| |
Taiwan: Dirty politics as
usual
By Laurence Eyton
TAIPEI - Whoever said that Christmas is a time
for giving probably had something in mind other than
large wads of cash in plain envelopes. These were,
however, the seasonal gifts that found their way into
the possession of an embarrassingly large number of city
councilors in Taiwan's second-largest city as incentives
to vote for one of their number, Chu An-hsiung, a
political independent, as speaker of the council in
elections held on Christmas Day.
The scandal
that has erupted around the Kaohsiung Speaker vote is
almost wearily familiar as part of Taiwan's corrupt
local politics as usual. What makes it remarkable is the
size of the corruption, the determination of the local
prosecutors to get to the bottom of the case and the
volume of evidence that is amassing from those who were
involved.
It is also interesting because its
chief protagonist is almost a textbook example of the
wheeler-dealer politician-businessman who dominate
Taiwan's political life, because the case itself shows
the effort of the major parties to try and distance
themselves from what are euphemistically known as
"traditional political practices" and a rising anger on
the part of the public at such shenanigans that might
express itself in a disillusionment with democracy - the
development of which in the past decade is, in many
eyes, Taiwan's chief claim on the world's respect.
Chu An-hsiung's career is typical of his class.
He started off as an accountant in the Formosa Plastics
Group. He entered politics in 1973, when the then
governing Kuomintang (KMT) was still largely composed of
exiles from mainland China but local elections were
being opened up for ambitious Taiwanese willing to toe
the party line. Chu won a set on the Kaohsiung City
Council. After two terms there he won a seat on the now
defunct Taiwan Provincial Assembly from where he was
elected by the assembly to the Control Yuan, Taiwan's
supreme government watchdog body. Meanwhile his wife
used the family's clout in Kaohsiung to get herself
elected as a legislator. From the mid-1980s until the
Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s, the Chus used
their political influence along with their business
connections to build their An Feng Group into Taiwan's
third-largest steelmaker.
Chu retired from the
Control Yuan in the early 1990s and returned to
Kaohsiung City Council where he continued to wield
formidable influence while his wife concentrated on
running the business. The Asian financial crisis,
however, proved the couple's financial undoing when An
Feng defaulted on its debts, precipitating a crisis at
the Pan-Asia Bank.
It's an interesting
illustration of Taiwan's crony capitalism at work that
at the time of the crisis, the KMT's financial supremo
at the time Liu Tai-ying, decided to make an NT$2.5
billion (US$72 million) investment in An Feng, despite
the fact that experts thought the company beyond saving.
And yet later the same year, Chu broke with the KMT and
ran for reelection to the council as an independent.
An investigation of the affairs of the An Feng
Group resulted in Chu and his wife being indicted in
2000 on charges of embezzlement, forgery and tax
evasion. The two were accused of stealing an enormous
NT$20 billion from their own company. And yet last year
Chu ran again for election to the city council and was
elected on December 3, probably much to his relief
since, under Taiwan law, a prosecution cannot proceed
against an elected official during the period the body
he is elected to is sitting. This has created such a
narrow window of opportunity for Chu's case to be heard
that so far there have only been two hearings and it is
quite possible the matter would not be resolved for a
decade - if Chu is able keep his seat.
Certainly
he was determined to do so at the election on December
7, so much so that he asked employees and business
colleagues to re-register their households in his
constituency so that they might vote for him. The 1,000
votes he is believed to have got in this way, along with
other votes he is alleged to have straightforwardly
bought for NT$500 each, allowed him to just scrape back
on to the council.
There is, by the way, also a
case being prosecuted against Chu for vote-buying. The
main prosecution witness is one Cheng Ming-ching,
himself a former city councilor and one of Chu's
zhuang jiao, or vote-buyers.
Chu has
always been a political opportunist. He was in the KMT
because that was the party with the power and the money.
When that power and money no longer supported him he
became an independent, basically a mercenary political
wheeler dealer whose formidable services were for hire.
Unsurprisingly, as the Democratic Progressive
Party (DPP) became the ruling party at the central
government level, won the mayoralty in Kaohsiung and
became the largest party on the city council, Chu stated
flirting with the DPP.
