Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
語言:
English
Photo Credit: KmccwikiAD/WikiCommons/CC BY-SA 4.0
A HISTORIC RECALL of Kinmen County Council Speaker Hung Yun-tien failed earlier this month. The recall was the first of its kind, in that those exist on the books for municipal county speakers to recall a county speaker under Article 46 of the Local Government Act, this was never before attempted since the law was passed in 1999.
The recall did not succeed because of Kinmen’s 19 county councilors, only eight were present, and only six signed in. As such, the vote did not pass, in that a recall needs to be attended by more than half of county councilors and has to be supported by 2/3rd of those present. As such, Deputy Council Speaker Ouyang Yi-hsiung declared that the meeting would be adjourned after 16 seconds. It was a surprise when news of the attempted recall first broke in late August.
While many recalls in the past few years of Taiwanese politics occurred due to the pan-Green camp seeking to recall pan-Blue politicians or vice-versa, this did not occur due to party politics. Kinmen has only one DPP county councilor. The rest are members of the KMT or largely pan-Blue-leaning independents. Indeed, Chou Tzu-chieh, the initiator of the recall vote, is from the KMT. So, too, is Hung. In this way, the recall vote could be understood as a split within the KMT.
The recall petition was originally backed by nine county councilors. One county councilor, Tang Li-hui, did not attend the vote due to claiming to feel unwell. During the day of the recall vote, one county councilor, Dong Sen-bao refused to sign, while another, Hsu Da-hao, signed too late and so his signature was invalidated. Still another county councilor, Hung Chen-fa, accidentally signed where Hung Hung-bin’s signature should have been and so his signature was also invalidated.
It is somewhat unclear as to why Kinmen county councilors called for Hung’s recall, as well as why the recall vote apparently failed in such a clownish manner.
The attempted recall against Hung occurred after online reports that he had purchased jars of Kinmen Kaoliang at duty-free prices to sell at marked-up prices in China for profit. The Hung administration has denied this, instead emphasizing that it purchased 50 official collectible Kinmen Kaoliang for official use.
Hung was also accused of attempting to influence personnel decisions at the county government-run Kinmen Kaoliang distillery. Kinmen Kaoliang Liquor, which produces the Kinmen Kaoliang–the iconic Taiwanese hard liquor made from sorghum–is owned by the Kinmen County government. To this extent, Hung was accused of cutting off broadcasts from the county council in order to interfere with them politically, ordering government staff to serve as his wife’s driver, and building an illegal guest house for himself.
Perhaps pointing to deeply rooted issues of corruption in Kinmen, this is not the first time that high-level Kinmen politicians have faced graft allegations regarding Kinmen Kaoliang.
In May, former Kinmen county magistrate Lee Wo-shih was sentenced to 90 months in prison. Lee was Kinmen county magistrate between 2010 and 2014, as a member of the KMT. Lee was previously a New Party member until 2007.
Photo credit: Rheins/WikiCommons/CC BY 3.0
Lee’s sentence was on the basis of accepting bribes from Firich Enterprises Company head Hsu Ming-che. Hsu handed one million NT in a bag to Lee’s wife, Su Feng-ying, during a dinner while Lee was running for office. The meeting took place at the Palace Mansion, widely known as the most expensive luxury property in Taiwan.
Hsu asked Lee to lower the price of a high-end baijiu line of Kinmen Kaoliang, which he had previously discussed the prospects of marketing in the Chinese market with Lee. Investigators found that after accepting the bribe, Hsu indeed pressured Kinmen Kaoliang Liquor to lower the base price of the baijiu brand. While the marketing, promotion, and packaging of the baijiu line were to be decided by a public tender, Lee agreed that this would be carried out by Hsu’s preferred company.
But the baijiu deal was part of a more extensive political relationship between Hsu, as well as another businessman surnamed Huang, and Lee. Hsu and Huang reportedly spent tens of millions of NT subsidizing political ads for Lee while campaigning, in the hopes that Lee would assist them in overturning laws forbidding offshore gambling in Kinmen or outlying islands of Taiwan. The Lee case, then, could potentially be a precedent for current controversies in Kinmen.
Yet the reason for the controversy could ultimately go back to competing politicians in Kinmen. Hung is the only Kinmen county council speaker to ever win two consecutive terms. Nevertheless, Chou Tzu-chieh challenged him for the position of county council speaker in 2022, after previously serving as Hung’s deputy county council speaker, during which the two were viewed as having a conflicted political relationship.