Taiwan’s DPP Should Rein in Radicals
Written by Howard Shen, Deputy Secretary General of the International Young Democrat Union, and Assistant Director of International Affairs for the Kuomintang
The 2024 Republic of China (ROC/Taiwan) presidential election resulted in the victory of William Lai of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), who was just inaugurated on May 20th. Although a handover from Tsai Ing-Wen to Willaim Lai seems like DPP continuity in the highest office of the ROC, the Tsai-Lai feud ahead of the 2020 presidential election has long exposed the fissures, fractures, and fault lines across the DPP. Lai and his friends are gearing up to prove that Lai, a radical “Deep Green” member of the DPP, is better than Tsai, a “Light Green”.
Lai is no Tsai for a lot of reasons. For one thing, Tsai’s family had close relations with the Kuomintang (KMT) and the United States. She herself even worked for the KMT under President Lee Teng-Hui as a trade policy specialist for a while and only joined the DPP in 2004. Lai, on the other hand, has been a staunch advocate for the DPP’s fundamentalist, leftist cause since he entered politics over three decades ago.
Meanwhile, the current DPP legislative minority has done nothing but ridicule and insult anything the KMT legislative plurality does in the Legislative Yuan. The DPP has been too comfortable with freestyling their unchecked way through legislative proceedings as a swelled-headed bunch of partisan rubber stamps for the past eight years when the DPP had absolute control over all branches of government.
On May 17th, 2024, three days before the inauguration, it was most deplorable that the DPP resorted to physical violence to stop from passing a series of bills that would give the Legislative Yuan more legislative oversight over the executive branch. A male DPP legislator assaulted one female KMT legislator twice with WWE-like takedowns. Another DPP legislator was shameless enough to assault a 73-year-old neutral parliamentarian, snatch his legislative documents from him, and then storm out of the building with the documents with the goal of paralyzing the proceedings. Some DPP legislators even threw themselves combatively on top of the human shield formed by the KMT legislative caucus around the speaker in an attempt to occupy the speaker’s chair and stop the speaker from performing his duties.
President and DPP chairman William Lai should take responsibility, demand his legislative caucus behave in a civilized manner, treat his KMT colleagues with respect, and apologize.
Holding onto their minority government, the DPP has no intention whatsoever in building consensus across the aisle or listening to the popular majority who voted against them. Once the KMT nominated Han Kuo-Yu as its candidate for the legislative speakership in January, the DPP has done nothing to even try to understand what his vision for the Legislative Yuan is.
The DPP’s knee-jerk reflex was demonstrated through their criticism of Han Kuo-Yu’s lack of international affairs experience and allegations about how it would constrain or jeopardize the Legislative Yuan’s parliamentary diplomacy. What radicals within the DPP have failed to realize is that former Speaker You Si-Kun did not have any international affairs experience at all prior to his role as Speaker of the Legislative Yuan, while Han Kuo-Yu at least graduated from Soochow University with a degree in English literature. Granted, a bachelor’s degree in English literature does not even fulfill the bare minimum understanding of international affairs required to thrive on the international stage as a seasoned statesman. However, it does not give the DPP any right to make false assumptions about Han without first seeing for themselves what tactics Han has in his arsenal.
The KMT has always supported a strong national defense and deep defense relations with the United States to deter the Chinese Communist Party’s militarist adventurism. The KMT also seeks to maintain cross-Strait communication channels to manage risks and reduce miscalculations. For the past two decades, the KMT’s external affairs guideline has been being “pro-United States, peaceful with the mainland, and friends with Japan.”
Lo and behold, according to a Taiwan Public Opinion Foundation poll on March 19th, Han Kuo-Yu was approved by 52 percent of those surveyed while Tsai Ing-Wen was approved by 45 percent and Chen Chien-Jen 48 percent. If we break down Han’s numbers, you will find that 58 percent of those surveyed aged between 20 and 24 approved Han’s speakership, which was also approved by 51 percent of college graduates. Even more surprising, among supporters of the DPP, 35 percent expressed their approval. This ought to teach the quick judgers a lesson.
Aside from the DPP’s partisan attacks on Speaker Han, Taiwan’s next major source of uncertainty is the inauguration of William Lai. Lai’s lack of experience managing Taiwan’s relationship with Beijing, his poor and reckless choices of words in describing sensitive contentions across the Taiwan Strait, and the clumsy concealment of his true political intentions have only cemented the impression that Lai is no Tsai.
Lai’s controversial pick for Vice Premier, Cheng Li-Chun, has not impressed either. Back in 2016, when she had just assumed her position as Culture Minister under the Tsai administration, she said with absolute pride that her favorite philosopher is Karl Marx, and her favorite book is The Communist Manifesto. And all the news about how her husband has made money by investing in mainland China was already an eyeful and does not come as a surprise either. She tried to dismiss the claims and said her husband has never been to the mainland since they got married and has pulled out investments from the mainland already. To everyone’s surprise, Legislator Hsu Chiao-Hsin was able to dig deep enough and found transaction statements that prove a direct linkage between her husband’s company in Taiwan and a company located in Dongguan, Guangdong Province on mainland China.
What soon-to-be Vice Premier Cheng said at a recent public event was no less astonishing. She laid out her priorities after she assumes the position: “advancing social transformation and national reconstruction” (進行社會改造與國家重建) and “cleansing every individual’s life” (洗滌每個人的人生). These “priorities” do make one wonder if she is trying to take us back to mid the-1960s People’s Republic of China. Her poor track record of advancing a radical imagination-based agenda without forming a national cultural consensus beforehand is yet another source of uncertainty and instability from the DPP as Taiwan moves dangerously into their latest four-year plan.
The DPP knows how to play the media and fool those who do not pay attention to Taiwanese politics as closely as Taiwanese people do, but more often do they fail to recognize where the boundaries lie. The people voted against them in January. If they keep allowing their radical voices to expend the waning political capital of their presidential plurality, the DPP will not have any of its own feet left to shoot by the next election.