair of the institution’s Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region project and former commander of the US Strategic Command. It also included former Australian minister for foreign affairs Marise Payne, influential US academics and other former policymakers. Think tank diplomacy is an important component of Taiwan’s efforts to maintain high-level dialogue with other nations with which it does
On Sept. 2, Elbridge Colby, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development, wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal called “The US and Taiwan Must Change Course” that defends his position that the US and Taiwan are not doing enough to deter the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from taking Taiwan. Colby is correct, of course: the US and Taiwan need to do a lot more or the PRC will invade Taiwan like Russia did against Ukraine. The US and Taiwan have failed to prepare properly to deter war. The blame must fall on politicians and policymakers