Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
語言:
English
Photo Credit: KMT/Facebook
THE ONGOING “Great Recall Movement” against the KMT proves unprecedented in Taiwanese history. Namely, there has never been a campaign to recall all the legislators of a specific political camp.
Despite efforts after the Sunflower Movement to target specific, much-hated KMT legislators by way of what was termed the “Appendectomy Project,” they never got as far as the present. And though in the wake of his disastrous 2020 presidential campaign, Han Kuo-yu was recalled as mayor of Kaohsiung, this was mostly a product of how Han came to be seen as mismanaging and then abandoning his home constituency to run for president. The recall proves qualitatively different than such past recall efforts.
How is it, then, that the “Great Recall Movement” has gotten so far? Though part of it returns to that benchmarks to hold recalls are relatively low at present, this is insufficient to explain how the “Great Recall Movement” came to encompass Taiwanese society.
After all, though the KMT has attempted to frame the recalls as DPP-organized, they are anything but. Civil society groups organized from the bottom up across Taiwan, often through self-initiated activity, in order for recalls to take place. And though certainly, the DPP has thrown its weight behind recalls, the party has little capacity to organize petition signature collection and recall campaigning on as wide a scale as has taken place.
In this sense, one might examine what exactly it is that has outraged the Taiwanese public, to allow for the outbreak of the “Great Recall Movement”. Certainly, the recalls are a larger development in Taiwanese politics that returns to public anger against the KMT’s actions in the last two years.
KMT actions that outraged the public include seeking to expand legislative powers last year in a manner that led to the emergence of the Bluebird Movement. This move provoked fears that the KMT was attempting a power grab through a drastic expansion of legislative powers. At present, the KMT has also frozen the Constitutional Court, to surprising little public reaction. But the most direct cause of the recalls was the budget cuts pushed through into law by the KMT, which are the largest set of budget cuts in Taiwanese history.
One cause of anger is the means by which the KMT pushed bills through into law, taking advantage of its current slim majority in the legislature, and doing so in a manner that circumvents oversight process. But there is relatively little focus on the “black box” at present, in public discourse as occurred when the KMT pushed the Cross-Strait Services Trade Agreement into law a decade prior. The public is not primarily angered by the lacking transparency of the KMT’s actions.
Instead, the KMT is accused of collusion with China and seeking to undermine the institutions of Taiwanese democracy to please China. This is a way that the cross-strait frame more overtly intrudes into the present “Great Recall Movement” than with the Sunflower Movement a decade ago, even if the Sunflower Movement was still a movement whose causes lay in concerns about Chinese influence over Taiwan.
This shift marks the difference in the politics of 2025 versus those of 2014, perhaps. One notes that the eruption of the Sunflower Movement in 2014 took place only two years into the rule of Chinese President Xi Jinping, and the large geopolitical shifts in the world since the 2019 Hong Kong protests, and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. It can only be expected that the Taiwanese public is more concerned about the threat of a Chinese invasion than a decade prior.
At the same time, another factor is that the KMT’s actions more broadly have angered various specific demographics among Taiwanese society, who have since become highly active in recall campaigning.
To take one example, the budget cuts affected cultural funding for artists, musicians, writers, and other cultural workers. When confronted with this, KMT legislator Chen Yu-jen retorted that she could recite Tang poetry by heart, suggesting that there is no need to know contemporary Taiwanese art, and called artists beggars.
It may not be surprising, then, that cultural workers have been highly active in the recall campaigns, often serving to produce the visuals for campaigns, or translating complex political procedures into language that regular citizenry can understand.
Other demographics that the KMT has angered are, in fact, demographics that have traditionally supported it. Public sector workers, for example, such as at Taiwan’s state-run power utility Taipower, were targeted through cuts to subsidies. The subsidies keep Taiwan’s electricity prices artificially low, but the KMT is likely hoping that electricity prices rise and that the public blames the DPP.
Still, targeting Taipower at a time when Taipower workers have been publicly praised for their efforts to restore the power grid after Typhoon Danas left over 900,000 households without power earlier this month may not prove wise, in angering the public. This is all the more the case given injuries suffered by Taipower workers in restoring power that left one individual in critical condition. This is probably one reason why the KMT eventually backed away from some of its intended cuts to Taipower funding.
To this extent, pan-Blue veterans referring to themselves as the “True Blue Army” have also been among those to campaign against the KMT, claiming that the party has drifted far from its roots and sold out to the CCP. Such veterans are angered by KMT politicians acting as proxies for the CCP in Taiwan. However, it is also possible that such veterans are angered by the KMT’s budget cuts targeting Taiwan’s defense expenditure, even as the KMT also sought to keep the military happy by increasing salaries, seeing as members of the military traditionally vote KMT. Such actions may be seen as a brazen attempt at vote buying.
But more generally, it is also the case that members of the KMT have outraged the public through disdainful comments, as in media commentator Jaw Shaw-kong calling recall campaigners “ants.” KMT politicians such as Weng Hsiao-ling have also outraged the public with continual comments emphasizing views of Taiwan as being part of China. The KMT has increasingly offended moderates with unwise political comments.
In this light, it seems very possible that a crucial factor in the public rising up against the KMT may be that the KMT has simply angered too many demographics in society. If so, this would be the latest incident in the KMT’s failure to manage its public image.