It would be flattering to New Taipei City Mayor Hou You-yi (侯友宜) to compare him to former US president Richard Nixon and underestimating him to compare him to Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District Police Chief Pete Arredondo. Hou’s series of irresponsible moves — such as withholding evidence, shifting responsibility and sheltering subordinates — proves that an old dog cannot learn new tricks.
Nixon’s Watergate scandal, Arredondo’s slow response to the shooting at a Texas school last month and the “En En incident” all involved audio recordings.
Nixon wanted to destroy 18 minutes of taped evidence against him, Arredondo could not hide the 73 minutes of emergency call recordings and Hou continues to withhold 119 audio recordings made by the parents of a two-year-old boy nicknamed En En (恩恩), who became the first child in Taiwan to die from a COVID-19-related condition. An ambulance for En En arrived 81 minutes after the first call.
However, the truth will come out. As “Deep Throat” unraveled Watergate, scandal-hungry media descended like vultures, and Arredondo has been blamed for the botched response to the school shooting. Despite Hou’s efforts to cover up the recordings and evade responsibility, he could not stop concerned citizens from uncovering the truth.
In the Uvalde incident, audio recordings revealed key evidence, and Arredondo has been suspended and could be fired.
So far, Hou, a former Criminal Investigation Bureau commissioner, has withheld evidence, lambasted a whistle-blower and rubbed salt in the wounds of the child’s family. Without a shred of evidence, he has reprimanded legislators for providing evidence.
Having been educated during the Martial Law era, Hou is adept at using bureaucratic language to muddy the waters and creating cock-and-bull stories. Those who lived under the authoritarian rule of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), are familiar with this type of response. Authoritarian police became used to prevaricating.
Hou’s authoritarian mindset led to his poor response. After all, in their view, those in power do not need to account for their actions, so there is no need to prove their innocence. When whistle-blowers come forward with evidence, the powerful accuse them of sowing confusion.
Having taken a page out of his authoritarian background, Hou would be mistaken to think he can get away with following the KMT’s corrupt habit of sweeping scandals under the rug.
James Wang is a media commentator.
Translated by Rita Wang
Since the end of the Cold War, the US-China espionage battle has arguably become the largest on Earth. Spying on China is vital for the US, as China’s growing military and technological capabilities pose direct challenges to its interests, especially in defending Taiwan and maintaining security in the Indo-Pacific. Intelligence gathering helps the US counter Chinese aggression, stay ahead of threats and safeguard not only its own security, but also the stability of global trade routes. Unchecked Chinese expansion could destabilize the region and have far-reaching global consequences. In recent years, spying on China has become increasingly difficult for the US
Lately, China has been inviting Taiwanese influencers to travel to China’s Xinjiang region to make films, weaving a “beautiful Xinjiang” narrative as an antidote to the international community’s criticisms by creating a Potemkin village where nothing is awry. Such manipulations appear harmless — even compelling enough for people to go there — but peeling back the shiny veneer reveals something more insidious, something that is hard to ignore. These films are not only meant to promote tourism, but also harbor a deeper level of political intentions. Xinjiang — a region of China continuously listed in global human rights reports —
The annual summit of East Asia and other events around the ASEAN summit in October and November every year have become the most important gathering of leaders in the Indo-Pacific region. This year, as Laos is the chair of ASEAN, it was privileged to host all of the ministerial and summit meetings associated with ASEAN. Besides the main summit, this included the high-profile East Asia Summit, ASEAN summits with its dialogue partners and the ASEAN Plus Three Summit with China, Japan and South Korea. The events and what happens around them have changed over the past 15 years from a US-supported, ASEAN-led
To the dismay of the Chinese propaganda machine, President William Lai (賴清德) has been mounting an information offensive through his speeches. No longer are Taiwanese content with passively reacting to China’s encroachment in the international window of discourse, but Taiwan is now setting the tone and pace of conversation. Last month, Lai’s statement that “If China wants Taiwan it should also take back land from Russia” made international headlines, pointing out the duplicity of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) revanchism. History shows that the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) stance on regional territorial disputes has not been consistent. The early CCP
RSS