Civic groups yesterday urged legislators to create councilor-at-large seats in local governments to attract more young people to local leadership positions and to root out party cronyism.
The long-standing Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) system of partisan clientelism, of which the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is also guilty, must be given up to allow room for local talent and smaller parties, Economic Democracy Union president Lin Hsiu-hsin (林秀幸) told a news conference at the Legislative Yuan in Taipei.
The nation cannot keep allowing party factions to run local governments, she said, calling on legislators to amend the Local Government Act (地方制度法) to allow for councilor-at-large seats, without changing the overall number of seats.
Photo: George Tsorng, Taipei Times
The nation’s local governments are its testing ground for democracy, but also its Achilles heel, Lin said.
Due to the threat posed by China, Taiwan is in a more perilous position than other third-wave democracies, she said.
To uproot historical threads of authoritarianism and prevent local governments from falling under China’s influence, the nation must go through a second democratic reformation and strengthen its sense of identity, she added.
After President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) was elected in 2016, Beijing refused to communicate with the central government, instead dealing directly with local groups and individuals, she said.
After the 2018 elections, in which the KMT won 15 city and county seats, Beijing shifted its focus to local government leaders, hoping to bypass the central leadership, she added.
Local governments are the last mile on the nation’s road to democracy, but they are also China’s shortest path to disruption, Lin said, calling for electoral reform in the hopes of opening up local leadership.
Reform is urgent, as Beijing is skilled at manipulating social divisions to weaken the state, Lin added.
She cited as examples the debates regarding marriage equality and food imports from Japan, saying that Beijing manipulated borough wardens, influential political figures and religious groups into mobilizing in opposition.
Comparing party councilor votes in the 2014 local elections, Taiwan Citizen Front deputy secretary-general Chen Ku-hsiung (陳估熊) said that the DPP received 4.51 million votes to the KMT’s 4.48 million, but only won 291 seats compared with 386 for the KMT.
The discrepancy was even higher in the 2016 general election, when the DPP won 44 percent of all party votes, but only 32 percent of local seats, while the KMT took 42 percent of local seats, despite only winning 27 percent of party votes, Chen said.
Many young people ran for local seats in the 2018 elections, but even fewer were elected than a decade earlier, Taiwan Youth Association for Democracy secretary-general Chang Yu-meng (張育萌) said.
In 1998, representatives aged 30 to 39 comprised 21.7 percent of local councils, but today the proportion has shrunk to only 13 percent, Chang said.
This is not unusual, as young people elected 10 years ago have leaned on local and family resources for re-election, he added.
About 34.5 percent of councilors are aged 50 to 59, while 23.9 percent are older than 60, he said, adding that these demographics do not reflect their constituents or the nation at large.
Local politics has become a game between factions buying off the right people, Chang said, adding that this lack of oversight presents a golden opportunity for Beijing.
The groups hope for the addition of at-large seats and revisions to election deposit rules so that more young people could have a fighting chance in the next local elections, he said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching