DPP Members Are Scrambling to Verify the "Peter Principle"

DPP Members Are Scrambling to Verify the "Peter Principle"

United Daily News Editorial (Taipei, Taiwan)

July 15, 2020

 Translation of an Excerpt

Chen Chu’s nomination as president of the Control Yuan was scheduled to be reviewed in the Legislative Yuan yesterday. In addition to setting up four tiers of barricades on the outside of the Legislative Yuan, the ruling party even stationed police on the rooftop as if encountering formidable foes. For such an ordinary personnel case, the Legislative Yuan (LY) was so heavily guarded, it is a veritable, huge irony and humiliation to be used for Chen Chu, who claimed to have been imprisoned on trumped-up charges and who would be appointed to chair the "Human Rights Commission." Facing such social disputes churned up by her own nomination, as Chen Chu walks on the political road up to now, we do not know whether she would feel the slightest regret for accepting this nomination.

There is a "Peter Principle" in management, which can be used to explain Chen Chu's situation today. The "Peter Principle" says: In an institutional hierarchy of an organization or enterprise, a person is often promoted to a position for which he is not qualified because of certain characteristics, and eventually becomes an organizational obstacle. Chen Chu’s greatest trait is her experience as a "victim of the Formosa Magazine Incident." This has been an important factor in her every appointment and her every election campaign. Now, she has finally come to the position as head of one of the five Yuan, but it is a difficult fence to cross. Judging from the "Peter Principle", she has climbed to a position where she could hardly be competent, either on the moral or capability level, and has become baggage that the Tsai government must bear.

In the past four years, if Chen Chu had not actively pushed her team into the central government, including manipulating positions for Chen Chin-te, Wu Hong-mo and others, regardless of outside criticisms, leaving to society an abhorrent impression of cronyism, she would not have encountered so many hurdles in her nomination for Control Yuan president this time. But what is even more worrying is that the Tsai government seems to have fully established the "principle of excluding members of other parties", anyone who is not a DPP comrade, a non-member of the faction, nor relatives or cronies by the side of the “sovereign”, then no matter how objectively unbiased and extremely capable community leaders are, they could not catch the attention of the powers-that-be. The DPP had severely criticized the KMT's "inbreeding", and now it has copied it in its entirety. However, if being placed before the "Peter Principle", then the DPP would be forced to show its true colors.

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