101、The Kuomintang Should Promote a Referendum on Reconciliation

5 August 2015

I think some of the Taiwan Kuomintang’s ideas are correct, but its practices need to be improved.

Now I see that the Democratic Progressive Party mainly attacks the Kuomintang for its black-box operation in that Kuomintang hopes a lot of affairs can be carried out by the administrative means of the ruling party.

For example, if Service Trade Agreement had been carried out by means of a democratic referendum,

1．the Kuomintang would have had no responsibility for its failure;

2．people would have aroused a feeling that they were not circumvented, and thus the Kuomintang would not have been caught tripping;

3．politicians should play their role in clearly analysing the pros and cons of things, and telling people about the interests and benefits of things. Thus, the party can get more support, and more political propaganda. In this way, its influence is expanded; and

4．through a referendum on specific events, a party can know the people’s ideological trends and their responses to some things. The party can adjust its practices and deploy the next focus of work, rather than just do some reflection after the election results came out, which will have no sense at all.

Many things in the West are handled by the means of a referendum. Before a referendum, the politicians make a lot of speeches, stating clearly their position, just like the Greek referendum.

The referendum rarely occurs in Taiwan, only the demonstrations and the impact of government agencies, which shows that Taiwan’s democracy is not mature.

Democratic politics is that politicians are responsible for stating things clearly, and people are responsible for making decisions, especially for significant decisions.

The political ideas of the Kuomintang are basically right, but are not practiced in the right approach. The party needs to make good use of democracy to provide help and political support for themselves.

In particular, in terms of such a big event like reconciliation, politicians in their statements should say, ‘Promote cross-strait referendum on reconciliation’, rather than say, ‘Promote cross-strait reconciliation’.

‘Promote cross-strait referendum on reconciliation’ means the initiative at the mercy of people, and thus no one will oppose it. If one referendum does not achieve success, another one could be held again next time.

‘Promote cross-strait reconciliation’ will give people a sense of being manipulated and betrayed, which will bring trouble to the party itself.