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Updated Thursday, August 27, 2009 9:20 am TWN, The China Post news staff

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Politicians, bureaucrats and technocrats

Ma did, while Chen Yunlin, chairman of the Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait (ARATS), was in Taipei in November last year to sign a series of agreements with his opposite number in Taipei, P.K. Chiang, to establish what are known as the three direct links between Taiwan and China. Alarmed by an attack on Chen's deputy in Tainan in October, Ma ordered airtight security for the first ARATS chief to visit Taiwan. Police carried out the orders to the letter. They went to such extremes as to forbid people to carry tiny national flags of the Republic of China — which they might wave — to make sure that there would be no visible protests against Chen's visit to Taipei. There was a backlash, of course. Under fire from the opposition party, Ma ordered an over-relaxation of the security measures. Riots broke out as a result. Riot police clashed with crowds, who threw Molotov cocktails. Scores of cops were injured.

The president, an elitist bureaucrat, failed to take the initiative in the rescue of flood victims as Morakot triggered flash floods and landslides in southern Taiwan. His premier and top bureaucrats followed suit. When the rescue and evacuation operations were botched, the politician half of President Ma under fire began to assert itself. And he overreacted, again.

So, after holing himself up in Taipei for quite some time while he was coming under heavy fire, President Ma started a succession of whirlwind tours of the disaster areas, offering apologies for delays in helping the victims and promising help wherever he went. A special statute for the reconstruction was drafted in heedless haste and is being rammed through by a Kuomintang-dominated Legislative Yuan, which had to end its summer recess ahead of schedule. A special budget will be asked for as soon as the statute is enacted by the legislature, where Ma's ruling Kuomintang controls a virtual three-fourths majority. The special appropriations top NT$100 billion or US$3.3 billion. Incidentally, Ma will double as Kuomintang chairman shortly to ensure that there would be nobody in his party that can challenge his re-election bid.

Close to seven out of every ten eligible voters in Taiwan want President Ma to stay on, though a online CNN quick vote showed that an 80 percent majority wish him to stand down. Well, he is going to stay until May 2012 anyway. What we believe he doesn't need at the moment is extra pressure the former Redshirts may bring to bear on him. If they do, he will overreact, again, to the detriment of the reconstruction that he has pledged to complete in three years' time.

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