Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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A RECENT PIECE by Hilton Yip in Foreign Policy proves to be a highly cherry-picked take on current contentions in the Taiwanese legislature.
Yip seems to be highly interested in depicting Taiwan’s looming constitutional crisis as the fault of the executive branch of government, which is currently controlled by the DPP. But to do this, Yip makes a number of glaring omissions.
A series of constitutional crises are looming for Taiwan. None of these are the result of any actions by the executive branch. For one, the legislature–which is held by a slim KMT minority–currently aims to freeze the Constitutional Court in order to prevent it from making rulings that could strike down legislation as unconstitutional. This would be to prevent a repeat of the Constitutional Court striking down powers sought by the KMT in the legislature last year which would have arrogated powers that normally belong to the judiciary and executive branches of government to the legislature.
Similarly, the KMT first sought to block the national budget from passing last year, then this year called for drastic cuts of 34% to available government spending. This move by the legislature can be understood as an attempt by the legislature to claim the powers of budgeting that normally belong to the executive branch of government. These are the largest set of budget cuts in Taiwanese history and will impact not only Taiwan’s defense budget at a time when the US is seeking to pressure Taiwan to increase military spending but also social services and cultural funding.
Yip sees fit not to mention this, but provides little evidence to back his claim that the legislature is only reacting to overreach by the executive branch of government. To claim that there has been executive overreach, Yip cites a post made by the DPP legislative caucus on social media initially expressing approval for South Korea’s declaration of martial law, which was quickly deleted in twenty minutes and replaced by a condemnation of Taiwan’s own history of martial law.
One notes that what was probably an uninformed social media post from a staffer, which was then retracted in twenty minutes, hardly constitutes presidential policy. Since then, the DPP has held multiple press conferences apologizing for the mistake.
Yip then leans into the conspiratorial in order to claim that the DPP is targeting political opponents, including claiming that the imprisonment of former Taipei mayor Ko Wen-je of the TPP is political persecution. Here, Yip is also selective in what he decides to refer to. Charges against Ko began with Taipei city councilor Chung Hsiao-ping of the KMT, not the DPP. Documentation of corruption by Ko is substantial, including a plethora of Excel spreadsheets, USB drives, and hundreds of pages of messages. The KMT itself did not initially take a stance on the charges against Ko, given that they could be true, but later committed to defending Ko in order to maintain its alliance with the TPP.
But the independence of the judiciary remains alive and well in Taiwan. In the same timeframe, high-profile pan-Green politicians such as Cheng Wen-tsan of the DPP–like Ko, formerly a presidential contender–also face lengthy jail sentences. As with their KMT and TPP counterparts, a number of DPP politicians are also under investigation or serving jail time for corruption charges. Yip acts as though this is not the case.
To paint the DPP as undemocratic, Yip depicts the DPP as out to stir up trouble in the legislature in resorting to violence to block KMT-backed legislation, even if he acknowledges that both political parties have a tendency to fight for the cameras. Certainly, both parties fight in the legislature–one remembers when the KMT occupied the legislature and threw pig guts on the assembly floor at DPP politicians in order to protest the lifting of restrictions on imports of US pork.
But Yip fails to mention any of the reasons as to why the DPP undertook such actions, including the KMT physically shutting all DPP politicians from participating in committee review or readings of legislation in order to force them through–this despite that the KMT and TPP combined only have a narrow ten seats more than the DPP.
Indeed, this narrow majority hardly gives the pan-Blue camp the popular mandate to reshape government in its image, as Yup seems to think. Except for the design of Taiwan’s government system to have electoral seats reserved for minority groups, the DPP likely won a majority in government.
Yip, then, paints the series of recalls against KMT politicians as simply causing social chaos and seeking to undermine democracy. What Yip does not mention is that the right to recall is enshrined in the constitution and serves as a means for the public to hit reset on the legislature in the absence of powers that do not exist in the Taiwanese political system, such as the presidential right to veto or dissolve the legislature. That KMT politicians pushed through legal changes aimed at raising the barriers for recalls to take place is likely to see a challenge in the Constitutional Court.
The gist of Yip’s argumentation can be summed up as that the DPP is to blame for any constitutional crisis in Taiwan, while the KMT is not to be blamed. To make this argument, Yip resorts to conspiratorial claims about DPP political persecution of the KMT, when evidently it is not as though KMT politicians in the legislature have been jailed en masse for their obstructionism–the fact that they continue to be obstructionist in the legislature is proof against any far-flung claims of pan-Green authoritarianism.
Yet to make this argument, Yip has to resort to cherry-picking in a way that does not meet the basic threshold for fact-checking. While an op-ed, one still expects op-eds to be based on facts, rather than attempts to paper over Taiwanese politics for a foreign audience. After all, while Yip warns of a constitutional crisis, he is unable to name even one constitutional crisis looming that is a result of actions by Taiwan’s executive branch. His piece proves fallow argumentation, then.