What More Opportunity Should the People Give to This Kind of Ruling Party?

 What More Opportunity Should the People Give to This Kind of Ruling Party?

United Daily News Editorial (Taipei, Taiwan)

November 6, 2018

 Translation of an Excerpt

In the coming elections, the prospects of the DPP in quite a few places are encountering difficulties. The major reasons, aside from individual candidates personal qualifications, the outside world unanimously points out it is the result of too poor a performance of governance at the central level, leading to the loss of the people’s trust in the DPP. Viewed from the collapse of the Green camp’s core support in various places, this kind of statement is indeed not wrong.

In the two and a half years of Tsai Ing-wen’s Presidency, in so far as the overall politico-economic performance is concerned, the government’s administration has indeed been filled with lapses and loopholes, lacking a balanced framework, nor has it presented holistic planning. Coming from the grassroots, the DPP, under Tsai Ing-wen, has realized the goal of "complete control of government," but anti-democratic phenomena, such as abuse and expansion of power, undermining the rule of law, and disregarding the state of the nation and people’s livelihoods repeatedly occurred. When being accumulated, people’s grievances have snowballed; at election time, the fury naturally erupts like volcanoes. Just imagine, for a government that has no consideration for the people's livelihood, would the voters still want to give it another opportunity to abuse themselves?

For analysis, let us cite some instances. Since Tsai Ing-wen came to office, the most serious cases of ramming and impacting the livelihoods of the grassroots have no greater than cross-Strait policies and revisions of the Labor Standards Act. The deterioration of cross-Strait relations has led to an abrupt decline in the number of Mainland tourists, which immediately impacted the livelihoods of operators in tourism, hotels, night markets, and tour buses, including the sharp decline of Mainland students in local universities as well as tourism revenue in Hualien and Taitung. However, President Tsai was determined, refusing to make any adjustments in policies, even stingy in paying lip service. What’s more, she even asked Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je to retract his utterance of “the two sides of the Strait are like family." When the will of the President is bigoted to the point of not caring about the life and death of the grassroots, does she still remember her original motive of entering into politics? Look again at the “one fixed holiday, one flexible day-off.” If the idealism of labor rights and interests became rigid to the point of contravening e-commerce operations of the new century, contravening the wide-spread flexibility of Taiwan's small businesses, it would not only debilitate the new economic competitiveness of Taiwan, but also suffocate to death the livelihoods of grassroots stall vendors. As a result, the President’s will achieved a Pyrrhic victory, while the livelihood of small businesses suffered disastrous defeat; did it help anyone in seeking employment?

The new energy policy of the Tsai government is, moreover, a rotten account sheet that itself could not clearly explain. The ideal of "a nuclear-free homeland" ought to be pushed for within capability and implemented in a gradual and orderly manner; once the government wanted to leap forward, it would naturally bring risks of power shortages and power outages. More seriously, burning coal creates more air pollution, thus people, while not yet being benefited by "a nuclear-free homeland," are harmed by the ills of coal-burning. Wind and solar power, counted as "green energy," fundamentally cannot provide reliable base load power considering Taiwan's climate conditions. What is laughable is that the Tsai government has all along been tearing up here and repairing there, not being able to strike a balance between supply and demand of power. Nevertheless, for electoral campaigns, overnight it used "the Kuantang LNG terminal in exchange for the Shenao coal-fired power plant," stamping the Environmental Impact Assessment under its feet. With a ruling party which has this kind of short-term electoral tactics, yet no long-term strategy of management at the national level, is it worthy of the people's trust?

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