The Foreigner in Formosa

Lee Teng-hui On Taiwan's Current Government

From Monday's Taipei Times:

Former president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) yesterday accused President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) of incompetency, lashing out at his administration for failing to offer concrete measures to curb public apprehension over events such as the recent melamine contamination and the poor performance of the TAIEX.

Now, I've seen a few possible explanations for the governments' poor performance:

1)  President Ma Ying-jeou is attempting to create a precedent for a "Queen of England" presidency for Taiwan.  Unfortunately for him, he has no Taiwanese model for him to draw upon.

2)  The KMT has been out of power for 8 years, and its governing skills are out of practice.

Without disagreeing with point #1, I'd like to elaborate a little upon point #2.  While it's true that the KMT lost control over the executive for the last 8 years, it DID have effective working control over the legislative branch over the same time frame.  So how did it spend its time?  Did the KMT spend the last 8 years KEEPING ITS GOVERNING SKILLS SHARP by actually passing into law legislative proposals that would benefit Taiwan? 

Or did it DULL THAT EDGE by spending those 8 years engaged only in pointless, petty obstructionism? *

I've seen the China Post sneer at former President Chen Shui-bian's record, asking what it was that Chen accomplished over the last 8 years.  I can think of a few things**, but let me turn the question around.  What did the KMT-dominated LEGISLATURE accomplish in the last 8 years?  They had a majority, after all.  Their votes were law -- Taiwanese presidents have no veto power.

Once more,  what legislative successes can KMT lawmakers boast about on THEIR resumes?  Hmm?  Anyone?  Anyone?  I'm waiting . . .

A former marathon winner comes out of a long retirement for a big race.  He thinks he's got a good chance to win again.  But does he?

Not if he's spent the last 8 years scarfing down doughnuts and grousing about how easy kids today have got it.  If he hasn't spent enough time in training, maintaining his skills, our runner's fans are in for a major disappointment.
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*  Speaking of pointless, petty obstructionism, here's a case in point:

The Presidential Office is thankful that the US government sent an official notification on Friday to Congress on the sale of five major packages of weaponry to Taiwan, officials said yesterday, adding that the move signaled a new era of mutual trust between Taiwan and the US.

“The notification of the US government put an end to the turbulence of the past eight years and rebuilds mutual trust between the US and Taiwan,” Presidential Office Spokesman Wang Yu-chih (王郁琦) said yesterday.

Uh-uh -- you don't get off that easy, Mr. Wang.  Your boss, President Ma Ying-jeou, spent TWO YEARS boycotting those arms packages when he was in opposition.  As KMT chairman, Ma blocked 'em 60 times in the legislature.  Nyet, nyet, nyet, nyet . . .  Sixty times.  You can't pawn THAT off on the former president, buddy.

In the end, Ma relented on the special arms bill.  By that time however, America viewed him and the KMT as fundamentally untrustworthy.  And the U.S. put the weapons sale on hold.

And so it was that the KMT was reduced to begging -- BEGGING! -- for that which it had so casually boycotted and dismissed as unnecessary just a few months earlier:

The United States could see its credibility among Taiwanese at stake if it fails to approve a pending Taiwan arms procurement package . . .  [Taiwanese] Defense Minister Chen Chao-min said Monday.

Please, please, please, sell us these weapons.  'Cause if you don't, uh . . . you'll, you'll . . . look really bad.  Really, REALLY bad . . . The passive-aggressive approach -- yeah, that's the ticket!

As for the credibility of the Ma Ying-jeou administration, we'll escape unscathed.  Why, we're a lean, mean, governin' machine.

With the 24% approval rating to prove it.

**  At the top of my head, Chen's accomplishments as president include the de-politicization of Taiwan's military, increased democritization (via a new referendum law) and his partially-successful attempts to de-normalize Taiwanese worship of former dictators Chiang Kai-shek and Chiang Ching-kuo.

Set against that record are troubling charges of corruption and money-laundering.  Which if proven true, make his presidency a very mixed bag.

Taiwanese Corruption In Perspective

Been wanting to comment on the China Post's Three cheers for Hugo Chavez editorial for a while now.  Same old "Dictatorship ain't so bad as long as the economy hums along" schtick.  Yeesh.  While I'm not going to reply to the cries of We're not worthy!, I will to this point:

The Venezuela [Chavez] has ruled since 1999 will still be plagued by corruption and cronyism.  But what country is immune to these?  Certainly, Taiwan is not one to cast the first stone.

Taiwan's China Post likes to portray the Republic of China as being a den of corruption under President Chen, but the numbers don't exactly support that characterization.  According to Transparency International, Taiwan is the 34th cleanest government on the face of the earth (tied with Macao and the United Arab Emirates).  Meanwhile, Venezuela ranks 162nd, putting its level of governmental corruption on par with nations like Bangladesh and Cambodia.  (Only 13 out of the 180 countries surveyed were found to be more corrupt than Venezuela.)

