Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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Photo Credit: KMT/Facebook
THE KMT HAS been accused of attempting to pass legislation in order to benefit the residents of Tsu Ren Eighth Village, which is in Xinyi in Taipei.
Current law defines military dependents’ villages as built before 1980 on the basis of the Act for Rebuilding Old Quarters for Military Dependents.. There are two different versions of legislation from KMT legislators Lo Chih-cheng and Ma Wen-chun that would change the bill, however. Lo’s version of the bill specifies that the act should also apply to buildings in urgent need of renovations built before the act took effect, with the state financing such renovations, while Ma’s version of the bill specifies that the government should finance the renovation of all military dependents’ villages.
The two versions of the bill have been criticized by civil society groups such as the Economic Democracy Union, as well as the DPP. In particular, the bill has been criticized as mostly made for the sake of the Tsu Ren Eighth Village, which was ruled by the Supreme Court in 2015 not to be a military dependents’ village. As the village is located on prime real estate in downtown Taipei, the legislation is criticized as intended to benefit them.
Military dependents’ villages figure heavily in the political imaginary of the KMT. Veterans and their families lived in poverty in ramshackle housing after they came to Taiwan in the wake of the Chinese Civil War. Some had never wished to join the KMT to begin with, but were forcibly conscripted and separated from their families by force.
That being said, other waishengren elites who came to Taiwan with the KMT lived in comparative luxury, including high-ranking military officials. As a whole, waishengren constituted a privileged economic and political elite during authoritarianism, working as members of government as civil servants, in the military, police, or as teachers in order to maintain the KMT’s grip on society.
The KMT has often played up the history of military villages in order to whitewash its history of authoritarian repression, in depicting the situation faced by residents of military dependents’ villages as though this was the situation faced by all waishengren. Similarly, the KMT has played up instances of when waishengren were on the receiving end of political violence during the 228 Massacre and the White Terror that followed to depict waishengren as, in fact, the most persecuted victims of the White Terror. This, too, would be a way of whitewashing the past crimes of the KMT during the White Terror.
The KMT has continued to frame itself as the defender of the interests of civil servants, the military, police, and teachers. This can be observed in the KMT’s efforts to undo reforms to the pension system that took place during the Tsai administration, which were intended to prevent the pension system from going bankrupt, in that civil servants, the military, police, and teachers were paid generous pensions during the authoritarian period in return for their political loyalty.
In the past decade, residents of a number of military dependents’ villages have been forcibly evicted from their homes when the state came and reclaimed their homes, or claimed that they were illegal settlers. In the years prior to the 2014 Sunflower Movement, activists who later became part of the movement were involved in demonstrating the evictions of often elderly and impoverished residents of such villages, even if they had a very different sense of political identity than pro-Taiwan Sunflower Movement activists.
At the same time, it is also the case that not all military dependents’ villages are impoverished. Some, in fact, may sit on what is today prime real estate, making the owners of such residences quite wealthy. Hence the current controversy.
This is not the only time that the KMT has been accused of attempting to allow for graft or political kickbacks in recent memory. Late last year, KMT legislator Chen Yu-chen came under fire for legislation that would require legislators to not have to file invoices for applying for subsidies earmarked for legislative assistants. This, too, was accused of allowing for blank checks for corruption, seeing as embezzling funds earmarked for legislative assistants is one of the most common forms of legislative graft.