It was to the DPP he
turned after his election to plot the next part of his
political strategy - his accession to the speakership.
The deal with the DPP was that he would join its caucus
and support the party's candidate for deputy speaker in
the election held among the councilors on December 25 if
the party supported his own bid for the speakership.
Three days before the election took place,
however, the DPP's central party headquarters got wind
of the deal, decided that Chu had too dirty a reputation
for the party to be seen supporting him and quashed the
arrangement. President Chen Shui-bian himself, in his
role as DPP chairman, promised the direst consequences
would follow upon any DPP city council caucus member's
voting for Chu on the 25th.
Chen got his way -
though it was so touch and go that the party's secretary
general, Chang Chun-hsiung, attended the council chamber
to witness the vote in person and DPP councilors were
ordered to show their ballots, to reveal who they voted
for. Chu, however, also got his way, since nearly all
the other members of the city council from the KMT, the
People First Party (PFP) and the independents voted for
him anyway.
The result stank. There had, even
before the election took place, been rumors that Chu was
offering councilors NT$5 million each for their votes.
And KMT councilors had already been ordered by their
party to vote for themselves, the customary form of
abstaining. Only five days before the vote, the KMT's
chairman, Lien Chan, had made a major policy speech in
which he claimed that the party's association with what
is known locally as "black gold", by which is meant the
nexus of money politics, corruption and organized crime
that has been a feature of Taiwan politics and those of
the KMT in particular, was at an end. The KMT was now
clean, he said, a claim that fate greeted with a Bronx
cheer on Christmas Day. The position of the PFP, a party
of shady KMT renegades with even financial backing from
even shadier tycoons based in central Taiwan, was no
better.
Given the allegations about vote-buying
prior to the election, there can be little surprise that
the central government, believing the DPP councilors to
be uninvolved, launched a huge investigation of the vote
involving the Kaohsiung District Prosecutors' Office and
the Ministry of Justice Investigation Bureau, Taiwan's
equivalent of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation.
After simultaneously raiding more than 30 locations in
Kaohsiung and discovering name lists and sums of money
they believed to have been either intended as or used
for bribes, Chu and his wife were detained a week ago.
But the real revelations had hardly even started.
The prosecutors prompted a flood of information
late last week by on Thursday offering a 48-hour amnesty
to councilors who admitted to taking bribes, returned
the money, and were willing to give evidence about the
matter. At the time of writing some 10 councilors had
taken advantage of the offer, while another five were
hoping to have it extended to them.
Much of what
they have revealed is still under wraps. But from what
has been said it is becoming clear that the events in
Kaohsiung over Christmas will provide the most thorough
study yet of Taiwan's corrupt local politics at work.
From what the prosecutors' office and other
sources have revealed, Chu is alleged to have had a fund
of NT$300 million to buy up votes at up to NT$6 million
each for the speakership election and NT$2 million for
the deputy speakership being contested by Tsai
Song-hsiung, another independent councilor.
What
makes the speakership and deputy speakership worth
spending nearly US$10 million to acquire? Because they
provide automatic positions on the city's Urban Planning
Commission, a small body that administers city zoning,
and provide huge influence over the granting of
contracts in infrastructure projects. It is no
coincidence perhaps that Kaohsiung has just stated work
on a mass rapid transit railway project valued at NT$170
billion, nor that Chu's business milieu is steel and
construction. It has been alleged by Kaohsiung
legislators that Chu was hoping to manipulate the mass
rapid transit project, though whether for his own
benefit or as the agent of someone else is still not
clear.
Also to be revealed is the role of radio
station Happy Radio FM97.5, whose general manager Huang
Hsin-chung is accused of being Chu's bagman for the
bribes.
