With political parties lining up their candidates to contest November’s nine-in-one local elections, the first significant mudslinging of the election season has already occurred, once again involving academic plagiarism.
The first clod was flung on Tuesday last week. Taipei City Councilor Wang Hung-wei (王鴻薇) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) told a news conference that Lin Chih-chien (林智堅) — who on Friday retired as mayor of Hsinchu, as he is the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) nominee for Taoyuan mayor — plagiarized his 2008 master’s thesis.
The DPP returned fire. Lin denied the allegation and threatened legal action against Wang, while Lin’s academic advisers said that the claims were untrue.
Meanwhile, a post on a Facebook account named Wen Ta-jui (翁達瑞) accused former legislator Ko Chih-en (柯志恩), the KMT’s candidate for Kaohsiung mayor, of “self-plagiarism” by submitting duplicate manuscripts to two different academic conferences. Ko denied the allegations.
The pyrotechnics did not stop there. On Friday, Wang led a flash mob of KMT Hsinchu city councilors to the Chung Hua University campus, where they chanted slogans outside the main entrance demanding that the university investigate Lin’s thesis.
KMT caucus whip Alex Fai (費鴻泰), a “deep blue” firebrand, called the university “third-rate.”
It would be tempting to argue that the two main parties are equally bad. After all, during the 2020 Kaohsiung mayoral by-election, the DPP leveled more successful accusations of plagiarism against the KMT’s candidate, Kaohsiung City Councilor Jane Lee (李眉蓁).
However, irrespective of the veracity of Wang’s claim and while academic plagiarism is a real problem in Taiwan that should be taken seriously, the KMT’s off-the-wall campaigning tactics differentiate it from the DPP.
The KMT’s attempt to exert political pressure on the university is spectacularly ill-judged. The party’s dark history of political persecution on university campuses during the Martial Law era — the arrests of members of political societies, the networks of informants, people mysteriously “falling” from the roofs of buildings — is still fresh in the memory of many Taiwanese.
It was terrible optics for the KMT, indicative of its general malaise and its cacoethes for tone-deaf political stunts. With its political DNA rooted firmly in authoritarianism, it still struggles to get its collective head around democracy.
Although Taiwan’s incremental democratization has already entered its fourth decade, to this day the KMT still stubbornly refuses to participate in the transitional justice process and keeps incriminating party archives sealed tight.
Contrast Taiwan’s situation with that of the former East Germany. By 1992, just three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, all of the Stasi files had been made public. While it is true that Taiwan did not experience a “big bang” moment comparable to those of East Germany and other former Soviet Union satellite states, the KMT has been dragging its feet on the issue for far too long. Having failed to display genuine contrition, how can it expect to broaden its support?
Another problem for it is that KMT Chairman Eric Chu’s (朱立倫) leadership style is low-key to the point of being invisible. He has developed no discernible policy platform and the majority of the electorate would struggle to name a single KMT policy.
As with all of its recent chairs, the party appears rudderless under Chu, focused on opposition for the sake of it and bereft of an electoral strategy. Short of a miracle or massive interference by Beijing before November, the KMT’s electoral prospects appear grim.
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