For the past few weeks, the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) and its Chairman Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) have been embroiled in a series of scandals related to irregularities in their presidential campaign financial reporting. These scandals continue to expand as more evidence surfaces, raising more questions about the party’s financial propriety and competency.
These irregularities include unusually high spending, allegedly accepting donations from abroad, reporting 97.3 percent of personal donations as “cash,” making large payments to marketing firms with close ties to the party and accounting errors.
When the financial irregularities were first reported, the party blamed it on “arbitrary misconduct” by their accountant Tuanmu Cheng (端木正). However, later they blamed their chief financial officer Lee Wen-tsung (李文宗) for mismanagement. The two were expelled from the party on Tuesday last week.
TPP Legislator Vivian Huang (黃珊珊), Ko’s campaign manager, was also blamed by some party members for her poor supervision.
Huang called the irregularities in their financial reporting “unimaginable errors,” but she was only suspended from her party positions and is now tasked with dealing with the aftermath.
Throughout the crisis, Ko has denied knowing anything about the seriously flawed financial records, despite the Control Yuan having confirmed that it received Ko’s campaign financial report on April 7 and returned it the next day due to an obvious discrepancy.
Ko did not apologize until Friday, and only said he should not have “trusted a classmate who I have known for 50 years,” using Lee, who was Ko’s high-school classmate, to deflect any responsibility.
However, while Ko has used Tuanmu, Lee and Huang to insulate his reputation from the financial disclosure scandals, his wife, Peggy Chen (陳佩琪), unwittingly added fuel to the political firestorm.
On Facebook, Chen said she registered a company in her son’s name to open a coffee shop for the “little grasses” (小草, Ko’s younger supporters). However, after Ko said they only gave their son money to register his own business, Chen later deleted the Facebook post and changed her statement to align it with Ko’s.
To make matters worse, local Chinese-language media reported on Tuesday that Chen recently visited, with a view to possibly buying, a NT$120 million (US$3.75 million) luxury apartment in Taipei, leading to speculation about how the family could afford it.
At a time when the TPP is facing intense scrutiny over its opaque financial dealings, accusations of mismanagement, and allegations about false reporting and fraud, the visit did not help Ko in his efforts to project a clean image to the public.
As the central bank stipulates that banks can only grant a maximum mortgage of 40 percent of the total price for luxury housing units (above NT$80 million in Taipei), Ko would need to have more than NT$70 to be able to afford the apartment Chen visited. However, Ko’s personal financial disclosure report last year showed the couple had only about NT$24.6 million in savings.
Ko has often said that he lacks funding, and was forced to put his home up for collateral to secure a NT$20 million loan to fund his 2018 mayoral re-election.
He has also called for “housing justice” to win support from young people.
Many pundits have said that Chen’s luxury apartment search might damage Ko’s reputation more than the scandals, as it contradicts the image he presents to the public and the values he claims to hold.
They say that it would be more deeply felt by his younger supporters, who are likely struggling to buy a home for themselves and might now be wondering where their donations to the TPP ended up.
In their recent op-ed “Trump Should Rein In Taiwan” in Foreign Policy magazine, Christopher Chivvis and Stephen Wertheim argued that the US should pressure President William Lai (賴清德) to “tone it down” to de-escalate tensions in the Taiwan Strait — as if Taiwan’s words are more of a threat to peace than Beijing’s actions. It is an old argument dressed up in new concern: that Washington must rein in Taipei to avoid war. However, this narrative gets it backward. Taiwan is not the problem; China is. Calls for a so-called “grand bargain” with Beijing — where the US pressures Taiwan into concessions
The term “assassin’s mace” originates from Chinese folklore, describing a concealed weapon used by a weaker hero to defeat a stronger adversary with an unexpected strike. In more general military parlance, the concept refers to an asymmetric capability that targets a critical vulnerability of an adversary. China has found its modern equivalent of the assassin’s mace with its high-altitude electromagnetic pulse (HEMP) weapons, which are nuclear warheads detonated at a high altitude, emitting intense electromagnetic radiation capable of disabling and destroying electronics. An assassin’s mace weapon possesses two essential characteristics: strategic surprise and the ability to neutralize a core dependency.
Chinese President and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Chairman Xi Jinping (習近平) said in a politburo speech late last month that his party must protect the “bottom line” to prevent systemic threats. The tone of his address was grave, revealing deep anxieties about China’s current state of affairs. Essentially, what he worries most about is systemic threats to China’s normal development as a country. The US-China trade war has turned white hot: China’s export orders have plummeted, Chinese firms and enterprises are shutting up shop, and local debt risks are mounting daily, causing China’s economy to flag externally and hemorrhage internally. China’s
During the “426 rally” organized by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party under the slogan “fight green communism, resist dictatorship,” leaders from the two opposition parties framed it as a battle against an allegedly authoritarian administration led by President William Lai (賴清德). While criticism of the government can be a healthy expression of a vibrant, pluralistic society, and protests are quite common in Taiwan, the discourse of the 426 rally nonetheless betrayed troubling signs of collective amnesia. Specifically, the KMT, which imposed 38 years of martial law in Taiwan from 1949 to 1987, has never fully faced its