Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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Photo Credit: KMT/Facebook
ATTACKS BY THE KMT on DPP legislator Puma Shen have continued. In recent days, however, this has taken the unusual turn of claiming that Shen is an American spy. KMT legislative caucus leader Fu Kun-chi has been particularly emphatic on such claims.
Allegations against politicians of secretly being US spies are not new for the KMT. None other than current KMT chair Eric Chu was once accused of being a US spy by deep blue diehards in the party. This is due to the fact that Chu was in the past viewed as a moderate. Like Shen, Chu is also US-educated, having gone to graduate school there and previously served as an academic in the US.
Claims by Fu that Shen is an American spy hinge on allegations that the Kuma Academy, which was founded by Shen, received special funding from the US to conduct special training. Though this could, in fact, be true, Fu has indulged in the conspiratorial, suggesting that Shen’s aims in establishing what is Taiwan’s best-known civil defense organization are because of nefarious directives from his American minders. Fu stated, “Is he hiding a special operative mission?”, speaking of Shen in public comments.
To this end, the KMT has sought to attack Shen’s father, the owner of Sicuens International Company, for doing business in China. The senior Shen, Shen Tu-cheng, was recently sanctioned by the Chinese government over his car parts business.
Shen has criticized the KMT for taking China’s cues in attacking his father shortly after he was sanctioned by the Chinese government. The Chinese government was likely aiming to lend credence to such attacks in sanctioning Shen Tu-cheng. And the KMT has complied, following suit with a round of criticisms against Shen Tu-cheng.
But the KMT’s aims would be to suggest that the DPP is hypocritical in strengthening security measures against Chinese infiltration and that the DPP itself does business in China. More generally, the KMT has sought to paint Shen as a war profiteer, in having a parent who does business in China, but depicting the younger Shen as accepting money from the US and profiting from the sale of kits sold as disaster relief preparation.
This is not the first time that the KMT has leaned into conspiratorial accusations about the US having nefarious means. KMT legislator Hsu Chiao-hsin, for example, previously lashed out at US veterans’ organization Spirit of America, claiming that it is an organization that foments war wherever it goes, and that its presence in Taiwan was with the aim of creating conflict in a conspiratorial claim not so dissimilar from the Syrian White Helmets. Pan-blue outlets such as the United Daily News have also reported claims that the US has a secret plan to “destroy” Taiwan in the event of war, without elaborating what this would entail, as well as that the US was engaged in bioweapons development in Taiwan in a series of claims that likely drew from Chinese disinformation claiming that COVID-19 was a US bioweapon.
Interestingly, the KMT’s attacks on Shen are probably aimed at diluting the effect of when spy cases involving pan-Blue political figures come to light. Though there have also been cases of individuals in the DPP found to be spying for the Chinese government, such as most notably an aide of former Minister of Foreign Affairs Joseph Wu, there are usually many more cases of pan-Blue individuals who spy for China. Most recently, legislator Cheng Cheng-chien faces allegations of passing on information to China through an aide and receiving funding from China. Pan-Blue media outlets such as Want Want Group-owned China Times and CtiTV have also been accused of receiving Chinese funding and allowing China’s Taiwan Affairs Office to have a say in their editorial direction.
The KMT would be seeking to establish a logic of equivalency in suggesting that Shen, in turn, receives orders from the US. The KMT would also be seeking to suggest that Shen is hypocritical in that his family actually does business with China.
This would not be the first time that Fu has attempted to establish this logic of equivalence with the DPP. Before his current rehabilitation and rise to power, Fu was a controversial figure in even the KMT due to his long-standing record of political corruption.
Before a jail stint on insider trading charges in the 2000s, Fu divorced his wife, Hsu Cheng-wei, and named her deputy county commissioner of Hualien. Consequently, when Fu was in jail, Hsu would come to serve as acting county commissioner. Fu later faced charges over a fake divorce, though Hsu is still county commissioner of Hualien today.
Through his actions in naming his wife to a position of political power, Fu was likely seeking to invoke the history of female DPP politicians who ran for office after their husbands were jailed or died as a result of activism. Yet this would be to disguise corruption by drawing on a protest repertoire more usually associated with the DPP.
It is a broader pattern for the pan-Blue camp to draw on political repertoires it sees as a successful DPP tactic in past years, including various “mimetic distortion” in which it seeks to imitate the actions of the 2014 Sunflower Movement in staging abortive occupations of the legislature. If the DPP was successfully able to win office in past elections by galvanizing the public about the perceived threat of China, with the view that the KMT is China’s proxy in Taiwan. At a time when the KMT has embraced a form of US-skepticism that is, in most cases, conspiratorial in tenor, it may not be surprising that the KMT would try to depict the DPP as America’s domestic proxy.