Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱) yesterday dismissed the Presidential Office’s suggestion to push for legislation banning ethnic discrimination and ensuring transitional justice, saying pursuit of the latter could lead to greater social divisions and hatred.
“It would be better to not mix things together. We should seek to understand what the true essence of transitional justice is. If it targets certain individuals or has particular ways of handling things, then I wonder whether the objective is to achieve justice or twist it,” Hung said in Taipei.
If the goal is to “twist” justice, then transitional justice will not promote social harmony, but instead could aggravate divisions and hatred, she added.
Hung was responding to comments made by Presidential Office spokesman Alex Huang (黃重諺) on Saturday, who welcomed the KMT’s willingness to focus on ethnic equality and urged Hung and the KMT to join the government’s efforts to push for transitional justice to ensure a “true” implementation of freedom, democracy, justice and human rights.
Huang’s remarks came after Hung announced the KMT’s plan to propose legislation banning “discrimination based on ethnicity,” amid public outcry over self-styled citizen reporter Hung Su-chu’s (洪素珠) recent verbal abuse of older waishengren (外省人) — a term used to refer to people who fled to Taiwan with the KMT regime in 1949 after its defeat in the Chinese Civil War.
The KMT also issued a statement yesterday denouncing the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) promotion of transitional justice as a ploy to sow ethnic hatred and a catalyst for bigoted rhetoric, such as that voiced by the Taiwan Civil Government, a group with which Hung Su-chu is affiliated.
“The DPP’s transitional justice plan and the KMT’s ethnic discrimination legislation proposal are fundamentally different,” KMT Culture and Communications Committee director Chow Chi-wai (周志偉) said in the statement.
“What we aim to do is eliminate hatred,” Chow said.
Instead of promoting legislation concerning people’s livelihoods, Chow said that the Legislative Yuan, in which the DPP has the majority, has apparently focused on advocating for legislation to manage illicit party assets and promoting transitional justice.
Taiwan has a pluralistic, immigrant society that revolves around the Zhonghua culture (中華文化), Chow said, urging the DPP to support the KMT’s ethnic discrimination bill, as it endeavors to ensure respect and tolerance among people with different ethnic backgrounds.
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