Lai Ching-te Advocating "Writing a Constitution" in a High Profile, Challenging Tsai Ing-wen’s Status Quo

 Lai Ching-te Advocating "Writing a Constitution" in a High Profile, Challenging Tsai Ing-wen’s Status Quo

United Daily News Editorial (Taipei, Taiwan)

January 26, 2019

 Translation of an Excerpt

Lai Ching-te has successively referred to the constitution issue. From the review session for the electoral defeat to his farewell speech as Premier, he talked about such issues as the powers and responsibilities of the Presidential and Cabinet systems, and the demarcation between the executive and legislative branches of the government, and then he suddenly tossed out the advocacy of writing a new constitution, stressing that "the time is right."

After last year-end elections, in the review report of the Executive Yuan (Cabinet), Lai Ching-te pointed out the reasons for the set-backs in local elections as contradictions in the operations of constitutional government. He said that the President and the legislators were elected by the people, while the Premier, however, was appointed by the President, leading to insufficient mutual communication between the legislative and executive branches of the government; he thus advocated that there ought to be a different consideration for the system of constitutional government. In his farewell speech as Premier, Lai Ching-te pointed out bluntly that legislators should be able to serve as Cabinet ministers, or at least concurrently, to reduce the gap between the legislative and executive branches of government, allowing policy decisions to connect with "people at the grassroots."

Whether a constitutional government ought to take the presidential system, the cabinet system or the dual-executive system is an issue that should be reviewed. However, when the mutual trust between the ruling and the opposition parties is insufficient, and the Blue and Green each has its political agenda, once Pandora's box is opened for constitutional reform, no one is certain what kind of constitutional monster will be created, and whither it would take the country. For instance, Lai Ching-te was originally talking about "amending the Constitution" and then suddenly the subject jumped to "writing a new constitution," believing that there existed contradictions between the continental size China thinking and the ideology of Taiwan as a community of shared destiny, not beneficial to Taiwan's solidarity and progress; hence it has to be overthrown for starting over. Comparing the two, he first referred to the powers and responsibilities of the President and the Premier, and the demarcation between the executive and legislative branches of the government, perhaps it was only a smoke bomb for extricating himself from responsibility; his real goal was to use the writing of a new constitution to cut off the remaining constitutional linkage with China, pushing Taiwan toward the road of de jure independence.

Lai Ching-te, who self-styled as a "pragmatic Taiwan independence worker," magically morphed into a vanguard for writing a new constitution; in fact, it was not a bit pragmatic. Once constitutional writing engineering is launched, Taiwan’s society would be thoroughly torn apart over the fight for national identity and democratic system. What signals would we release to the international community? The US side immediately stated that Lai Ching-te’s constitution writing advocacy "was not a good strategy," and it would lose the support of the United States and Japan. Then why on earth is Lai Ching-te in such a hurry? Was it his own opportunity for 2020?

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