Rulers infected with elitism

During the years of Kuomintang rule, which governed Taiwan after it was handed over from Japan in 1945, KMT leaders were commonly thought to be mainland transplants who kept a distance from the people and remained unaware of the challenges they faced in their daily lives. Now, not even eight years after the DPP has replaced the KMT as our ruling party, it appears the tables have turned, and it is the DPP that has fallen out of touch with ordinary people.

Nothing illustrates this phenomenon more than the harsh way top leaders have handled a series of recent heckling incidents. DPP leaders who once prided themselves on their folksiness and humble backgrounds now appear all but sick and tired of hearing complaints from the people. President Chen Shui-bian, the self-declared “Son of Taiwan” who rose from a poor farming family to become a famous lawyer and national leader, has now abandoned any pretense of being close to the ordinary man.

Last week when President Chen attended an exhibition of domestically produced high-fidelity audio equipment, a man approached him and loudly declared, “the people will soon be unable to live!” The president didn’t offer much of a reaction to the emotional heckler, saying only that he respected differing opinions that commonly occur in a democratic society.

But soon afterward, President Chen angrily announced that unlike his KMT predecessors, he would not train gangsters like Chen Chi-li and dispatch them to “whack” people like the protester. The president was referring to the late Bamboo Union leader Chen Chi-li, who in the 1980s was sent to the United States by intelligence officials to assassinate Chinese American author Henry Liu after Liu had published a biography harshly critical of then President Chiang Ching-kuo.

After President Chen returned to his office, he told a group of visitors that Taiwan’s economy was clearly doing quite well, since the man who claimed the people could hardly live still had the spare time and money to buy a ticket to a hi-fi stereo exhibition. On the same day, Vice President Annette Lu got an earful from a market pork vendor, who complained that rising prices and inflation had left her virtually unable to earn a living. After Vice President Lu left the market, she told reporters she had received “intelligence” confirming the vendor was deliberately planted by reporters eager to fabricate negative news stories.

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