The Ill-gotten Party Assets Settlement Committee has questioned the legitimacy of the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) alleged request to use its Bank SinoPac account to pay for its Sun Yat-sen Scholarship program.
Sources have said that the party sought the committee’s permission to use NT$16 million (US$541,950) from an account at Bank SinoPac that the committee froze in 2016.
According to the Act Governing the Handling of Ill-gotten Properties by Political Parties and Their Affiliate Organizations (政黨及其附隨組織不當取得財產處理條例), parties are prohibited from handling ill-gotten properties unless they are fulfilling legal duties or other legitimate reasons, a committee member said.
It would be difficult to consider the Sun Yat-sen Scholarship as a legitimate reason under the act, the member said.
The scholarship program has been controversial, as oral historical records and sources have said that some recipients acted as spies for the KMT, although the exact number is not known, the member said.
Early dangwai (黨外, “outside the party”) members and people involved in study-abroad circles all knew that the KMT sent people overseas to secretly gather information about dangwai members and help compile a blacklist, the committee member said.
Taiwanese who took part in protests overseas often wore masks to protect themselves because many students studying abroad on Sun Yat-sen scholarships would conduct surveillance for the KMT by filming, taking photographs and reporting on conversations, the committee member added.
According to US government documents and sources, the Sun Yat-sen Scholarship is not a simple study-abroad scholarship, but a behind-the-scenes whistle-blowing mission with political “colors,” the member added.
Such activities violate human rights, the member said.
The committee was established to handle questionable party assets and transitional justice, so how could it approve the use of ill-gotten party assets to pay for the scholarship program, as that could be seen as approval of the KMT’s past unjust and unequal behavior, the member added.
People who received a scholarship are called “Sun Yat-sen scholars” inside the KMT, an unnamed source said.
The first scholarships were awarded in 1960 to 20 people, including Chiang Pin-kung (江丙坤), who later became chairman of the Straits Exchange Foundation, the source said.
Among the more than 100 others are former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), who received a scholarship in 1973, and former Examination Yuan president John Kuan (關中).
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