Now, being #34 is nothing to brag about, and Taiwan's government certainly has plenty of room for improvement.  But being #34 is a heck of a lot better than being #162, any day of the week.  Or, to put it another way:  if Taiwan were to crack down on its corruption problem and move up 34 places in the rankings, it'd join the company of clean-government winners Finland, Denmark and New Zealand.  And a similar 34-place improvement on the part of Venezuela?  Well, that'd put it just a bit ahead of such corruption-free nations as Iran, Libya and the Philippines.

The Taipei Times made a similar point on Dec 11th:

What matters is that systems of accountability [in Taiwan] are in place to deal with these robber barons.  The fact that 10 ministers have been arrested in less than eight years is proof that the system, though imperfect, is working.

10 ministers arrested in less than 8 years?  That's a lot, and let's not pretend otherwise.  In Venezuela however, no ministers are being arrested (or even being investigated); government auditors instead target a few local officials as the prime subjects of their financial probes.

(Doubtless that's because municipal corruption by mayors BELONGING TO THE OPPOSITION must be the biggest graft problem Venezuela faces.)

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Postscript:  Caracas Chronicles directs its readers to the Miami Herald's coverage of the Suitcase of Money scandal, where it is alleged that Hugo Chavez tried to illegally contribute $800,000 to Argentina's newly-elected president.  Naturally, this jarred my memory about a corruption scandal the China Post used to go on about concerning former Taiwanese president Lee Tung-hui. Story goes that an airplane carrying him was once ordered to leave the U.S. when it was discovered that he was trying to smuggle $17 million in 89 suitcases into the country.  Anyways, that's the story.

Funny thing though - Taiwanese papers seemed to have all the juicy details, but for some reason, there wasn't a PEEP about it from the American press.  Now, you'd think a big story like that - a foreign country's corrupt ex-president tries to launder 17 million dollars of ill-gotten loot in America - why, that'd be big news.  Surely at least ONE of the customs agents involved must have come home that night and said to his wife, "Honey, you wouldn't believe what happened at work today..."

So who does the guy's wife go to?  Not to the local papers - nah, that'd be too easy.  Instead, she places a long distance call.  To tell the press.

New York Times?  Nope.  The Washington Post?  Uh-uh.  Newsweek or Time Magazine?  In your dreams.

No, our American housewife's first choice is to call the China Times, et al.  In Taiwan.  Probably speaks to them in Mandarin.  Which by some miracle, she just HAPPENS to be fluent in.

Uh-huh.

(Gee whiz, the scandal here isn't that Lee Tung-hui tried to launder $17 million - which he didn't.  Or that KMT-affiliated newspapers would plug an obviously fictitious story about a president they hate with a passion.  No, the real scandal is that the Taiwanese educational system apparently produces sizable numbers of people who can't recognize a big, steaming pile of water buffalo poop when it stares them right in the face.)

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UPDATE (Dec 19/07):  Today's Taiwan News featured a story stating that Taiwan would not be included in Transparency International's 2007 survey, because the organization believes that local perceptions of the country's corruption level will be skewed in the run-up to the 2008 elections.

Mr. Lee Goes to America

Former Taiwanese President Lee Dung-hway, a practicing Christian, has previously compared the Taiwanese situation to that of the Jews during Exodus.  For those who are not familiar with the analogy, an Oct 23rd China Post write-up elaborates on the theme:

Comparing the present situation in Taiwan to the 40-year exile of the Israeli people following their exodus from Egypt, as recorded in the Bible, Lee said a number of people in Taiwan are disoriented and are thinking about going back to slavery in China, just like the Israeli people back then.

While it took 40 years for the Israeli people to reach their promised land, Taiwan cannot wait another 40 years, Lee said.

Having been ruled by foreign powers for more than 300 years, Taiwan must stand firm to its belief that "Taiwan is Taiwan, not a part of China" in order to secure its autonomy, he asserted.

http://www.chinapost.com.tw/taiwan/detail.asp?ID=70675&GRP=B

(On the topic of certain Taiwanese tempted to yield to slavery, I shall write another time.)

Lee's speech was delivered in LA during his current trip to America.  In the speech, he also labeled China a 'slave state', urged the free world not to invest in China, and called for a strategic alliance between America and Asian democracies India, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea.

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2005/10/23/2003276957

Ya gotta love that guy.  The Butchers of Beijing must be apoplectic.

Give 'em hell, Lee!

Sino-Japanese off-shore petroleum field dispute

The Chinese and the Japanese have been arguing for some time over sea territory between Shanghai and Okinawa.  The territory is said to have 7 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and possibly 100 billion barrels of oil.

It seems that the Chinese may have begun extraction from the disputed territory from a rig which was built in their own seas.  To mark the occasion, they paraded 5 warships in the area.  The whole situation is a little akin to that preceeding the First Gulf War, when Iraq accused Kuwait of horizontal drilling into Iraqi oil fields.

Japan is, of course, understandably unhappy about this.  They've announced that they'll soon begin drilling in the disputed zone.  In response, China said that doing so would be considered "an invasion" of Chinese territory.

Watch for more of this, as China "peacefully" rises.

http://www.chinapost.com.tw/asiapacific/detail.asp?ID=70686&GRP=C