FEATURE: The KMT’s Long, Slow Road to Reform

Can a more than 100-year-old dog learn new tricks? A young party official’s take on the future of Taiwan’s Kuomintang.

The News Lens
Date: 2016/08/18
By: Edward White

The Kuomintang (KMT) was hammered in Taiwan’s general election in January, losing the presidency and its long-held majority in the legislature. Despite the historic results, and the hopeful anticipation of political bloodletting among many commentators and presumably pro-reform KMT members, heads have, for the most part, yet to roll.

In its first few months in the opposition, KMT legislators have resorted to filibustering and the party has threatened legal challenges to the ruling Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) popular move to investigate the assets the KMT illegally acquired during its decades of at-times brutal authoritarian rule over the nation.

As Taiwanese writer Lee Min-yung (李敏勇) said in the Taipei Times this month, the party has been an “unwilling participant in the process of its own political cleansing.”
At least one KMT politician, however, knows the party’s reaction is bad for business.     [FULL  STORY]