The details of the case, and once it
gets to court they will be voluminous, are perhaps less
important outside Taiwan than other things the case
reveals. For one thing, it shows how little control
central party organizations have over their members -
the KMT ordered its councilors not to vote for Chu but
11 out of 12 did so anyway, as did six out of seven of
their similarly directed PFP counterparts. As a result,
any stated determination by the party center to
eradicate "black gold" at the local level has to be seen
against the indifference of local politicians to party
central's opinion. The KMT said that any councilor who
admits to having taken a bribe will be expelled whether
they are prosecuted or not, and on Tuesday it expelled
seven. That is not, unfortunately, very worrying for
corrupt councilors. Most of the independents on the
council, including Chu An-hsiung, are people who split
from the KMT without it damaging their careers. As long
as they can beg or buy enough votes, party support is of
little consequence.
Given that the Kaohsiung
debacle has made the KMT's "clean hands" claim a
laughing stock, there had to be a fall guy: James Chen,
head of the party's Organization and Development
Committee. Chen's fall from grace was indicative of the
tension between the KMT's traditional methods and its
new ideology; Chen was a traditional machine politician
who, while well aware of what was going on in Kaohsiung
didn't see anything particularly wrong with it. These
kinds of deal have always been done so that councilors
could recoup their election costs - something even more
important now that direct party election subsidies have
been seriously reduced - the KMT's revenues have fallen
dramatically since it lost office at the national level.
Chen simply didn't realize that times are changing -
that the greatest burden the KMT faces at in the 2004
presidential election is its reputation for corruption
and that the party chairman's anti-corruption drive was
supposed to have been taken seriously - unlike so many
in the past.
One question being posed about the
case, however, concerns the amnesties. Since councilors
can only lose their seats if they are convicted of
corruption, the amnesties for those who come forward as
confession-bearing witnesses mean that what Kaohsiung
will soon be left with is a council of whom it is known
that two-thirds of its members are corrupt bribe takers
but who will be allowed to conduct council business for
the next four years until the voters can, if they so
desire, boot the rascals out.
For some, this
kind of impunity leaves a bad taste in the mouth; the
Ministry of Justice has been criticized for pursuing the
truth about the corruption rather than justice meted out
to the corrupt. Almost certainly it is a political
decision - though the ministry of course denies it. The
idea is, of course, that, given that the DPP councilors
are by and large clean - after all they didn't vote for
Chu - there is far more to be gained politically by
bringing as much dirt surrounding opposition party
councilors to light as possible than there is from
trying to get these characters jailed.
This
strategy may have blowback of two different kinds. The
first is that the DPP caucus on the council are almost
certainly not as clean as they appear - the first
suspected bribe money to be found by investigators was,
after all, at the house of the DPP council caucus leader
Jan Yung-lung.
The second potential problem is
an extension of this, namely that, in the public eye, it
is not the opposition political parties that are seen as
especially corrupt and reprehensible, but rather the
venality and malfeasance is ascribed to "politicians" in
general, irrespective of party affiliation. And this has
serious implications for the nation as a whole. It is
not that Kaohsiung is a turning point. Rather it is
another brick in the wall of public indifference to the
political process and skepticism about the benefits of
democracy.
In the bad old pre-democratic days,
political life was crony-dominated and crony-driven, as
everybody knows. The problem is that it still appears to
be. And Taiwanese are beginning to think that all
democracy has brought about in Taiwan is a weak
vacillating government at the central level and economic
decline. There is a thickening strand of public opinion
that suggest that the orientation of the past 12 years
in Taiwan toward democratization and increasing
political rights, has been mistaken and that a little
less democracy and a little more concentration on the
economy might have been a better strategy.
This
feeling is too nebulous, perhaps, to be of serious
significance yet. But if the economic bad times
continue, it may grow. And if it does, Taiwanese will
look west to China's booming economy. Perhaps, people
will increasingly wonder, doing a deal with the mainland
on unification might not be such a bad idea after all.
True, it might erode the democratic system, but this has
been - so the thinking goes - of dubious benefit anyway.
For the past decade Taiwan has always set itself
apart from mainland China with reference to its
democratic system. The irony is that, just as the world
is taking greater notice of this, just as there is a US
president in the White House prepared to "do whatever it
takes" to preserve that system, Taiwanese are
increasingly wondering if the system is all it has been
cracked up to be, and whether it might be traded, in
part for something a little more economically secure.
(©2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights
reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com
for information on our sales and syndication policies.)
|
| |
|
|
 |
|
