Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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Photo Credit: Eric Chu/Facebook
THE KMT HAS hit out at funding for the Kuma Academy, the best-known of Taiwan’s civil defense initiatives.
In particular, the KMT has accused fundraising efforts for the Kuma Academy–which took place on a public welfare fundraising platform run by the Ministry of Health and Welfare–as being an effort to fund political activities. Laws forbid political activities from fundraising on public welfare platforms.
The Kuma Academy has stressed that its activities were in accordance with the law. Nevertheless, the broader effort by the KMT would be to paint the Kuma Academy as DPP-affiliated. As such, KMT legislators have pointed to the existence of photos with people holding DPP flags at Kuma Academy events. Likewise, the KMT has suggested that fundraising on public welfare platforms leads to funds being diverted away from welfare for women, the elderly, and children.
The KMT may be seeking to depict the Kuma Academy as DPP-affiliated in the way of former authoritarian institutions such as the Chinese Women’s League, which have been ruled by courts to be KMT-affiliated. Still, while the Kuma Academy has been incorporated into the Lai administration’s Whole-of-Society resilience initiatives and former Kuma Academy chair Puma Shen later became a DPP party list legislator, the organization is not subordinate to the DPP, and it can be critical of the DPP in its programming.
Consequently, the KMT has been criticized as simply following cues from China in targeting the Kuma Academy. Namely, the Chinese government has had a disproportionate response in targeting the Kuma Academy.
Social media post by the Kuma Academy responding to the allegations. Photo credit: Kuma Academy/Facebook
The Chinese government named the Kuma Academy as a whole to its list of most wanted Taiwanese independence separatists, marking the first time that China has taken aim at an institution or organization rather than an individual. Otherwise, several individuals associated with the Kuma Academy, including Puma Shen and UMC founder Robert Tsao, a funder of the Kuma Academy, were named to the list. Former Sunflower Movement student leader Lin Fei-fan, who now sits on the National Security Council and heads up Whole-of-Society resilience efforts, is also on the list.
In this sense, the Chinese government has signaled that it does not take kindly to efforts to strengthen civil defense in Taiwan. The KMT is accused of taking cues from its masters in Beijing, in this sense, in taking aim at the Kuma Academy.
That China’s most wanted list of Taiwanese independence separatists only names ten individuals, but three are linked to civil defense, may indicate the priority that China places on efforts to stem civil defense. By naming such individuals to this list, as well as the Kuma Academy as a whole, China may hope to dissuade members of the general public from joining civil defense initiatives. Furthermore, the Chinese government may have aimed to signal to the KMT that they should also target such efforts if they wish to receive backing from China.
This proves ironic, seeing as the history of civil defense efforts in Taiwan actually dates back to the authoritarian period, when the KMT viewed itself as at war with the CCP. But the KMT has now reinvented itself post-democratization into a pro-CCP party, while it is now the DPP that calls for cautious distance from China.
Still, one notes that for organizations such as the Kuma Academy, if they hope to win over the general public and scale up civil defense efforts, they cannot only be perceived as partisan pan-Green. In this sense, it is concerning if the KMT is able to paint the Kuma Academy or other civil defense organizations as politically partisan.
To this extent, however, the ability of such organizations to maintain political distance from the DPP even if working together with it–as part of Whole-of-Society resilience efforts–is important. And while the Kuma Academy is the best known civil defense organization, there are a number of such efforts underway in Taiwan. It is to be seen whether other organizations also become publicly known, or if they, too, will be targeted by the KMT.