Political analyst Courtney Donovan Smith explains what Taiwan's recent wave of corruption scandals means for the country.
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00:00So, what do you make of this recent spate of corruption cases?
00:03Is it a sign that corruption's on the rise in Taiwan overall, or just that prosecutors
00:07have gotten more proactive about cracking down on it?
00:11I can't say for sure.
00:13It's quite possible that they're getting more proactive.
00:16It also could be that corruption has indeed ticked up over the last few years.
00:21I don't know if there's a connection here, but traditionally, William Lai's been associated
00:26with anti-corruption efforts, particularly when he was the mayor of Tainan.
00:31So this may be a top-down thing, but there's no definitive proof on that that I'm aware
00:36of.
00:37What does it say about Taiwan's political culture?
00:39And is this a new low point, or has it always been quite this bad?
00:43Oh, it used to be far worse.
00:46It used to be that corruption was the norm and not the exception, and now it appears
00:50that it still remains the exception.
00:52It's worth noting that there are 113 seats in the legislature, and there's two of them
00:57under investigation currently.
01:01So we're not looking at a huge percentage here.
01:04That's less than 2%.
01:07It is true that a fairly high percentage of the county council speakers are under investigation.
01:16That's not a surprise.
01:17Local governments have often been a little bit more of a hotbed of corruption, particularly
01:21in the center and the south.
01:23And do you think that we're going to see big changes after this slew of scandals, or will
01:28it continue to be business as usual?
01:30I think that with the DPP and the KMT, because relatively speaking we're looking at a small
01:36number of people relative to the massive scale of the parties, I don't think we're going
01:41to see big changes in either of those two parties.
01:45At this point, however, in the TPP, at the very least there's been gross mismanagement
01:53of their financial disclosure forms, and frankly there's a decent chance that they're just
01:59going to collapse, that they may no longer be electable.
02:02The latest Formosa poll that just came out a couple days ago, people's negative feelings
02:09toward the party jumped by about 16%.