Taiwan Matters!: A Quick Quote

Friday, January 08, 2010

A Quick Quote

Minister of the Government Information Office is quoted in a letter from him to the Taipei Times on the topic of Taiwan's official name following Richard Kagan's criticism of the administration for accepting 'Chinese Taipei':

"... given Taiwan’s unique international status, use of our national title is beyond our control."

1 Comments:

At 3:45 AM, Άλισον said...: After reading the GIO chief, Mr. Su's letter, I have this to say:

The GIO chief likes to emphasize that KMT is in power through a “democratic” election.

But, I’d like to challenge scholars around the world to assess whether Taiwan’s election is truly “democratic”, if it has the following problems:

1. fairness? each vote counts different weight.

per Dr. Jerome Keating's post

The DPP received almost 37 per cent of the party vote, but only got 24 per cent representation in the seats of the Legislative Yuan. They had a disproportionate loss of 13 per cent. The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) on the other hand received a little over 51 per cent of the party vote but they got almost 72 per cent representation in the seats of the Legislative Yuan. They had a disproportionate gain of 21 per cent.

Non-Partisan Solidarity Union: (3 seats/ 88,527 votes) one seat for every 29, 509 voters. KMT (81 seats/5,010,801 votes) one seat for every 61,861 voters. DPP (27 seats/3,610,106 votes) one seat for every 133,707 voters. All other parties (2seats/1,091,139 votes) one seat for every 545,569 voters.

2. gerrymandering? electoral district boundaries can be redrawn by a pan-blue dominated Election Commission.

I propose setting up a Bureau of Statistics for several functions, one of which is to do a national population census, followed by a project on administrative re-division of areas of the country (counties, and directly-administered metropolitan areas) as well as redrawing the electoral districts; and electoral boundaries can only be adjusted because of population change from the result of the latest national census (every 10 years or so).

3. black gold and local factions still quite influential on local elections: The KMT has had much support from local factions, and still has the ill-gotten assets to buy votes. If a voter refuses vote-buying, some local faction members can pay you a "warning" visit and harm you physically.