Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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Photo Credit: Hung Meng-kai/Facebook
A NEW CAMPAIGN by seven KMT lawmakers, who claim to have the support of the KMT legislative caucus as a whole, would put a proposal to institute caning as a punishment for “major crimes” to a national referendum. The proposal is led by KMT legislator Hung Meng-kai.
What is defined as a “major crime” is vague, consisting of various issues that the KMT believes it can win votes using. For example, this includes sexual assault, child abuse, and “large-scale fraud.”
The KMT has proposed implementing capital punishment for cases of child abuse in the past. Indeed, it is not incorrect that child abuse is an issue in Taiwanese society–at the press conference where Hung announced the campaign, he raised that over 140,000 reports to authorities about children were made in 2024. The same year, there were over 10,000 reported cases of sexual assault.
Similarly, issues of fraud are increasingly widespread in Taiwan. As Hung pointed out, in just January 2026, over 7 billion NT was lost to fraud. This occurs on a number of levels. For example, elderly who are unable to tell that the messages they receive online are fake are defrauded of their money, while young people lured by the promise of job opportunities are trapped in scam centers in Southeast Asia and forced to work scamming others.
Hung and the other KMT legislators who have made the proposal claim that existing punishments are insufficient, hence the need to introduce caning as a means of public shaming. Hung and his KMT colleagues likely have Singapore in mind as a model for Taiwan. Singapore has historically been a frequent point of comparison for the KMT, with the view that Singapore is another majority Han polity, has high international standing, and is economically competitive. Of course, one notes that Singapore is hardly a democracy.
DPP critics, then, have noted that the proposal would reflect badly on Taiwan’s international image. Other countries that have caning as a punishment include Brunei, Malaysia, and Singapore, as a legacy of British colonialism. Internationally, countries that are not former British colonies that have caning are often countries with a history of Islamist governments, such as Iran, parts of Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Yemen. Such countries differ depending on whether caning is held publicly or indoors.
Amnesty International has criticized caning as akin to torture. In response to the campaign, the National Human Rights Commission has criticized the proposal as violating human rights conventions to which Taiwan is a signatory. Consequently, it is possible that the proposal would be unconstitutional.
Even so, it is probable that the KMT is not serious about the proposal. Instead, the KMT is likely aiming to depict the DPP as weak on crime and failing to take the drastic action needed to keep Taiwanese society safe. It is in this vein that the KMT has repeatedly lashed out at the DPP on the issue of capital punishment, taking the view that capital punishment is a necessary deterrent to violent crime, and that by failing to exercise the death penalty on a regular basis, this increases violent crime in Taiwanese society. To defend against this claim, DPP presidential administrations–the DPP being internally divided on the issue of capital punishment–have sometimes strategically chosen to carry out executions ahead of elections.
Indeed, one notes that the KMT does not actually need to campaign among the general public to hold referendums, as it plans on doing for the proposal. Instead, using its current majority in the legislature, the KMT could simply push the referendum through. This would save on the expenditure and energy required to campaign and would be possible if the KMT legislative caucus as a whole were in support of the proposal.
Consequently, one believes that the KMT is not serious about the proposal, but has only made it in order to campaign. Last year, the KMT used its control of the legislature to pass referendums on capital punishment and on nuclear re-starts for the shuttered Ma-anshan nuclear power plant. The Central Election Commission approved the latter referendum but not the former, seeing as capital punishment is still on the books–except that the KMT was attempting to frame a Constitutional Court ruling that limited the scope of capital punishment as having been a de facto ban on capital punishment. More broadly, however, one notes that both major parties in Taiwan continue to have only punitive approaches to addressing crime, and this is not likely to change anytime soon.