As the World Turns in Taiwan I: Junket Time

Wednesday July 15, by Jerome F. Keating Ph.D.

The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) forum has begun in China. This is a party to party forum initiated in 2005 by the two leaders (KMT Lien Chan and CCP Hu Jintao); neither one of them has ever won a democratic election; that should tell you something about the nature of the forum. It is party to party, but in his own way of dodging the truth, Ma Ying-jeou wants to call it a cross-strait forum. He knows party to party talks cannot justify a basis for policy, but he does not want to give outsiders any real power in it. They will only be "special guests."

Though they will not have power, these guests are wanted so that they can seemingly give sanction to the party to party talks and then the KMT can claim everyone agreed on the matters discussed. That will make it easier for Ma to pretend the party to party talks should be transformed into his national policy. Whatever happened to the old KMT canard, "Gentlemen don't sit down with thieves?" Is this an acknowledgement that they all are thieves?

The forum also of course becomes a nice junket for some 270 people and even a few Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) people have joined in to be wined and dined in China. Lien Chan has to stake some claim to influencing the nation though he lost twice in his presidential bid. If you can't get them to vote for you, treat them to dinner. Some people can be bought cheap. I am curious, whose bucks are paying for all of this, China's or the KMT's stolen state assets.